Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 23, 1994 TAG: 9410240025
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER NOTE: Lede
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Odds are, Virginians are going to elect a liar, or at least a deceiver, as their next U.S. senator.
Yet we don't seem to care.
There's black-and-white evidence that Oliver North deceived Congress about the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scheme, and that Charles Robb deceived Virginians about his personal life.
Are they lying outright? That's a trickier question. North prefers to say he simply "misled" Congress. Robb insists he always told the truth: He just doesn't contend it's the whole truth. Social scientists who study truth-telling would classify that as a "quantity violation," which is one reason they prefer the term "deception" to "lying" - it covers so much more territory.
The Robb and North campaigns aren't nearly so precise.
Just in case Virginians somehow missed something, each side has unleashed a multimillion-dollar ad blitz to remind us: Robb's commercials suggest North is just short of being a pathological liar, charging that North "doesn't know what the truth is"; North counters that Robb "lived a lie" as governor.
And that's only the most visible part of a race in which the L-word has become a central issue.
The Virginia Republican Party is distributing a "Robb-Speak vs. Reality Daily Hotline" that details Robb's, ahem, quantity violations. Virginia Democrats are passing out their own "Truth Kit" that spells out North's alleged deceptions.
On Monday, an anti-North group called Clean Up Congress is joining the fray, releasing a deck of cards, each one inscribed with a lie North is alleged to have told.
Virginians apparently believe both sides. Recent polling by Virginia Commonwealth University finds that most voters don't trust either Robb or North to tell the truth - nearly six in 10 voters have "some doubt" about the veracity of each man.
So voters are fed up with both candidates, right?
Wrong.
There is evidence voters are queasy about the front-runners. A pollster hired by independent Marshall Coleman found that two-thirds of North supporters and two-thirds of Robb supporters remain lukewarm toward their candidate.
Why? They're concerned about their nominee's honesty. Some 44 percent of the lukewarm Robb voters say they haven't fully committed because they're concerned about his "lack of integrity"; 35 percent of the lukewarm North voters say they're bothered because he's "not honest and trustworthy."
Yet they're obviously not concerned enough - yet - to bolt to Coleman. A VCU poll found voters aren't especially bothered that their favorite candidate may be deceptive; they're only mad at the other guy.
Seventy-eight percent have a favorable impression of at least one of the major party nominees. That's because nine of 10 North supporters still have a favorable impression of their man; eight of 10 Robb backers see their candidate in a favorable light, deceptions notwithstanding.
"This has been very surprising to me," VCU pollster Scott Keeter says. "Fewer voters are holding their noses in choosing a candidate than we might believe from watching the television ads and reading commentary on the race."
'Who says so?'
The results don't surprise one group of experts who have been following Virginia's Senate race with special interest - scholars in the field of deception, a niche of human behavior research where psychology, sociology and speech communication converge.
Indeed, some of the nation's leading experts on deception regard Virginia almost as a social science laboratory, where many of the field's most cherished theories are being borne out.
Take one of the most curious contradictions of the campaign: The biggest rap against North is that he lied to Congress. Yet many North supporters say the thing they like most about him is that they trust him to tell the truth.
"I like the colonel," Lewis Teague of Rockbridge County said as he watched North stride through downtown Buena Vista during the city's Labor Day parade. "I think he'll be straight up with you. ... I think he'll be honest with the people."
Steve McCornack, an associate professor of communication at Michigan State University who has studied deception for more than a decade, says that mirrors a landmark finding in the field: The more that people have an emotional stake in someone, be it a lover or a political candidate whose views they agree with, the less likely they are to believe that person is lying.
In fact, when confronted with evidence of deception, they're quite likely to identify even more with the person accused of lying.
"There's no evidence that you can sway people by giving them explicit, contradictory evidence," McCornack says. That makes it difficult, of course, for either Robb or North - or Coleman, for that matter - to undermine the other's core support, although there's a chance undecided voters might be persuaded.
Accusing a political candidate of lying is a difficult tactic for another reason, says Michael Johnston, a political scientist at Colgate University in upstate New York and the editor of the Journal of Corruption and Reform, an international academic journal devoted to the study of scandals. ("We never run out of things to talk about," he observes.)
That's because the first response of voters, when confronted with allegations of lying, is often not to study the accusation - but instead to judge the accuser, he says.
"The first test is: 'Who says?' How do voters react to the accuser? And North is very sophisticated at that. He knows people are skeptical of the press, and he knows people don't like Congress."
Indeed, North's tendency, whenever he's accused of not telling the truth, has been to strike back - and not address the substance of the charge. His most recent visit to Roanoke provided yet another example. Earlier in the day, Robb had paraded forth a group of military men, including the secretary of the Navy under President Reagan, to accuse North of lying under oath about his own service record.
North's response: He called the charge "sour grapes," "mean-spirited," "petty" and "an effort to distract people from the real issues."
But he never denied it or attempted to refute it.
Robb, by contrast, has often taken a different tack. He'll deny some things outright, such as drug use. But on better-documented charges about his personal life, Robb concedes to some indiscretions - then refuses to discuss them.
"I have said I have a degree of vulnerability in a purely private, purely personal sense, that I didn't think was appropriate for public reporting," he says.
Robb also has a taken a rather legalistic approach to the subject of honesty.
He recently insisted to the Washington Post that he's "never" told a lie. So how does Robb square his initial assertion that his wife, Lynda, was the only woman he'd ever "loved physically or emotionally" with allegations by his own staff that he had "sexual relations" with at least a half-dozen women during his party days in Virginia Beach?
