I'm a fairly high self-monitor and can adapt to foreign cultures pretty easily, though I'm only familiar with various European ones. I also knwo how to interact with people in South Dakota. I'm not so great with the denizens of exurbs and gated communities, but I can do it. Much of California's Central Valley is still a mystery to me, but I'm a terrible liar.
It took me a while to draw that Q. I knew that it was important to make sure that the other person could read it, but it took me a minute to remember which way I wanted it to go. Maybe that delay in making the decision is what makes me a poor liar.
A doctor friend of mine confuses left and right all the time. I pointed out to him taht what he thought was the right side of a grill was actually its left. He then realized that he was looking at the grill in the same way that he would look at a patient. The patient's right arm would be on his left, so left had become right for him.
like you, ogged, high self-monitor, drew the Q for my audience, don't have much occasion to lie.
I can say, though, that when I have had occasion to, I have been truly, pathetically, awful at it.
neither, perhaps relatedly, can i act worth a damn on stage, or excel at any other public performance.
why should my self-monitoring enable me to please people, instead of simply providing me with paralyzing amounts of evidence about how little i am pleasing them?
I drew the Q for myself. I'm not the world's most innately truthful person (particularly wasn't as a child) but I don't know that I'm a convincing liar. By this measure, apparently I'm not.
I am an extraordinarily skilled liar.
Doesn't work for me. I draw the Q to be read by someone facing me and am highly conscious of what others are/may be seeing in my behavior, but don't like being the center of attention, am not good at manipulating how others see me, and can't lie worth a shit. And since I'm a perfectly typical example of people like me, the theory is obviously bullshit.
Did you guys use a felt-tip pen too? Bad idea.
pssst--LB *actually* drew the Q the other way. she's just lying!
I anticipated that the test would involve which way I drew the tail, so I drew it the way I thought would indicate that I was a poor liar (for some reason I associate being a poor liar with being virtuous). I, of course, drew it incorrectly. This is, I think, anecdotal evidence of the test's accuracy.
I drew the Q for myself, but I think I'm a decent liar anyhow.
I assumed the onlooker was standing behind me, staring through my skull. Thus their orientation lined up fine with mine.
Two, three, many pwns.
4: I, on the other hand, am an incredibly low self-monitor, and am always to be trusted completely. Have I ever lied to you?
The most interesting bit of the article was the part on how the behavior we associate with lying (cross-culturally!) is not at all a reliable indicator of lying.
He surveyed thousands of people from more than 60 countries, asking them to describe how they set about telling whether someone is lying. People's answers are remarkably consistent. From Algeria to Argentina, Germany to Ghana, Pakistan to Paraguay, almost everyone thinks liars tend to avert their gaze, nervously wave their hands around and shift about in their seats.
There is, however, one small problem. Researchers have spent hour upon hour carefully comparing films of liars and truth-tellers. On each showing, the observers look out for a particular behaviour, such as a smile, blink or hand movement.
The results are clear. Liars are just as likely as truth-tellers to look you in the eye, they don't move their hands around nervously and they don't shift about in their seats (if anything, they are a little more static than truth-tellers).
If you draw the Q for yourself, it means you lie to yourself convincingly and with great ease.
14: Are you saying the researchers are lying to us? How can you tell?
Oops, those italics should extend to the end of the last paragraph.
16: I'm more skilled than most.
Draw the Q for another, sailors take mothers.
Draw the Q for yourselves, sailors take elves.
I think I'm a high self monitor. But, the reason I drew the Q so that an audience could read it is I made a concerted effort to learn to do that when I was a teacher, and now it's habitual.
I didn't often draw letters in the air, but, for example, to indicate a graph showing a rising trend I now start on my lower right side and ascend towards my upper left side.
On a different note, people, particularly roommates and the like, who are "less aware of their impact on those around them" bug the crap out of me. Oblivious nitwits!
Ah, sailor-elf porn -- takes me back it does.
Huh. I was a low self-monitor. I would not have expected that.
I am a ridiculously good liar. One of the reasons I'm so successful at lying is that people NEVER suspect that I'm being anything less than 100% truthful.
Bow down before my awesome powers of deception!
21
by jove, SB, i think you've got it!
plus if you sit very still, avert your gaze, and flap your hands a lot, the morrow will dawn bright and clear.
