No Stupid Questions - 66. When Is It OK to Tell a Lie?

Episode Date: September 12, 2021

Also: is obsessing over your mental health bad for your mental health?

Wow, maybe she doesn't really have it together. I'm Angela Duckworth. I'm Stephen Dubner. And you're listening to No Stupid Questions. Today on the show, when is it okay to tell a lie? I feel that I get more honest the older I get, or maybe it's just cranky is the better word. Also, is obsessing over your mental health actually bad for your mental health? You don't, as they would say in my family growing up, hang your dirty laundry outside.

Hello, Angela. Steven. I want to talk about something that you recently touched on in your conversation with Lori Santos when she sat in for me. By the way, I really enjoyed that conversation. I just really enjoy Lori. She's actually one of my favorite humans. You guys talked a little bit about lying, and I hope you don't mind me asking you a fairly personal question about it,

but I want to know, how many times a day do you tell a lie? And when and why is it okay to lie? And maybe the answer to both questions is never, but I think that would put you well outside the normal range of humans. I would like to say that I go days, if not weeks or months without a single lie. Wow.

I said I would like to say that. Oh, you'd like to say that. I would like to be six, five. Right, okay. I do think though, Stephen, that if we define a lie as intentional deception, then I definitely go days without lying. I'm not saying that every day I go without lying. I'm going to just ballpark this and say that my average lying rate is 0.5 lies per day. Okay, so your ALR, average lying rate, is 0.5 daily. How do you think that

compares to the rest of humankind? I would imagine, and I'm guessing this in part because I'm pretty familiar with Dan Ariely, the psychologist, and his research on lying. And he says that most people lie a little. Not many people lie a lot, but most people lie a little. And by the way, when I'm talking about a lie every other day, that includes white lies. So give me an example of your median lie. For example, if somebody asks me to review an article for a scientific journal, and I click no, I decline. And then the next screen says, why are you not able to review this article?

And the default response is, I don't have expertise. You just press next. I don't think like, oh God, I should probably be honest, which is to say that this journal is terrible. Are you kidding? I would never review for this journal.

So this leads to the question of, I guess you'd call them prompted lies versus unprompted lies, perhaps, right? Like as in response to this conversational cue or this request, I'm now lying versus like just spontaneously telling an untruth. Maybe not spontaneously, but maybe a little bit more driven by some internal incentive. Like I want to get something or I want to avoid something. And therefore, I will proactively create a different version of the truth. Let's call that first degree lying. I can't call to mind a single instance of first degree lying, but that doesn't mean I haven't done it. I'm sure I have. I'm just saying that seems bad, Stephen, and I hope I don't do it very often.

Okay, but let me ask you this. We talked about the Eisenhower matrix a few weeks ago, and I got to thinking, I wonder if it would be useful to create a lying matrix for ourselves. So here's my little attempt. There'd be big lies and little lies, and then there'd be lies for self-gain and lies for, let's say, the benefit of others. So like pro-social versus personally motivated. Or at least neutral. Okay. So you'd have your big lies for self-gain, small lies for self-gain,

big lies for the benefit of others or neutral, and small lies for the benefit of others. I think everybody could imagine what's most desirable and terrible about that matrix. Telling a big lie for self-gain sounds pretty terrible, yeah? Oh, yes, absolutely. Like lying so that you can get the vaccine earlier than other people or cheating on your taxes. I mean, these are all lies for personal gain. Or like saying things on your resume that aren't true, which is apparently a very common lie. Interesting. Yes. So we're all in consensus that lying in a big way for personal gain, bad. Now, what about a big lie for the benefit of others? Like Jean Valjean in Les Misérables.

Oh, isn't there something called the Valjean effect in the psych literature about lying? I'm looking at this paper by Williams, Pizarro, Dan Ariely, and J.D. Weinberg called The Valjean Effect, Visceral States and Cheating. This is from the journal Emotion. That's a nice name for a journal. It's like Smokey Robinson. It's a good journal. Is it? I would definitely do a review for Emotion.

