Who is a wise person? and curious science of detecting lies

Few days ago one of the readers of this blog wrote to me that “you read lot of different and varied things”. This is true but that does not mean I could boast of being knowledgeable in many areas, on the contrary, the more you read about the various things and find that so many different aspects of physical and social phenomena are studied by scholars, the more you realise how much you don’t know. For me reading has simply ensured that I don’t lose the humility. So in all humility let me start with a story that is attributed to Socrates. Once he was asked to define wisdom. The following remarkable response that I have shared earlier with many of my students, but at the risk of repeating for some of them here, is put below. The Socratic view on wise person goes something like this:

A person who does not know and does not know that s/he does not know is ignorant
A person who does not know but thinks that s/he knows is fool
A person who does not know and knows that s/he does not know is wise

Professor Richard Wiseman (the surname is real) is the only professor of promoting Public Uderstanding of Psychology at a university in England, UK. He is Quirkologist. ‘Quirk’ means peculiar or strange and logy is a Greek suffix found in hundreds of words in English and means ‘study of’ something. For instance psych-ology is study of mind or etym-ology is study of origin of words. So quirk-ology is study of strange or quirky things. For instance, how or why people smile, study of people telling lies. Professor Wiseman has written a book entitled Quirkology: The Curious Science of Everyday Lives. I got this book as summer reading for my son but when it arrived in the post I started reading it with great interest.. One of the studies Wiseman conducted involved national survey on people telling lies. A large number of people participated in the survey that was run in collaboration with a British daily. Only 8% of the people said they had never lied meaning 92% of us tell lies at one or other time in our life. He also reports from other studies that 80% of respondents said that they had lied to get a job, 60% of the people have cheated on their partners at least once..hmm. Mercifully 4 out of 5 lies remain undetected. What will happen to the number of divorces if all cheaters on their partners were found! A quirky question for Professor Wiseman could be, to what extent is the institution of marriage dependent on our inability to detect lies.

Talking of detecting lies Prof. Wiseman reports his work on how to differentiate between an artificial and real smile. If you want to try and see if you can differentiate a real smile from an artificial one go to the link provided below. Meanwhile let me leave you with a simple philosophical statement that has puzzled quite a few wise people thus far:

When someone makes the following statement, is s/he telling truth?

‘I am telling truth that I always tell lies.’

Link to Prof. Wiseman’s experiments and other material on Quirkology
http://www.quirkology.com/UK/Experiment_lying.shtml