I know that I am a truly terrible at telling a convincing lie, so I didn't even bother drawing the Q before reading the rest.
After reading the article I did draw the Q and, unsurprisingly, drew it so that I would be able to read it (which feels natural, because it's the same motion that I would use to draw the Q normally).
I drew the Q the correct way which tells me I need to get back to work, Friday or no.
I'm not a good liar. I sometimes sound like I'm lying even when telling truths that I know will sound like a lie because they're too convenient.
plus if you sit very still, avert your gaze, and flap your hands a lot, the morrow will dawn bright and clear.
Liar.
30
go back to "monitoring" yourself, SB
if that's what you call it.
I intended to draw the Q so others could read it, but failed. I am either an exceptionally poor liar or a latent dyslexic.
I'm apparently a low self monitor and not a liar. Yeah, I'd have predicted that I guess.
I didn't even think about other people trying to read it, I just did what felt comfortable.
I wanted you all to think I'm trustworthy. I'm trying to build up a false sense of security.
28: Pray tell, which way is the "correct" way? Is this another instance of oppressive high self-monitor normativity?
Also, Washingtonienne is bankrupt.
I'm curious about what study or studies link the forehead-writing with high vs. low self-monitoring, as the article doesn't say. In my experience, putting a piece of paper on your forehead and writing on it is, for most people, mainly a handy trick for producing decent-looking mirror writing, instead of the gnarled stuff that most people produce when they try to write backwards freestyle. Of course practicing mirror writing and "forwards" forehead writing are both perfectly acquirable skills.
"If I asked the other guard to draw a Q on his forehead, what would it look like?"
Sifu, I was totally trying to phrase a joke along those lines! Yours is better.
I think the alignment of attention-seekers with liars is flawed. It certainly is in my case. I'm a strutting fool of a performer, and for reasons related, a terrible liar. (I'm an eager actor, but not necessarily a particularly subtle one, which is why I was the star of the high school musical, drifted into improv comedy in college, and left behind my early intention of having a career in acting). I tend to disclose promiscuously, to give more information than needed, to continually bring attention onto myself when the needed skill would be to leave suggestive blank spaces that the mark would fill with what he wants to believe.
I had a research job that required some subterfuge, and I was not very good at the lie-cheat-steal parts of it. Deception requires more quietness than I can handle.
I did the Q for others to read, of course.
Stop trying to be so transgressive, JGO, you're screwing with Flippanter's odds-making.
("Correct" meaning to be read by others.)
Robust McMP: liar-normative.
40: That reminds me of the scene from Every Man For Himself and God Against All, when the classic question is put to Kaspar Hauser and he answers, "I would ask him if he was a tree frog."
Will, your neck swivels on a horizontal axis. Possibly on an axle running through your ears?
In seeking a reference for 40 I found "Exploding God-Heads".
A backwards Q is the same shape as a forwards Q, spun about the center -- this does not apply to most fonts, where the "circle" part of the letter is elliptical and the "tail" part is curved -- but generally when people are printing block letters, it is just a circle with a line through it, and you could spin it 270 degrees to get the mirror image. Did anybody taking this test write a cursive Q?
OK, you're on an island populated with Oggeds, half of whom are truth-tellers and half of whom are liars. If asked, all will say that they are truth-tellers.
You're at the intersection of two roads, one of which leads to a man-eating dragon's lair, and the other to a settlement full of Swedish swimming instructresses. Two Oggeds are standing at the fork in the road. What question do you ask in order to find out which is the right road?
When I tried to do it, I ended up holding a capital L up to my forehead. Huh.
I tried to do it for the audience, but got confused and did it backwards. I'm not only unselfconscious, I'm stupid.
I'm also terribly amused by the visual image of all of us seated in front of our computers drawing Qs on our foreheads like idiotic monkeys.
53: I was convinced the payoff was going to be along the lines of "now smack yourself in the face. Haha, stupid!"
Following on to 49, I wonder how many people who drew the Q in the other-oriented "right" way drew the ellipse in what would be their habitual direction (clockwise vs. counterclockwise) from an observer's point of view or from the self-oriented "I believe myself to writing on the inside of my forehead, thank you" point of view.
54: Draw a Q on your forehead. First, get a sharp knife...
OTOH, I am very good at deadpan false utterances. Low stakes, highly absurd lies. Confuse-a-cat sort of thing.