They write that visceral states like thirst, hunger, and fatigue can alter our motivations, predictions, and even memory. And they demonstrate that these so-called hot states can shift moral standards and increase dishonest behavior. It's a form of behavior driven by incentives, right? That's right. Well, Jean Valjean, as many of us may remember from reading or seeing some version of Les Miserables, he stole a loaf of bread because he was starving and had no money and then spent, I think, 19 years in prison, was released, but was then given a kind of scarlet letter for being a forever criminal. And so I guess the Valjean effect is about the fact that he was in a state, a hot state, a hungry state, where he needed to do something dishonest, which was taking bread that did not belong to him. It would seem to make sense, I think, to just about every human that

cheating or stealing or lying when under, if not duress, then under some, you know, pretty strong emotional motivation, we'd be more likely to do it. But you and I aren't really talking about lying in a hot state. We're talking about lying in a neutral state. At least that's what I'm thinking about when you say, Angela, about how many times a day do you tell a lie? You know, not under duress, not starving, not dying of thirst. Let me ask you this, my dear friend. Do you think you would be interested in, let's say, an app or some kind of tracking paraphernalia where you'd be able to learn exactly how often you tell a lie.

If I had like the equivalent of a pedometer. Yeah, a built-in lie detector. But you're the only one with the data. Do you think you might perhaps lie more or less than you think? Because part of it is the lies we tell other people, and then there are the lies we tell ourselves. I would love to have an app if I believed that, what's that word for a lie detector? Isn't it like a polygraph? I think polygraph is the right word.

Okay. Anyway, if there were a reliable polygraph, and I don't know whether the science says that those polygraphs are reliable or not. I think they're based on skin conductance and like sweating associated with lying. And then if it were really possible, yeah, I'd go for it. Totally. I'm all into this kind of like self-improvement in all possible ways. And what would happen if this polygraph app told you that you were lying a lot more than one half a day? If I believed it, if I thought, oh, yeah, there you go, that wasn't exactly true.

I hadn't thought about all this motivated reasoning that's happening in the moment. I think I would begin to lie less because I do think lying erodes the trust we have in other people. So that's the external cost of lying. But what about the internal? How does lying change one's self-perception as a person of integrity? That's important to most of us. It's interesting to think about what it means to lie to yourself and why that's bad, if it's bad. And by the way, many psychologists, and I think neuroscience would be in rough

consensus with this, that in a real sense, there are multiple selves. There's like tired Angela and energetic Angela, and there's Angela with a lot of other people around. There's Angela all by herself and future Angela and present Angela and past Angela. And I think the idea that one of the Angelas could be lying to the other Angelas would probably cause some kind of distress to have that inner dissonance. Of all those Angelas that you just named, and there were many, and I'm sure there are many more. I'm sure there's Pizza Angela, Sushi Angela, and Chopped Liver Angela. Which one lies the most or maybe the least? Well, if you believe the Dan Ariely study that you were just talking about,

then I think it would be some kind of distressed Angela, desperate Angela, distressed Angela, desperate Angela, instrumentally lying to get her way. And maybe that's why if I am roughly accurate in my belief that I'm not inclined much to lying, maybe it's because I'm privileged. Maybe it's because I have not a lot of need. I'm the opposite of Jean Valjean. I don't need to steal a loaf of bread to feed my family. I don't need to lie about my credentials. There's not a lot of duress, honestly, in my life. So I am looking here at some research by Ipsos, the market research firm, surveyed about a thousand Americans about their views on lying. 64% said that lying was sometimes justified. 36% said never justified. Now, we don't know how many of them are lying about that answer. Does that result strike you as believable, useful?