Or how does he square his later admission that he'd done things "not appropriate for a married man" with his simultaneous declaration that "I haven't done anything that I regard as unfaithful to my wife, and she is the only woman I've ever loved, or slept with, or had coital relations with in the 20 years we've been married"?
That's because, his former staff members claim, Robb engaged only in oral sex, which he didn't "regard" as "unfaithful" and thus didn't qualify as "love" or "sleeping with" or "coital relations."
Social scientists say North's more assertive approach to combating allegations of deceptions tends to work more often - at least in their lab research.
"People like to think there's truth and deception, and when politicians go halfway with the truth, that doesn't work," says Caroline Keating, a psychologist at Colgate University. "That engenders suspicion. The people who have successfully handled these issues are those who have come clean and admitted everything - or those who squelched all discussion."
The only time admitting a little something works is when the liar admits it in advance, suggests Bella DePaulo, a psychologist at the University of Virginia. She's studied salespeople hawking a product they knew was lousy.
"One thing the salespeople did that enhanced their credibility with customers was they admitted some little thing they didn't like. That really helped their credibility."
In that sense, North may have the edge over Robb when it comes to credibility with Virginia voters - he admitted long before he ran for the Senate that he misled Congress during Iran-Contra, so presumably he's telling the truth from there on.
By contrast, Robb presented himself as a milk-drinking family man through much of his political career, and now must deal with allegations that he instead frequented parties where cocaine and prostitutes were among the refreshments.
Indeed, the VCU poll shows that voters, by a slim margin, are more likely to believe North is being honest than they are Robb: 37 percent "trust North to tell the truth"; 34 percent trust Robb.
Short of a polygraph test, though, there's really no way to tell.
That's partly our fault, as a species. "People aren't very good lie detectors," McCornack says.
That's also partly the politicians' fault.
"There's no Pinocchio's nose," says DePaulo, the UVa psychologist. "People lie in different ways."
Liars are like wine
Most people "leak" some emotional clues when they're lying, says Maureen O'Sullivan, a psychologist at the University of San Francisco. Sometimes their vocal pitch goes up. They furrow their brows. If they smile, it's a phony smile where the mouth curls but the eyes don't change. But those clues don't work every time, or with everyone, she cautions.
Worse yet, from a voters' point of view, liars are like wine - they often tend to improve with time, O'Sullivan finds.
"Unless someone is a complete dork at lying, they'll get better and better at it."
So we should give up on catching North telling a fib about Iran-Contra or Robb changing his line about what happened at Virginia Beach? Not entirely, O'Sullivan says. Liars must control their emotions.
"At the end of the campaign, they may have less control just because they're exhausted. If somebody asks them, they might make a slip."
But don't count on it.
Much evidence suggests that politicians make better liars than ordinary citizens - but not for the reasons you might think.
Keating, the Colgate psychologist, found that the same skills that make someone a good leader - self-confidence, ability to conceal their fears and project false emotions - also make them good liars.
"We don't know if leaders lie more," Keating says. "But we know that if leaders chose to lie, they'd be better at it than the rest of us."
That's especially true during time of stress - such as, say, a political campaign.
"We find for your everyday liar, if it's really important, they become worse liars," says DePaulo. "But people who have this special cluster of attributes rise to the challenge and tell a better lie."
Successful liars also do something else politicians do well: They look you straight in the eye. In Keating's studies, "those who neutralized their smiles and gave a steady gaze while speaking were the most successful liars."
The academics can't say whether they think Robb or North is lying about anything. But many of them have, as part of their research, studied videotapes of the Iran-Contra congressional hearings, and come to this conclusion: If North wanted to lie, he'd be great at it.
"North, in his hearings, was very well controlled," O'Sullivan says. "There were only one or two demeanor cues."
"It doesn't say he would tell a lie," DePaulo agrees. "It says if he tried to lie, it would be very hard to know if he was lying."
Part of that, the psychologists say, could be because of what North was accused of lying about.
The researchers define two types of lies. Most men tell lies for their own benefit, DePaulo says. It's more unusual for them to tell lies for someone else's benefit. (Women, she says, tend to split about 50-50.)
Robb stands accused of the former - covering up what he did in his personal life and covering up what he knew about the infamous tape of the cellular phone call involving former Gov. Douglas Wilder.
North also has been accused of lying for his own benefit - in embellishing and exaggerating his version of various events.
But on the main thing he's accused of lying about - Iran-Contra - he defends his actions by saying they were necessary to save the lives of the hostages in Beirut and the anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua.
When North is asked about his honesty, he'll often contrast the type of deceptions he's accused of against those Robb was involved in.
"I did it because I thought that saving lives was important, and I certainly didn't do those things for my own pleasure," he says.
Furthermore, North has a curious definition of honesty. He says he's been honest because he's kept his commitments in life.
"So does a hit man," grumbles Robb spokesman Bert Rohrer.
Robb, meanwhile, takes a minimalist approach, saying voters should know he's honest because he's never been proven dishonest.
Again, the social scientists can't speak as to whether North was telling the truth. But they can say that research shows when men feel they're lying for someone else's benefit, the more likely they are to get away with it.
That's because they feel justified - and that self-assurance helps stifle their emotional "leaks," O'Sullivan says.
"Someone who believes they did it for the greater good would have an easier time."
Are some lies worse than others? On that score, voters must apply their own moral calculus.
But polls suggest voters may be more forgiving of North than Robb. The VCU poll suggests that most Virginians don't hold North responsible for what he did during Iran-Contra: 56 percent believe he was "just following orders."
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB