Lying

Lying is part of human nature, no one has to be taught how to lie or take classes on how to lie. According to renowned British Psychologist Prof. Richard Wiseman, everyone is born naturally with the ability to lie and every organism knows how to lie. Findings of Wiseman’s research showed that 40% of three-year old who have just learnt to speak lies. Therefore, lying is a very interesting topic in psychology.

The biopsychologist perspective is one of the five contemporary perspectives. They focus on how our genes, hormones, and nervous system interact with our environment to influence learning, personality, memory, motivation ,emotions and coping techniques.( Smith et al. , 2003) it related behavior to the brain, and genetics. The biopsychologist would explain lying in terms of the bodily structures and biochemical process that causes the behavior of lying. The biopsychologists would describe the behavior of lying using the relationship between biological process and behavior. They would say that we lie because our brain tells us that we need to lie. They would explain why we lie due to the command of our brain, the element of lying is coded in our genetic codes. Any organism that wants to survive in this world will need to lie, therefore the ability of lying is coded into our genetics and passed down in the gene pool to make sure homo-sapiens keep survive in this world. This school of psychologists would say that lying is a basic necessity to keep staying alive. Even animals will lie, to get food or to search for mate, this is the basic and most fundamental use of lying. It is because our brain tells us that we have to survive, that we develop the ability to lie. Human being evolved through time, survived under natural selection ( Charles Darwin’s principle that says survival of the fittest) through times and times of evolution, the ability of lying remains because it is an effective strategy for human survival. It is essential for any organism, including human-being to have this ability if they want to survive. Some of these psychologists would say that we inherit this trait from our ancestress, this is why we possess the ability of lying. And because of our biological make-up there is no total control over the trait of lying, the only way for us to conform to the social norm is to try our best not to lie. But, no matter how dominance human-being are, we human-being will lie. There is no-one that would be brave enough to claim his/herself as a person that never lies for the whole life, this is because we don’t learn how to lie. We lie when we are still a baby, when we are still young. Every bit of knowledge about lying is written in our DNA, from bases to bases of nucleotides. It is the most primitive biological factor that every living organism has, and human-being have no escape in the circle of life. Some ways to detect if a person is lying using biological methods are such as increase heart-pumping rate and blood pressure.

The behaviorist perspective is a school of psychology that was started by John B. Watson. These psychologists studies how organisms learn new behavior or modify existing ones depending on whether events in their environments reward or punish their behavior. (Smith et al. , 2003) Basically the behaviorists studies the stimuli and response conditioning of a person’s behavior. They would emphasize on the objective and scientific analysis of lying. They studies why do a person lie as an effect of learning, as influence of external rewards and as a mechanistic view of lying as human nature. These psychologists would describes and explain human lying as a process, by which is stimulated by a reward. They would say that as the same as an animal, we human lie because we are expecting a reward. The habit of lying became part of our lives because when we lie, we get rewarded (we got something we want, desirable). This would explain why some people have a bad habit of lying and some people and why some others don’t engaged in this habit. The reason why some people lie is because they got rewarded when they do so, and therefore they are conditioned to do so if they met with the situation again. Their choice between to lie and to tell the truth would be to lie because for them , telling the truth would not be beneficial to them whereas lying gives then reward. The people that tell the truth don’t lie because the last time they lied, they were punished, therefore they tell the truth to avoid being punish. People that lie receive positive reinforcement when they do so, and this habit will grow in them where as people that receive punishment would less likely to be engaged on lying. It is predictable that a person, would lie for his life because when he was young he lied, and his parents praised him. This child is conditioned in such a way that lying is a good