52 is the only one that has made me laugh today.
also tristero over at digby's place, on an idiotic editorial by morton kondracke:
"This is so mind-bendingly stupid it reminds me of when I saw Pat Boone on tv covering (I think) a Little Richard song, cheerfully snatting his fingers on 1 and 3."
i've been laughing at that one all morning.
The Guardian article supports my 42:
So what are the signals that really give away a liar? It is obvious that the more information you give away, the greater the chances of some of it coming back to haunt you. As a result, liars tend to say less and provide fewer details than truth-tellers. Look back at the transcripts of the interviews with Sir Robin. His lie about Gone With The Wind contains about 40 words, whereas the truth about Some Like It Hot is nearly twice as long.
I found it very easy to tell which was Sir Robin's favorite movie, for those of you who read the article.
I read 49 as saying it did not normally have an elliptical feature, and therefore placement of the tail was all that mattered.
Drawn to be seen by others, a better liar than I want to be.
all of us seated in front of our computers drawing Qs on our foreheads like idiotic monkeys
This was my first thought as well. Nyah, nyah, says Ogged, draw the damned Q, because I am hiding the rest below the fold, so do it! (Nyah! How gullible you? Oggedy authoritay say no clicky until drawy!)
Wow, so all you guys actually did this? (I might have, except they don't let me have writing utensils here.)
Strangely, the article's second half is all about the funniest joke in the world. (Of course, it's this one.) There is an elegant segue from lying to laughing that hinges on the involuntary constriction of muscles around the eye.
I read 49 as saying it did not normally have an elliptical feature, and therefore placement of the tail was all that mattered.
My point actually was the same: ellipse or circle, the usual block-printed Q looks the same on each side of the vertical axis in every way except for the placement of the tail. But you don't actually *draw* it the same way when you're writing it forwards vs. backwards.
64: ok, and to that the answer is I drew it counterclockwise, where I would ordinarily draw a Q clockwise. If you care to believe me.
Of course, it's this one
Three jokes up from that: so funny.
I didn't draw it at all. I imagined getting stamped with a forehead-sized wrecking ball with a portruding Q - which I could read as it swung toward my head. Like being inside a typewriter, it was.
And since I could read the Q, you know I'm telling the truth.
This whole thread is making me long for Q. And here I am in New Jersey, with nary a pit for miles around.
What does it mean that after trying this experiment I can no longer remember the correct direction to write a Q?
69: Not to turn this into another food thread, but this place opened recently just four blocks from my house. I am on the very threshold of heaven.
27: After reading the article I did draw the Q and, unsurprisingly, drew it so that I would be able to read it (which feels natural, because it's the same motion that I would use to draw the Q normally).
It's only the same motion if you inserted your finger into your brain cavity and drew the Q on the inside of your forehead. If you drew the Q on the outside of your forehead and drew it so you could read it, you used the opposite of the motion you normally use.
the article claimed that the presence of the letter 'k' should make the version of a joke with 'duck' and 'quack' in it funnier than the same version with 'cow' and 'moo'.
sure enough, i read the cow-version first, thought it was pretty funny. then i read the duck version, and laughed out loud.
pathetic, simple-minded fuck.
You know, I was hoping 22 would inaugurate a paroxysm of hatred against those who are "less aware of their impact on those around them".
Of course, none of you picked up on that.
Oblivious nitwits!
I do think the Q test is basically bunk. I doubt it even indicates low/high self-monitor very well, let alone ability to lie. And ability to lie is itself pretty variegated. I can keep up appearances like nobody's business, but I don't know that I'm so good at looking you in the eye and telling an untruth.
M/tch, you want trolling lessons? My rates are $100/hour.
78: I think you're taking that "those that can't, teach" thing a little too seriously, B.
I tend to side with those who think the test is a little specious.
I drew it for others to read, and, to quote a commenter,
am highly conscious of what others are/may be seeing in my behavior, but don't like being the center of attention, am not good at manipulating how others see me, and can't lie worth a shit
One wonders if they're factoring in intelligence -- if more intelligent (or more trained) people automatically draw it so others can see, merely because that's the obvious thing to do?
Certainly I can't lie worth a damn, unless I'm being totaly ironic.
This sounds like one of those "tests" to give girls you're trying to pick up. (Supposedly, girls love personality tests.)