It does strike me that there are occasions on which the lie is a price that you're willing to pay for some greater good. And Barry Schwartz, our common friend and a psychologist now at Berkeley, Barry would very often bring out the example of your wife was to show you her new dress and she says, how does it look? And you're thinking it makes your ass look a mile wide. And the question is, do you tell the truth? Barry probably wouldn't have been so crass in his description. But Barry would say that's an example where honesty, which is obviously a virtue, should be trumped by something else like empathy. And that's also a virtue. So I think those Americans who say, hey, there are occasions on which lying is a good thing are probably thinking about the white lies that we tell each other and maybe

even ourselves in moments where there's a greater virtue. We have that scenario exactly in my house all the time, not is my ass a mile wide scenario, but my wife will put on something. It might be an outfit or shoes or maybe a piece of jewelry and say, this one or that one? Or do you like this? And I have learned to be very honest with her because my wife is very honest in those kind of things. And she wants that. But what's interesting is that she will often, in fact, I would say almost always disagree or overrule me. She'll come out with like black shoe on one foot and a brown shoe on the other and say, which of these do you think goes with this outfit? And I look at it and I'll

say the black. She's like, okay, yeah, I'm wearing the brown. Now, what's interesting is I was so conditioned when we first got married years and years ago to do the opposite, to do the Barry Schwartz, you know, just. Yeah, you look great. Yeah. Fish around for what she wanted to hear and then go with that. Or they both look fantastic. I couldn't imagine any third shoe in the world looking better. So maybe I've been informed by marriage in that way, but I really do. I mean, what I'm about to say is so self-serving. I can't believe I'm about to say

it because I'm sure everyone would say this, but I really do try to not lie. And I think about why, and I think there are at least two reasons. One is it feels terrible. It just feels like a small but significant emotional trauma every time you tell a lie. It doesn't feel good. The other part is that it becomes costly to lie in that you have to keep track of your lies or otherwise you'll be caught. And then the cover-up is worse than the crime. This gets me back to the question of why we lied. So I read a really interesting piece of research. It was from almost 20 years ago by a psychologist at UMass Amherst named Robert Feldman that

was looking at lying among undergrads. He had 120-some pairs of undergraduate students, and he told them the study was about how people interact when they meet someone new. And these participants would have a 10-minute recorded conversation with a hidden camera. And in one condition, the students were told to try to make themselves seem likable. Another, they were told to try to seem competent. And a third was a control group. They didn't get any direction like this. Afterward, he told the participants that they had been videotaped, then he got

consent from them, and then he had them watch the videos after and identify where they had told an untruth. And the results I'm reading here, 60% of the people in that 10-minute conversation lied at least once and told an average of two to three lies. But here's what I'm getting to. This is a side result, but I find really interesting. Women were more likely to lie to make the person they were talking to feel good, while men lied most often to make themselves look better. That resonates so deeply, by the way. I wondered whether in addition to lying to make the other person feel better, there was going to be a gender difference on claiming or owning up to lies. Because by the way, what one person defines as a lie and what another person defines as a lie can be very different things. Ah, good point. Let me ask you this. You know a little something about children and their brains. At what age does lying start? I know from Jerry Kagan's research that

these moral emotions, like to even feel a sense of what it means to do the right thing and to also feel guilt and shame when you do a wrong thing. I think he would argue that that starts around the age of two or three. And so I'm assuming that if you need some self-awareness about a lie to be a lie, then it would be around then. But as we all know, young children do say things that are untrue. And I don't even think they know that it's bad when they're really little. Wait, I'm a little confused. Is there a period where a child is capable of talking and doesn't lie? Or does the lying start as soon as they can talk? Well, let's talk about like a very young toddler.

If they are saying something that's not true, but they don't have a metacognitive sense that like, ha ha ha, I'm telling this untruth because I want to get something. I think Jerry Kagan might have argued that to tell a lie, you have to know at some level that you're telling a lie. And I think very young children would not have that capacity. Does it diminish over time as we get older? Because I'll be honest, I feel that I get more honest the older I get, or maybe it's just cranky is the better word. I don't like to mince words.

