You know how we love us some Ol’ Pussy Grabber is a lying liar who lies a lot stories here at Ye Olde Blogge. And, we also love us some good psychologicy sciencey articles, too. So, we were so hap-hap-happy to find this story that combines all of them.

Did you know that there are psychologists out there who study lying? You may not have ever thought about it before this moment, but now that I’ve asked, it’s like, well, of course there are, right?

Well, Bella DePaulo is a “project scientist” at the University of California at Santa Barbra and an expert in deception, aka lying. She has studied and written about it for decades. After the Ol’ Pussy Grabber was elected and it became apparent what a lying machine he was, she couldn’t help her self, so she collected up his most recent 400 lies and analyzed them like she did other lies she collected for past studies.

Her analysis places the Liar-in-Chief in the top 5% of liars in the country. There may be no one in the country who tells more lies than the Ol’ Pussy Grabber!

In the past, she’d code the lies people reported telling as self-serving, kind, you know, told to protect others in some way, or cruel, lies that were used to malign. In the past she would get people to record their daily lies in diaries — that seems quaint, nowadays, don’t it? — and compared the lies university students told with everyday folks from the community. She built up quite a database of lies.

She compared the Ol’ Pussy Grabber’s lies to those that she found in previous research. I can’t help myself, I just gotta report her findings:

• He lies a lot more than the average person in her studies and a lot more than the worst liars in her studies. The Liar-in-Chief told on average 6.0 lies public lies per days implying that he probably has told more than that when private lies were included. The most prolific college students told 6.6 lies per day, ergo presto, the Ol’ Pussy Grabber lies more than the worst liars in the study.
• He told significantly more self-serving lies than the average person: 65% of the Ol’ Pussy Grabber’s lies were self-serving versus 46% of college students and 57% of community members.
• Less than 10% of the Ol’ Pussy Grabber’s lies were kind! Not surprisingly, everyone else told kind lies at a much greater rate: 26% of the college students and 24% of community members.
• An astonishing 50% of the Ol’ Pussy Grabber’s lies were cruel! Compare this to 0.8% of the college students, and 2.4% of the community members. Please note: About 24% of the Liar-in-Chief’s lies could be classified in multiple categories whereas college and community member’s lies were easily categorized without overlap.
• On average, the Lying Liar started out telling on average 6.6 lies in public per day. That’s about as many as the worst college liars in her studies. Of course, those are only the public lies that the Ol’ Pussy Grabber and not his private lies.
• By October, the Ol’ Pussy Grabber had increased to nine public lies per day! Who could tell more lies than the Ol’ Pussy Grabber? He’s gotta be the most prolific liar in the country.

Those are my take aways from the article. I’d be happy to hear yours in the comments!

Commentary: I study liars. I’ve never seen one like Donald Trump.

Donald Trump’s lies are both more frequent and more malicious than ordinary people’s.

Bella DePaulo 8 December 2017

I spent the first two decades of my career as a social scientist studying liars and their lies. I thought I had developed a sense of what to expect from them. Then along came President Donald Trump. His lies are both more frequent and more malicious than ordinary people’s.

In research beginning in the mid-1990s, when I was a professor at the University of Virginia, my colleagues and I asked 77 college students and 70 people from the nearby community to keep diaries of all the lies they told every day for a week. They handed them in to us with no names attached. We calculated participants’ rates of lying and categorized each lie as either self-serving (told to advantage the liar or protect the liar from embarrassment, blame or other undesired outcomes) or kind (told to advantage, flatter or protect someone else).

At The Washington Post, the Fact Checker feature has been tracking every false and misleading claim and flip-flop made by Trump this year. The inclusion of misleading statements and flip-flops is consistent with the definition of lying my colleagues and I gave to our participants: “A lie occurs any time you intentionally try to mislead someone.” In the case of Trump’s claims, though, it is possible to ascertain only whether they were false or misleading, and not what the president’s intentions were.

I categorized the most recent 400 lies that The Post had documented through mid-November in the same way my colleagues and I had categorized the lies of the participants in our study.

Continue reading at the Chicago Tribune: Commentary: I study liars. I’ve never seen one like Donald Trump. – Chicago Tribune

Correction

The original version of this post incorrectly stated the average number of lies that the Ol’ Pussy Grabber told in one day. It has now been updated with the correct number. It also left a sentence incomplete that would’ve compared the average number of lies per day told by the Ol’ Pussy Grabber to the most prolific liars in the study. That too has been corrected. We at Ye Olde Blogge regret any confusion or consternation these errors may have caused.