How should you deal with a pathological liar? This team, led by Dr Panagiota Korenis at the Bronx Lebanon Hospital Center, agreed with the other experts that habitual or compulsive lying of this kind usually emerges as a 'means to assert autonomy in the face of lack of self-esteem'. Subsequent investigations suggested none of this was true, except that she did have one son. In a case reported by a team of New York psychologists in 2015, a woman told her therapists she had made several suicide attempts, she claimed her mother had been executed in California for killing her father and stepfather, that her brother and sister had been killed and buried in the backyard by her mother, and that she had two children, including one who was the product of a rape by one of her siblings. The team, led by Dr Cheryl Birch, said that the pattern was characteristic of pathological lying because the lies were harmful to Lorraine (she actually ended up in a secure forensic unit) and they weren't inspired by any apparent clear motive – they seemed to be driven by a deeper psychological need to present herself as a hero or victim. The details from the surveys fit in with some theories in scientific literature suggesting that pathological liars tell tall tales – especially of far-fetched past achievements or suffering, or grandiose social connections – as a kind of unconscious strategy to boost their fragile sense of self or low self-esteem.įor instance, in 2007 a team of Canadian psychologists reported the case of ‘Lorraine’ whose dramatic lies included a colleague sending her death threats, a friend developing a lesbian infatuation, a supposed death threat from a fiancé’s ex-wife, and her fiancé’s three-year-old setting fires in relatives' homes. W boson: Is the new measurement for the subatomic particle’s mass the first chink in the armour of the Standard Model?.We’re having less sex because we’re too busy, not because of social media.Additionally, they said their lying felt out of control and that they did it partly to reduce anxiety. The pathological liars had been lying in this excessive way for six months or more (the behaviour typically first emerges in adolescence), and they said it caused them distress, largely because they did it for no apparent reason and because it was causing them relationship problems. They were also more likely to lie in person rather than over the phone, text or email, and more likely than usual to lie to friends. They lied 10 times per day on average, compared to three times per day among the rest of the sample (one admitted to 66 lies in the last 24 hours, but perhaps that was a lie!).

In the aforementioned surveys, it was found that the pathological liars lied a lot. How often do pathological liars tell fibs? The pair asked hundreds of volunteers to complete several measures of lying behaviour and they found that between 8 per cent to 13 per cent of them met the criteria for being a pathological liar. Consider the results of a recent survey carried out by two US psychologists – Dr Drew Curtis and Dr Christian Hart – who believe pathological lying should become a discrete psychiatric diagnosis.

Pathological liar signs