So our prefrontal cortex, the stuff behind the forehead, the stuff that is the reason why human beings have foreheads, you know, like. Really? Yeah. That's the reason I have a forehead? Pretty much. I mean, if you look at other primates, of course they have foreheads, but they're not as big as the human forehead. And that accommodates the prefrontal cortex. And the prefrontal cortex is the seat of executive function in the brain. And executive function is many things, but one of them is to inhibit impulses. And so there's an impulse to lie, and then there's the inhibition of the impulse to lie. And prefrontal function does follow a sort of inverse you, where it's terrible when you're really, really little,

and then it gets better. There's a little blip in adolescence, by the way, but it's terrible when you're really, really little. And then it gets better. There's a little blip in adolescence, by the way, but that's a slightly more complicated story. But then your 70s and 80s, for sure, prefrontal function is declining over those later years. And just the other day, Stephen, Jason and I are at the top of a church steeple. We're on vacation. Wait, you're at the top of a church steeple? Well, yeah, it was one of those scenic lookouts that you could pay five bucks and climb the church stairs. 96 stairs. And at the very top, there's a 90-year-old.

90? 9-0? 90. 9-0. Wow. Did they get her up there with a crane? She goes up and down these really steep ladder-like stairs every day. Ooh, cause or effect? I will say this, probably selection bias. Certainly not the reason why she's 90, but for sure she's doing well.

And if anybody's got a good prefrontal cortex, it's gotta be this 90, or at least compared to other 90-year-olds. However, she's 90. So we're leaving and we're there with our 18-year-old, Lucy. So we thank her. We've had a lovely conversation.

She's made all these jokes about how as long as she doesn't do the knitting while she's walking down the steps, she's fine. And she said, oh, are you guys together? And she points to Lucy and my husband and says, like, are you married? And we laugh and we think, wow, maybe she doesn't really have it together. We, you know, explain that I'm married to Jason and not our daughter, Lucy. And then she just looks at me, said, well, you're really robbing the cradle. Whoa. And the idea was basically that I look really old relative to my beautiful, handsome husband. And when we got to the bottom of the stairs, I was like, you know, 90 year olds, they have no ability to inhibit themselves. She has lost the capacity to tell a white lie. That was a thought that was probably to protect my ego. The other thought I had is, do I really look that old?

Now, if we could take a chainsaw and cut off one leg of you and Jason, how many rings would we see on each of you? In other words, is he younger than you? That's a lovely image. Thank you. Yeah, sorry, that's not the easiest way to tell age, I guess. But next time I want to know somebody's age, I'm just going to say, if I could take a chainsaw and chop off one of your legs. If that seems too violent, you could use a handsaw of some kind. But is Jason significantly younger than you, however? He's two years younger than me. He's 49 and I'm 51. And I don't know, maybe I was having a bad day,

but I really couldn't believe it. This woman thought that I looked old enough to be my husband's mother. She felt no desire to lie. Okay, question. How did that incident change your view of 90-year-old women generally? I hate them.

Yeah, that sounds about right. Damn you all. No, I thought it was actually kind of charming. And honestly, if it's true at all that the older you get, the less you lie, whether it's because your prefrontal cortex isn't what it used to be or you have learned that honesty is the best policy. I kind of like it, honestly. Well, I'm not going to lie. I enjoyed this conversation every word of it. Yeah.

How do you like this dress? Still to come on No Stupid Questions, Stephen and Angela debate whether there's a downside to destigmatizing mental illness. Oh, I would like everyone to think I'm depressed. I would like everyone to think I have generalized anxiety disorder. to think I have generalized anxiety disorder. Angela, here's an email from a listener who wishes to remain anonymous. He writes to say, I have served as an officer in the British Army for the past 15 years, including two tours of Afghanistan. As a young officer, I can barely remember mental health being discussed except during a mandatory period of post-operational decompression at the end of deployments. It certainly didn't pervade the everyday management of my soldiers as it can do at the moment.