59: when I was trying to decide whether I found people credible at the court last year, the three things it was clearly okay to consider were: (1)
level of detail given; (2) inconsistencies or lack thereof; (3) corroborating evidence or lack thereof. Of which I'd say level of detail was the single most important.
I drew the Q so I could read it. I also drew it with my left hand, for some reason...I think of myself as: 1) a high self monitor, and 2) a bad liar because I'm so nervous, obsessive and afraid of getting caught.
I also drew it with my left hand, for some reason
I drew mine with my left hand too! But I think I did so because I'm left-handed.
So how many other people, after they drew the Q and then read the rest of the instructions, then had to do the "left hand looks like an L" thing to figure out which way they'd drawn it?
(I drew it for others, btw, and am a passably good liar when I could be bothered to do so).
It's only the same motion if you inserted your finger into your brain cavity and drew the Q on the inside of your forehead. If you drew the Q on the outside of your forehead and drew it so you could read it, you used the opposite of the motion you normally use.
Indeed you are correct. I thought that was not the case, but upon further reflection I am wrong.
I am good at math but not so much spatial reasoning.
The Q Test: Low self-monitor. But very good liar.
This strikes me as entirely off: low self-monitors come across as being the "same person" in different situations [...] guided more by their inner feelings and values, and they are less aware of their impact on those around them [...] not so skilled at deceit
The fact is that lying well requires appearing to be the same person, which requires knowing who that person is, and projecting it even while lying.
I haven't read the original article, but the alignment of personal attributes, for lack of a better word, seems superficial. Did someone say specious?
Actually the quoted segments make low self-monitors sound stoopid. "less aware of their impact on those around them," my ass.
85: Only because you're so uncomfortable even when you're telling the truth that no one can tell the difference.
when I was trying to decide whether I found people credible at the court last year, the three things it was clearly okay to consider were: (1) level of detail given; (2) inconsistencies or lack thereof; (3) corroborating evidence or lack thereof.
I would do about the same thing, but I suspect that what you end up with works better as a test for intelligence than honesty, at least as to (1) and (2).
I'm definatly a high self-monitor, and drew the Q for others. I don't often lie though, even though i'm great at it. Its easier to just tell the truth, and on the rare occasion where its not, just changing topics or skirting around the truth works too. Lying betrays the Platonic Truth, which i dislike doing. It feels like throwing paint on a sculpture.
I drew the q for the viewer, after 2 seconds of realizing the stem would be critical. I'm a career actor and pretty good at it, because I love to work hard at it, which I have to, because I am a lousy liar.
I'm a lousy liar because I feel terrible about deceiving people who haven't asked for it. I wouldn't like someone to try to deceive me.
Also, 89 applies. When I tell the truth I'm usually unconvincing anyway.
i mean, 90% of the time you can just look at someone like they're crazy and they'll backtrack on what they think anyway.
Besides, all social interaction feels like manipulation for me, but i really have a sentimental attachment to words. Words are important and beautiful, adn you shouldn't go around lying when you can just emotionally fool people.
The 'don't trust people who are nervous' thing is more about not trusting or caring about people with low social status, than anything about the truth. most people don't realize this though, and 'lying' is how its rationalized.
Whence the emerging notion that "lying" here means something as drastic as preying on other people?
Surely there are simple lies. Like calling in sick when you most definitely aren't. Or claiming that you most certainly did send that check on time, but dammit, you screwed up and forgot to put a stamp on the envelope, so it's just been returned in the mail to you! First you knew of it! Heck! Right on it now, then!
While there is indeed a breach of trust going on there, I consider these things sort of normal. I don't really feel terrible about them. Part and parcel of dealing with a world hostile to one's own way of doing things.
Lying about deeper, more personal things is an entirely different story.
"less aware of their impact on those around them," my ass.
I'm not sure how you're defining "low self monitor" then.
96: Did I misread the original post?
It suggested that low self-monitors are essentially self-absorbed; introverted rather than extroverted, say. (That parallel doesn't quite work either, but the quoted portions of the article imply it.)
I'm suggesting that "self-aware" might be more accurate for so-called low self-monitors, and that self-awareness very much involves an awareness of one's impact on those around one.
