Sign up for our Evening Headlines email for your daily guide to the latest news
Sign up for our free US Evening Headlines email
Anyone who’s been keeping an eye on the news lately knows that it’s been a bad week for George Santos. When the 34-year-old representative from New York’s 3rd Congressional District flipped the seat in November’s midterm elections, it was hailed by Republicans as a rare and significant victory. This was once a Democratic stronghold where people voted for Joe Biden by double digits in 2020. How did Santos do? As his house of cards crumbles, the answer seems to be: By making himself out to be the perfect candidate.
Santos is now accused of lying about the entire contents of his resume, including where he went to college and even where he went to high school; whether married to a man or a woman (he mentions a husband in his campaign bio, but records appear to show only marriage and divorce to a woman); how his mother died (not on 9/11, it turns out); whether his grandmother was in the holocaust, and indeed whether any of his family were actually Jewish (they all seem to be actually Brazilian Catholics); and where does his money come from. He even appears to have claimed to run an imaginary animal charity. These alleged lies range from the very serious to the comically absurd, the personal to the professional, and the obviously self-serving to the mind-bogglingly outlandish. There is a sense of compulsion to them.
And so many questions hang over Santos’ head that most of his fellow Republicans have stopped defending him. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told CNN he had “always” had questions about the congressman’s summary Tuesday. Rep. Nick LaLotta — a fellow New York Republican — and six others are calling for Santos’ campaign funds to be frozen by the Justice Department and the Federal Election Commission. Former GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger just started a petition to remove Santos from office. Not surprisingly, the reactions from Democrats were even fiercer: Richie Torres, the Democratic representative for New York’s 15th congressional district, who runs just down the road from Santos, wrote an article for NBC on Tuesday morning titled “The New my colleague George Santos is a distraction and a danger to democracy,” which calls Santos a “liar, fraud and con man” and “a fraud to the core” in the first two sentences.
Despite all that, Wednesday morning brought news that Santos had won two committee seats in the new Republican-controlled House. The man who appears to have lied about his entire work experience will now sit on the Small Business Committee and the Science, Space and Technology Committee. According to CNN Politics, however, Santos’ initial ambitions were much more far-reaching: “Santos privately lobbied GOP leaders to serve on two higher-level committees, one on financial oversight and the other on foreign policy, but senior Republicans rejected this step, as some chairmen refused to add him to their panels.
Political analysts may have a lot to say about the Santos case — but what do psychologists say about people who lie as much as this particular congressman seems to have done?
Santos’ former roommate says he was delusional
Drew Curtis has dedicated his professional life to understanding why people lie. The licensed psychologist directs the Curtis Deception Lab at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas, and specifically researches “pathological lying, deception within psychotherapy and the health professions” and psychopathy. With his research partner Christian Hart, he published the book Pathological Lying: Theory, Research and Practice last year.
Drew is careful to say that he would never diagnose someone remotely or without their consent because that would be an abdication of his professional duties as a psychologist. But when I asked him about the Santos case, he said it was important to keep in mind that there is a difference between pathological liars and prolific liars. Pathological liars can’t help themselves—they feel a compulsion to lie and feel deep remorse afterward, even if they can’t stop the behavior. Prolific liars are people who lie to achieve success, sometimes outrageously, and who never feel remorse. These people usually have traits of psychopathy or personality disorders: “It’s part of seeing other people [around them] as objects in the world and navigates them for his own profit and his own interests.
Politicians are in an interesting position when it comes to lying, Curtis says, because recent research shows that “politicians who are honest are less likely to get re-elected.” Yet polls during the last presidential election also showed that “the number one thing most Americans look for in presidential debates and elections is honesty — above competence, above anything else, it’s honesty.” Time and time again, he says, they find that “liar” is the most damaging label that can be thrown at a politician, the lowest-ranked trait out of more than 400 possible traits presented to the public. And time and again these same members of the public re-elect politicians who lie the most.
People travel from state to state to see Drew Curtis at his lab in Texas seeking help for their lying behavior, saying things like “my marriage is about to end” or “my relationship with my mother is strained and I’m doing this for her “. But of course, the people he heals are only the ones who feel some sort of compensation: “If the lies are doing them any good, I doubt it even crosses the radar of ‘I need help with this’ until those lies start to hurt their work or their family life or relationships.’
We all lie sometimes—Curtis touts the idea of ”putting your best foot forward” on a first date as a fairly harmless game of lying that we’ve probably all participated in—but only some of us will encounter prolific or pathological liars. And when we are on the side of these people’s lies, it can be very seductive. “People tend to enjoy stories,” he says. “And I think that’s our fault on the other side, engaging with pathological liars. So if you think of the most exaggerated story you can think of, even if you know it’s false – if I tell you right now that there are 15 alligators outside my office and I’m going to go kill them with an ax , cut off their heads and use them to help me dissect frogs, and then I’ll take the guts of the frog and make a hat or something, which was so obviously false to you – I think you’ll find it hard not to maintaining interest in it. I would draw your attention. So the novelty of such exaggerations often grabs our attention, which helps reinforce these lies, even when we know they’re false. And I think that’s part of the problem.” We pay attention to people, reinforce their lies, and then resist disbelieving them. I think of the Republicans who saw George Santos as the perfect candidate to win a Democratic district in New York. When such an opportunity falls from the sky, who wants to challenge it?
George Santos waits for the House session to begin
(Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)
Curtis recently met with Christopher Massimin, a disgraced former theater producer who resigned after an investigation found he embellished his resume and engaged in a series of compulsive lies. What struck Curtis when he met Massimine was how Massimine’s wife had unwittingly entered into a dynamic that enabled his lie: “His relationship was broken. And his wife wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt and she kept catching him in his lies. And that’s the nuance – how people reinforce it and it becomes a problem.”
After Massimin was exposed, he contributed a candid article to the New York Times about his many lies. He then wrote a blog on Medium titled “I’m a liar and this will follow me forever,” along with a photo of himself holding his young son. “I created elaborate stories of success and adventure as the world passed me by – or rather, I let it. See for me lying is a coping mechanism. My self-esteem was completely tied to the stories – I never felt like I was enough without them. Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. This is where I am in my current perspective,” Massimine wrote in her Medium post in late November 2022. “I can no longer hold my head high in public, I spend my days at home writing whenever I have the desire to fabricate. It’s been a useful substitute, but I’m not sure it’s a healthy one… When I’m not writing, I’m working with people and organizations who don’t want my name associated with them. i get it This is my life now and it may never get better. There are people who will curse me “once a liar, always a liar”. One thing I am certain of in being public about my illness is that my past will follow me forever.
Massimin describes in detail how he was diagnosed with depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and cluster B personality disorder and how he lives with constant anxiety: “I am terrified that my wife, whom I love with all my heart, is going to leave me; that my son will grow up to think of his father as a bad man; that the few friends I have left will disappear from my life. These are all reasons to keep working on change. But are these reasons stronger than my compulsion? That’s the real question: Will I be able to live a fully authentic life?” In January, he wrote another post titled “Staying Outcast,” where he described how he keeps returning to his obsessive lie and putting himself in the spotlight. He seems confused about his own motivations: “I could easily withdraw from…
Add Comment