Putting my professional experience to one side, he continues, it does seem like over the last decade, society writ large has become more mental health conscious. I don't dispute that for the most part, this seems like a really positive progression. You can feel the but coming here. People are now far more comfortable verbalizing their struggles and accessing the treatment they need, he writes. But, he goes on, coldheartedly, I can't help cutting people adrift. Clearly, there is a threshold at which mental health becomes a medical issue, and I really believe in helping anyone who is suffering. So, Angela, I find this a really interesting question, which is essentially, can paying a certain sort of attention to a problem turn into a problem itself, or at least magnify the problem. You know,

there's the old saying, when you're holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So, I'm really curious what you have to say about that in the context of mental health. Well, I am going to argue that understanding that mental health and mental illness, they're a thing, as the teenagers would say, you know, they're real issues. I'm going to argue that that is a good thing and a big advance, actually. I think that we now live in a time where most people would say that depression and anxiety are diseases and that they can be understood in the same way that we would understand any other disease. I think that is a major advance for humanity. But before I argue that side of things, I do think that what this question gets at is the fact that we're shining a light on our anxiety or our insecurity.

Could that create the self-fulfilling prophecy that now we are anxious? And I think that's a legitimate concern. Even if net, it's clearly better to understand these things for what they are, which is real conditions. So it is true that it's common to hear someone say, you know, I have OCD when they're simply bothered by a sloppy area. Oh, yes. By the way, I remember taking psychopathology my first year in my doctoral program. And my professor said that it really bothered her as a therapist who treats people with actual obsessive compulsive disorder that people

who are like really don't want to miss their workout would say that they were OCD. And she's like, no, OCD is when you go back to your house 50 times in a morning to check the stove. That's OCD. I think what this British Army officer is writing about is something a little bit beyond that, which is the idea that hypochondria is maybe on the rise. According to the Cleveland Clinic, do you have any idea what share of Americans are affected by it? It's also called illness anxiety disorder. Just take a guess. Gosh, I would guess maybe, what, 5%?

That's what I would have guessed, too, 0.1%. Wow. On the other hand, it could be wildly underdiagnosed. But what this writer is implying is that there's been a rise in attention paid to mental illness, and then some people are selecting into that group. So can you tell us what's known about the incidence of mental illness over time and the incidence of diagnosing mental illness over time? Most of the reports suggest that issues like anxiety and depression are on the rise. Those are two of the biggest categories and actually the ones that create the most suffering, particularly among young adults.

Right. So I've seen a report that says that 25 percent of more mental illness or more mental health issues in younger people, or there's a lot more diagnosis than there used to be, or both, theoretically. When they say diagnosable, it may be that they are diagnosed, but my suspicion is that somebody's extrapolating from data. Because it would be hard for me to believe that one in four college students have been diagnosed. That would mean that colleges around the country had big mental health divisions that could even do all that testing.

So to go to the big issue that he's raising, what's a bigger problem, undiagnosed and untreated mental illness or the opposite? And that's why I think this is a net problem. In other words, I think there could be pros and cons of increased awareness of mental illness. But other words, I think there could be pros and cons of increased awareness of mental illness. But to me, the pros outweigh the cons. I mean, the cons are like, does it create a self-fulfilling prophecy? Maybe, you know, medical students famously in their first year of medical school are always like diagnosing themselves with everything that they just learned about. And Glenn's like, oh my gosh, I must be having appendicitis. No, you don't. But I do think that when I was a kid,

my dad and mom were given the advice that they should take one or all of us to a counselor for various problems that we were having when we were growing up. And my dad rejected it wholly out of hand, like over my dead body was essentially his attitude toward that. And I think it was because there was such a stigma, I guess, for my dad. It wasn't that he didn't believe that people could have mental health problems. It's just that, like, God forbid our family had any of them. So I think that's why this awareness is like net so much better. If you could transplant your father, the same person from when he came to the U.S.

to let's say he's coming to the U.S. now, do you think the environment is now different enough that he would have a totally different view of the wisdom of seeking out therapy? Or do you think that was his character? I think it would be better now because even within his own lifetime, I could see my dad's attitude shift along with culture, you know, questions of sexuality, et cetera, race. But I will say this, you know, my dad was raised in 1930s China, where not only do you not talk about mental health issues, I don't even know if they would know the phrase mental health, but also you don't, as they would say in my family growing up, hang your dirty laundry outside. I was like, wouldn't you definitely want to hang it outside? Like, why would you want to keep it in the house?