Right. "Low" and "high" are in the original article/post used to describe the extent to which one monitors one's impact on others. Then a shift: "monitors" or "is aware of" becomes "acts to manipulate." Wrong.
Attempting to assume an attitude of unself-consciousness, I drew the Q so others could see it, then repeated carefully to see what was comfortable in that motion. I started the circle at the top of my forehead, for instance. Point your finger at yourself and see if moving to left or right feels more comfortable. Our arms are not built to move in every direction with equal comfort.
Then I drew a Q in the air in front of me and comfortable was "so I could read it".
Then I picked my left nostril with my right index finger.
Hammer curls vs regular curls. Stick your arm straight out in frot of you, is your palm facing up, down, facing your body, or away from your body(freak)?
The test is bullshit.
bob, the only important question here is whether you're right-handed.
I'm suggesting that "self-aware" might be more accurate for so-called low self-monitors, and that self-awareness very much involves an awareness of one's impact on those around one.
[...]
Then a shift: "monitors" or "is aware of" becomes "acts to manipulate." Wrong.
Here's the deal: The "self-monitoring" concept isn't the same as "are you or aren't you self aware?" Instead it is a measure specifically of the degree to which you use cues from other people's behavior to regulate your own behavior. As is so often the case with these sorts of things, there is a standard questionnaire used to determine where you fall on the "self-monitoring scale". (I don't know if the test has been updated since, but the original one is online here.)
Other studies (lost the citation and am now in a rush, but can find it again later if you like) have explicitly tested how well trained and untrained observers do at identifying lies told by people who have been given this self-monitoring assessment. It turns out that both kinds of observers are better at telling when the low self-monitoring people are lying than when the high self-monitoring people are.
It turns out that both kinds of observers are better at telling when the low self-monitoring people are lying than when the high self-monitoring people are.
But that suggests only that low self-monitoring people are shitty liars, not that high self-monitoring people are good liars.
101: that's interesting. It seems like it might correlate pretty well to the autism spectrum. URL?
101: Okay. I scanned this thread quickly, did see references to these scales, but I forgot.
I might want to read the original article linked in the post, might help. As it stood, the gloss between self-monitoring understood as self-awareness, and using cues from other people to regulate your behavior, seemed strained.
102: Possibly -- I don't know the details of the study (just found an abstract or two earlier in the day). Maybe (for example) extremely high-self-monitoring people do extravagantly better than the norm at being convincing while even very low-self-monitoring people are only so crummy at it. The linked article is most definitely very easy-breezy about making all kinds of unsupported generalizations because they sound kicky and interesting. The Q thing is probably the most egregious example, and of course it's what every blogger likes to highlight.
(Mainly I wanted to explain how on earth you get from the self-monitoring to saying anything about lying at all, since the article just asserts it without explaining why people think there is a connection.)
100:Right-handed, so of course I repeated the test with the left.
I work out daily with dumbbells, sometimes in very weird positions with awkward movements to get at that lower left ab.
The test felt to me a little like a tricep worker.
"As it stood, the gloss between self-monitoring understood as self-awareness, and using cues from other people to regulate your behavior, seemed strained."
There's a fair amount of evidence from neuroscience to indicate that they are quite deeply connected; tasks which require self-awareness and regulation of your own behavior show activation in many of the same parts of the brain used to understand somebody else's behavior. That's why I asked about autism; current research indicates that the problems with Theory of Other Mind in Autism are matched by corresponding deficits in Theory of Own Mind. Autistics are generally extremely poor liars, if they can manage it at all.
You can see the assessment questionnaire in the link in 102 -- this isn't an area I actually already knew much about, I've just seen mention of the scale a couple of other places and did some quick shallow research earlier. Mark Snyder, who developed the original scale, has a website (here). It seems very likely indeed that people have done work on self-monitoring using the Snyder scale and autism spectrum disorders, but I haven't come across any of that work in my quickie searches today.
There's also a short Wikipedia article on self-monitoring, not hugely enlightening, but something.
Okay! Back to my actual rush.
tasks which require self-awareness and regulation of your own behavior show activation in many of the same parts of the brain used to understand somebody else's behavior
Got it.
I've been using "self-awareness" in an almost entirely unrelated way. No matter now; I see what y'all are saying.
I just tested this with my thirty pounder and there was no tricep tension. What do I know I just mimic the stuff in the pictures.
