May 24, 2018

Trump's lies increasing

NBC News Between when President Donald Trump assumed office in January 2017 and the end of April, the average number of public false or misleading statements he has made per day has been increasing. According to the Washington Post’s fact checkers on May 1, "for the president’s first 100 days, he averaged 4.9 claims a day... since we last updated this tally two months ago, the president has averaged about 9 claims a day."

This is a significant rise. Our calculations suggest that if the current escalation rate remains steady, by the end of his term the president could be making as many as 19 public false statements a day, on average.

... Research we conducted at University College London with our colleagues Dan Ariely and Stephanie Lazzaro, which was published in 2016 in the journal Nature Neuroscience, showed that the intensity of the emotional response people experience when they act dishonestly is reduced every time they lie. And this reduction (which scientists call emotional adaptation) makes them likely to lie more over time.

.... Repeated dishonesty is a bit like a perfume you apply over and over. At first you easily detect the powerful scent of a new perfume. But over time and with more applications you can hardly sense its presence, so you apply more liberally. This happens because neurons in your olfactory bulb desensitize to the smell of the perfume. Similarly, it appears that our response to our own acts of dishonesty is strong at first, but over time decreases. Like students taking beta-blockers, your capacity for being dishonest increases.

...In a recent study of 2,500 U.S. citizens, the psychologist Birony Swire-Thompson found that Trump supporters’ intentions to vote for him were not affected by learning that the president had provided false information. And a recent Gallup poll showed that while the percentage of Americans who believe the president is “honest and trustworthy” has decreased from 46 percent in February to 36 percent in April, his approval ratings remained relatively stable.

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