Dan Ariely

What do Williams Gehris, America’s most decorated war hero, and Walter Williams, our last Civil War veteran to pass away, have in common?

Both were frauds: they spun tales of military heroism, duped the public, and then – whoops – someone discovered that they hadn’t actually achieved the purported feats. Gehris professed to have racked up 54 decorations, when really he just had one. And Williams claimed to have fought in the Civil War, but records prove he couldn’t have – he was only five at the time!

I came across these and other military fish tales in the article “Fake War Stories Exposed,” in which Anne Morse covers frauds from all walks of life (journalists, actors, politicians, clergymen) who had all kinds of motives (money, glory, self-esteem). That so many “veterans” could pull the wool over our eyes is remarkable, but what’s even more striking is that many of them seem to have convinced even themselves.

Take for example our decorated war hero from above, Williams Gehris: when a reporter confronted him about his lies, Gehris responded with the incredible “There are people who don’t believe 6 million Jews were killed, either.”

Or how about former military chaplain and purported Vietnam veteran Gary Probst? Morse writes that when Probst was confronted about his lies, he “claimed he’d lied for the Lord: His phony heroics, he explained, allowed him to gain the trust of his flock – which made his fibs a good and helpful thing.”

And then there’s my personal favorite, former Connecticut state representative (and yet another Vietnam faker) Robert Sorensen, who came up with this exquisite response to the disclosure: “For the first time ever, the American public had before them a war in their living rooms… Every single person in this United States fought in that war in Vietnam. We all felt the anguish that those people felt. So in a sense I was there.”

It’s possible, of course, that these conmen fully realized all along what they were doing and they only gave their feeble excuses out of a last-ditch effort to save themselves. But given what we know about the power of the mind to self-deceive – how it can rationalize anything and rework all kinds of memories – I suspect that many of these men had actually come to view their fibs as truth.

Maybe Lenin was correct when he said:  “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.”

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Sad story out in the New York Times describing growing concerns about texting while driving. In Britain, a woman was sentenced to a 21-month sentence after it was found that she had been texting while driving, which resulted in the death of a 24-year old design student. In many ways, texting while driving illustrates a case in which tiny, individual irrational decisions can accumulate and cause widespread suffering, not only for the individuals who are texting, but their unsuspecting victims. Unlike cases of drunk driving, in which the driver’s decision making abilities are impaired, drivers who text are at their full wits to wait until they’ve pulled over to check their texts, and yet in the process they routinely underestimate the risk they impose to themselves and others.

Aside from being another example of a common irrational behavior (and who among us did not text or checked their email while driving), this leads me to wonder, what is the best way to solve this problem? While presently the issue is being hotly debated here in the US on a state-by-state basis, England has taken a tough national stance on texting while driving, which includes hefty minimum point penalties on the offending party’s license, and fines upward of 60P. If you watch the video in the linked article, you’ll also find a very graphic video depicting the carnage of a texting accident–shocking and informative public service announcements are yet another option. Alternatively, we can hope that cell phone companies are continuing to explore voice activation technologies that can read text messages aloud and also transcribe them from voice — thereby by-passing the problem altogether.

We have lots of irrational problems to deal with, and the realization that tiny, seemingly innocent little ones, like 10-second text messages, can cause so much damage should make us look around for more such problems.  perhaps ones that are not as obvious (think health care), but are potentially just as damaging.

Irrationally yours

Dan

Here is a video dedicated to the start of a new academic year.

Today we all have good intentions but what will come of these intentions in the future?

Happy semester