TheEconomistNovember 2nd 2019 531I
n 2001 jonathan haidt, a psychologist
at New York University, published a pa-
per in Psychological Review delightfully en-
titled “The Emotional Dog and its Rational
Tail”. He argued that when people make
moral decisions, they are influenced by
emotion, or what might also be termed in-
tuition. They may think they are weighing
evidence but in fact their decisions are
made in the blink of an eye. The reasons
they give afterwards merely reflect these
emotions, like a dog wagging its tail.
Others have taken similar views. “Rea-
son is, and ought only to be, the slave of the
passions,” wrote David Hume, a philoso-
pher of the Scottish Enlightenment, in- But the lessons of Mr Haidt’s essay are
particularly apt at a time when lying has
come to define politics more than usual.
Dictatorships have always been built on
lies: that Kim Jong Un is a demigod, that
nothing much happened on June 4th 1989
in Tiananmen Square. The Soviet Union
called its main newspaper Pravda
(“Truth”). That was a lie, of course.
Politicians in democracies have always
mangled the truth: denying affairs and
downplaying the ill effects of their policies.
What is new is the degree to which voters
are prepared to back leaders who seem to
revel in their mendacity.Misleaders of the free world
Boris Johnson’s first notable act was to be
fired from a newspaper for making up a
quote. Yet he is Britain’s prime minister. In-
dia said that it had downed a Pakistani f-16
fighter jet over Kashmir in February. Facing
an election, Narendra Modi, India’s prime
minister, said his country had taught Paki-
stan a lesson. A subsequent inspection of
Pakistan’s aircraft by American officials
showed that none was missing (India
maintained its position).
As for President Donald Trump, whole
websites are devoted to his truthlessness.
On one, Glenn Kessler of the Washington
Post fact-checks presidential statements
and awards scores: three Pinocchios for
“significant factual errors” and four for“whoppers” (Mr Trump’s claims about Uk-
raine and Hunter Biden fit into the whop-
per category). As of October 9th, the presi-
dent had made 13,435 false or misleading
statements while in office. Rather than
grapple with what is true and what is false,
Twitter said on October 30th it would ban
political ads (Facebook has so far declined
to the same).
Yet their duplicity seems to cost politi-
cians little, if anything, in electoral sup-
port. Surveys by YouGov, a pollster, put Mr
Johnson’s Conservative Party in the lead in
the election due in December. Mr Trump’s
job-approval rating, at 43%, is low but only
one point below what it was when he took
office. No one takes for granted that he will
lose next year’s presidential election.
Why isn’t lying more damaging? One
possibility is that lying on a Trumpian
scale is so unusual—so frequent, shame-
less and easily falsified—that people do not
know how to react. In tests, between two-
thirds and three-quarters of people say
they never lie; most of the rest claim to lie
fewer than five times a day. It is hard to
comprehend someone who goes so far be-
yond normal, occasional deceitfulness.
Another explanation is that people trust
leaders for whom they have voted, what-
ever those people say. A recent study by two
researchers at Brigham Young University,
Michael Barber and Jeremy Pope, examined
whether voters are loyal to an individual
leader or whether they support leaders whoCredulity and politicsThis article is full of lies
You really can fool some of the people, all of the timeInternational