Have you ever accused another person of something?
If so, did you already know they were guilty—or were you still in the “investigation” stage of the matter?
Most importantly, did you notice their reaction… to the accusation?
Whether the subject is infidelity, money missing (more…)
So I’ve been AWOL from my blog since the end of September.
Why?
Well, I could probably come up with a lot reasons (excuses) why I haven’t posted anything in so long, but there’s really just one. It’s among the 3 below—which do you think it was?
I’ve been:
1—Hitch hiking cross-continent
2—In and out of rehab (more…)
Believing the words of other people is natural. In fact, it’s necessary.
Even a guy like me tends to believe people initially… yep, I subscribe to The Truth Bias just like you do.
But there’s believing, and then there’s trusting.
We tend to believe everyone (it’s shallow enough, though, we can toss it aside immediately when there’s cause for doubt).
And we tend to trust the people closest to us (and it’s deep enough with family and friends that we can maintain it to our detriment).
With trust comes risk, right? Put your trust, your faith, in another person and you’re vulnerable. Don’t infer that I’m suggesting trust is a bad idea. It’s not. It’s necessary. But it does leave you vulnerable. And so herein lies the trick to it all, the safety valve: Knowing when to (more…)
Every time you hear another person speak, you decide whether to believe them—or not.
For virtually everyone, this “decision” is made passively, by default: They believe.
This automatic tendency toward belief isn’t due to naivet’e, ignorance, or having not read my book, but just a phenomenon called ”The Truth Bias“, which simply means that we all naturally tend to believe what others tell us.
This default faith in what others say remains perfectly intact until we have reason for doubt. Sometimes that doubt comes almost instantly… sometimes never. People do tell the truth sometimes, you know.
When I read this week about (more…)
Mid-morning last week I surfaced from work in my underground lair, reheated some BBQ chicken, and sat down in front of the television for a quick lunch.
Since I watch VERY little TV, it’s sort of fortuitous that I happened to land on a channel that was carrying what would be a very unusual (more…)
Good TV should never be confused with reality.
But we confuse the two all the time.
Cops may be the worst on this one.
Believe it or not, when I was ”on the job” I personally saw other detectives do TV-style interrogations on actual suspects.
They yelled. They intimidated. On more than one occasion I heard a fellow officer say, ”Do you know what they do to punks like you in the joint?” And they expected a guy to confess after hearing this?
The last homicide case I worked as a detective was the double murder of an elderly couple. They’d been together constantly for 55 years—and were still together in death on side-by-side tables for their Saturday afternoon autopsies. While we waited (more…)
Many years ago I knocked a Gypsy fortune teller on the head and swiped her crystal ball.
I never had any faith in the thing working, but still I’d dust it off occasionally over the years and crank it up for guests, or when things were slow around the house. You know, just for fun.
So you can credit coincidence, intuition, or a crystal ball that’s right once in a blue moon, but 2 of my recent posts contained a couple of foreshadowings that were manifested through the Casey Anthony verdict yesterday:
Foreshadowing Number 1# - In the Oprah/OJ post I mentioned that “we often consider the lie more egregious than the act they lied about”.
Is it interesting to you that the jury (more…)
Were you surprised when Oprah said last week that she wanted to interview OJ Simpson—with the condition that he confess to the murders of his ex-wife Nicole and friend Ron Goldman?
Would you be surprised if he submitted to her demand?
I guess my surprise was that Oprah thinks he’s guilty.
You can see a clip of Oprah talking about her idea here. In it she says, “I wanted to talk to him, not because, you know, not to be a voyeur for that evening, but just because (more…)
Wouldn’t you know it: The one time I don’t take a position on an act of public deception, the guy comes out 2 days later and admits to lying.
“Confessing to the lie”: This NEVER happens, especially with public figures, so the fact that Anthony Weiner (D-NY) did it makes this a very interesting case study.
And while the rest of country talks about the obvious points of this scandal, I’d like you to consider a question that’s escaping everyone: (more…)
So I heard James Arness died today.
Sure, I watched Gunsmoke some when I was kid. Did it mean anything to me? I don’t know.
My wife would tell you that I’m a terminal nostalgic, though—sometimes she’s right.
Anyway, I Googled James Arness this afternoon, and some- thing strange began to develop…
It starts with the post I gave you a few days ago: The one about Blackbeard and the celebrities who drop their birth names in favor of better branding?
Well, it turns out that James Arness’ younger brother was Peter Graves. I never knew it: The guy on Mission Impossible (the real one, the TV show that ran ‘67-’73) was Marshal Dillon’s brother. But instead of using his birth name of Arness, brother Peter (more…)
