Hello everyone
In the last two editions of Simon Says I’ve been looking at truth and what people believe. This has led me to think about lying and how people give themselves away when telling untruths.
What people won’t tell you…
Many elections are being held around the world this year. With elections comes polling.
The trouble with polling is that people lie
And, yes, beyond lying, there are many other reasons for polls to have errors. However, very often, a pollster will be told by the voter that they intend to vote for candidate A, but then in the anonymity of the voting booth, the voter will put their cross next to candidate B.
In other words, there is a conflict between:
- what people say, and
- what people do
The choices that are demonstrated by people’s actions, rather than their words, are called revealed preferences.
Revealed preference
Whether we want to or not, we all reveal our preferences.
How many times have you heard someone say that they want to lose weight, but then eat calorie-heavy food (and lots of it)? I’m sure you can think of many other examples.
If you want to catch someone revealing their preference—in other words if you want to see whether someone’s actions will accord with what they say—you just have to pay attention. Or maybe set a trap…
Encouraging revelation
The rock band Van Halen had a reputation for a level of craziness. I’ll leave you to Google their more outrageous activities.
The band were particularly known for making outlandish demands in their contracts. One demand, for which they became legendary, was:
a bowl of M&Ms…with the brown ones taken out
On the face of it, demanding M&Ms with the brown ones taken out seems ludicrous—and that’s before we think about the hygiene aspects. However, this demand had a very practical purpose.
As the band became bigger, their shows became more complex and involved more equipment—potentially dangerous equipment such as pyrotechnics. The band wanted a swift and effective way to check that the people they were working with at a venue were complying with the terms set out in the contract, and in particular that they were alert to the safety aspects. Failure to comply with the band’s safety stipulations could lead to injury for a member of the band, their crew, or the audience.
For the band there was an easy way to encourage the other parties to reveal whether they had read the contract and complied with the terms—a bowl of M&Ms with the brown ones taken out.
If the band arrived at a venue and there were no M&Ms or there was a bowl but it had all the colors, including brown, then the band could infer that there would likely be other aspects of the contract which had not been properly attended to.
In other words, it was a simple warning (or if you’re a Van Halen fan, a Fair Warning).
Why do we care?
As readers, we want our characters to be coherent. We want our characters’ words and their actions to be consistent. At least, we think we do.
The trouble is, if every character in a novel is telling the truth and their words and actions are congruent, then the novel can be rather dull. In the real world we want honesty and reliability. But in fiction, where’s the fun if everyone’s perfect?
When there’s an incongruity between a character’s actions and their words, we may not know why there’s an incongruity, but we’ll sense that something is off. It may take a while for us to understand whether the character is lying to themselves or lying to another character, but we’ll figure, and very often this central lie is the fuel that drives the story.
So while Van Halen’s M&M trick was clearly beneficial for their purposes, as readers, we don’t always want to have a character’s preferences revealed too early in a novel.
To close
That’s me for this month. I’ll be back in November.
Until then.
All the best
Simon