So let me ask you this. How is America an outlier in thinking about mental illness? I've seen a World Health Organization study looking at the number of mental disorders in 28 countries. The lowest rate of reported mental disorders was Nigeria, and the highest was the U.S. So is this about existence and incidence or diagnosing or what? You know, it will be impossible, I think, in cross-cultural data to tease apart how much of this is having the language and the awareness and how much of this is just true, like we are more depressed or we have more anxiety. I don't think we can ever definitively do that. I have to say that it's

got to at least be some element of like we have the words for it and we think it's okay. So now you're talking about the change in stigma associated with mental illness. By the way, I learned this recently. In ancient Greece, stigma referred to a brand to mark a slave or a criminal. So, when we de-stigmatize, it's a fairly heavy meaning. But when we're talking about the de-stigmatization of mental illness, plainly the upsides are large. It makes me think back to PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. That is a relatively newly identified condition, correct? Yeah, newly recognized. What can you tell us about the origin of that classification? Post-traumatic stress disorder, which is the psychological consequences of having been through something traumatic like war or rape or witnessing

a murder. This phenomenon, I think, actually came about in the wake of World War II and Vietnam as well. There was federal funding and federal recognition of a problem, and that actually spawned in some ways the whole mental health industry because now there were federal dollars going to therapy, diagnosis, etc. But PTSD is when you experience something which is truly traumatic, that you have this oversensitization of your vigilant system. And so you respond in an exaggerated way to stimuli that are mildly threatening or even like neutral. There are now formal treatments. There's lots of argument about what the best treatment is. Is it cognitive therapy? Is it exposure, et cetera? But I do think that PTSD is a good focus for this conversation because I think that would be the sort of thing where some would say,

like, oh, we used to say keep calm and carry on. And now, you know, everybody wants to be diagnosed. And again, I can understand that sentiment, but isn't it worse for people who are like genuinely suffering to feel like it's all made up? Right. So on balance, it's a gain. In my view, it really is. And I, by the way, don't think we have to worry about people running out and falsely getting stickers that say they have mental health disorders who don't think we have to worry about people running out and falsely getting stickers that say they have mental health disorders who don't. Because even if we're trying to remove the stigma, I don't think a lot of people are like, oh, I would like everyone to think I'm depressed. I would like everyone to think I have generalized anxiety disorder. So I think it's more like,

hey, people sprain their ankles and some people need to work on their hamstrings because they're too tight and you can break your femur and your brain can have some problems that you have to get help with. That said, I do see on social media people spending just a lot of time talking about their issues and problems. And you do wonder whether it starts to even verge on exhibitionism, which I think is also a formal diagnosis. So it's not like there's an either or like, oh, this is always good. The anonymous listener who wrote in, I have to say, I don't think he sounds unsympathetic, but it does make me want to know how hard is it for someone without

mental illness or experience with mental illness to empathize with someone who does have a mental illness? And for anyone listening, how can they improve that? You know, my uncle by marriage, Ken Duckworth, is a psychiatrist. He is the chief medical officer for NAMI, which is the National Alliance on Mental Illness. So I always like to think of him as the nation's psychiatrist. And he would say, both as a lifelong clinician and as the chief psychiatrist for NAMI for years, and also as the son of somebody who had florid manic depression, that one of the most important things you can do