110: I wasn't going to say anything.
I drew the Q for myself... but with the wrong hand.
This seems so intuitively right to me, that it amazes me how many people found it goofy and wrong.
I physically resisted drawing the Q the outward-facing way, even after I read the explanation. I am useless at lying. And although I'm good at empathising with people and reading the dynamics between them, I have absolutely no clue about how other people perceive me. As soon as a relationship includes me, I can't understand it any more!
I am so extreme on the low-self-monitor scale that I can't even learn languages. I just can't bring myself to take on the accent when I speak; it feels like I'm being fake, or taking the piss somehow. Vaguely morally wrong, and yes I know how insane that is.
I expect the HSM/good liar types to have a more instrumentalist view of people. If you lie to people it's because you want something from them, even if it's just attention or approval. Which probably sounds judgemental and arrogant. Maybe it is judgemental and arrogant? Hmm. I wouldn't know, I can't self-monitor to save my life.
Okay. I don't know why I'm so interested in this, but I am. I just took the original Self-Monitoring test rfts linked in 101.
That link says that a score of 0-12 indicates a relatively low self-monitor. I got a 4. I don't regulate my behavior according to others.
However, there are/were a handful of questions I could not answer, so they don't factor into my score. They show a pattern:
(these are True/False questions, btw)
7. When I am uncertain how to act in a social situation, I look to the behavior of others for cues.
9. I rarely seek the advice of my friends to choose movies, books, or music.
18. I have considered being an entertainer.
22. At a party, I let others keep the jokes and stories going.
23. I feel a bit awkward in company and do not show up quite as well as I should.
25. I may deceive people by being friendly when I really dislike them.
----
Here's the pattern I see emerging, and which makes me question at least the way Mark Snyder, originator of this self-monitoring theory, frames it:
I can't answer these questions because I do not put myself in these situations in the first place. I attend to the advice of my friends about books and music IF I trust the judgment of those friends. I avoid social situations in which I might be terribly unsure how to act. Likewise avoid company among whom I should worry about "showing up as well as I could."
Here's the thing: if you take out the fact that I avoid these situations in the first place, put me in a big wide world in which I'm at the mercy of all the people clamoring to control me, I'd place borderline low- vs. high-self-monitor.
Last sentence from the short wikipedia thing rfts also linked above:
"Subsequent research using the self-monitoring scale ... has questioned whether the scale really - as Snyder believed - measures a homogeneous concept."
Shorter me: I'm a low self-monitor entirely because I construct my environment so that I can be.
I figure a good test of how "low" a self-monitor someone is is how often I read one of their comments and think, "little nuts, that one." That puts you somewhere between low to medium, dear parsimon.
Ah, thanks, dear ogged. Free to be a little nuts, okay.
Wow, I'm a very low self-monitor. Never even occured to me to draw the tail on the left side. Makes perfect sense, I knew that about myself. I'm constantly fighting this tendency since I operate in a very political environment.
On the other hand, when I meet other low self-monitors it's a big mutual relief and we can all hang loose together.
Actually, you want to cross this with introversion and extroversion:
low-self-monitor, introvert: geek
low self-monitor, extrovert: asshole
high self-monitor, introvert: tightass
high self-monitor, extrovert: salesman
119, 120: The narrator of this great novel agrees:
But, so what. So what if I'm a bad person. I've noticed that, in general, if a person feels nasty in the morning but is full of plans and dreams and vigor in the evening, he's a very bad person. Mornings, rotten; evenings, fine -- a sure sign of a bad type. But take someone who's full of energy and hope in the morning, but overwhelmed with exhaustion in the evening -- for sure he's a trashy, narrow-minded mediocrity. That sort of person is disgusting to me. I don't know how me strikes you, but to me he's disgusting.
Of course, there are those for whom morning and evening are equally pleasing, who are equally pleased by sunrise and by sunset. These are simply bastards. It's sickening even to talk about them. But then, if someone is equally repulsed by morning and evening, I really don't know what to say about him. That's the ultimate cocksucking scum.
Such an awesome book. You really have to read it.
Ogged, I didn't think you cared. The good person version would be:
low self-monitor, introvert: thoughtful
low self-monitor, extrovert:life of the party
high self-monitor, introvert: punctilious employee
high self-monitor, extrovert: leader of men
Not so far from the first list, really.