is just say that these things are real and they are more like diseases than they are not like diseases. But I think Ken would say that understanding these things as being more common than people think and more treatable than people think is a very important advance. I understand there is an effort underway to change how mental illness is diagnosed from the National Institute for Mental Health. There's something called the Research Domain Criteria Project, which is, from what I understand, an effort to make these disorders less black and white and more on a spectrum,

which sounds like common sense. Well, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which everyone always calls it the DSM, in the latest revision, I think the major sea change is to understand that the majority of mental health issues are more like continua than they are like categories. So rather than saying you are ADHD or you are not ADHD, it's more like how ADHD are you and does it pass a threshold of dysfunction? And we should say the DSM is famous for including until, I believe, 1972 homosexuality as a mental disease, yes? Yes, that's true. It's almost like a history of cultural listener's question. He writes, coldheartedly, I can't help but wonder if the focus on mental health has caused widespread hypersensitivity and or hypochondria.

Could our modern day obsession with mental health be bad for our mental health? Let's just focus on that very last part. Could the obsession, he calls it, be bad for mental health? Your answer on balance then is what? No. If I only were allowed one syllable, I would say on balance, no. The potential overflow costs are well worth the benefits, you're saying? Correct. I consider it net unequivocally positive. Angela, I thought this was a great conversation. I thank you. And I really thank this listener who not only raised an interesting point, but I think what

he did for us in the public sphere is set a really good example for how to struggle with an interesting and difficult topic. And so kudos to you, Mr. Anonymous British Army officer. Thank you. So kudos to you, Mr. Anonymous British Army officer. Thank you. No Stupid Questions is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Freakonomics Radio, People I Mostly Admire, and Freakonomics MD.

This episode was produced by me, Rebecca Lee Douglas. And now here's a fact check of today's conversations. In the first half of the episode, Stephen and Angela discuss the work of Israeli-American psychologist and Duke University professor Dan Ariely. After this recording, the blog Data Collada published research revealing that a 2012 Ariely field study about dishonesty was based on fabricated data. field study about dishonesty was based on fabricated data. Ariely denies making up the figures, and it is possible that the fabricated data came from the company where the study took place. So while nobody disagrees that there is a smoking gun here, it's not clear who pulled the trigger. Later, Angela says that she doesn't know whether polygraph tests are an effective tool to detect lies. Research has confirmed that polygraphs can detect physiological reactions associated with

stress, fear, guilt, anger, excitement, and anxiety. These reactions include elevation of pulse, respiration, blood pressure, and electrodermal activity due to sweat. But according to the National Academy of Sciences, Also, Stephen remembers reading that 25% of all college students in the United States have a diagnosable psychological disorder. I wasn't able to locate that exact statistic. However, according to survey results published by the National Institute of Mental Health, 20.6% of all Americans have some form of mental illness, and for young adults age 18 to 25, that figure is 29.4%. Finally, Stephen says that homosexuality was listed as a psychopathology

in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1972. He was actually one year off. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed the diagnosis from the DSM. That's it for the Fact Check. No Stupid Questions is produced by Freakonomics Radio and Stitcher. Our staff includes Allison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Eleanor Osborne, Joel Meyer, Trisha Bobita, Emma Terrell, Lyric Bowditch, and Jacob Clemente. We had additional help this week from Anya Dubner.

Our theme song is And She Was by Talking Heads. Special thanks to David Byrne and Warner Chapel Music. If you'd like to listen to the show ad-free, subscribe to Stitcher Premium. You can also follow us on Twitter at NSQ underscore show and on Facebook at NSQ show. If you have a question for a future episode, please email it to NSQ at Freakonomics.com. And if you heard Stephen or Angela reference a study, an expert, or a book that you'd like to learn more about, you can check out Freakonomics.com slash NSQ, where we link to all of the major references that you heard about here today. Thanks for listening. Can you remember the last time you lied?

I remember the beginning of this conversation. I said it was so great to speak with you. Total flat out untruth. The Freakonomics Radio Network. The hidden side of everything. Stitcher.