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July 11, 2025 15 mins

Curious about the psychology of pathological liars, Andrea talks with two leading experts. For more from Dr. Drew Curtis and Dr. Christian Hart, check out their book Big Liars: What Psychological Science Tells Us About Lying and How You Can Avoid Being Duped.

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Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Hi, guys, it's Andrea with a bonus episode this season
on Betrayal, We're telling the story of Caroline Brega. After
two decades of marriage, she discovered that her entire life
was a mirage. Her husband, Joel, an honorable cop, was
anything but For years, he'd been spending his time on
the clock having sex in his police car. On top

(00:33):
of that, he'd had dozens of affairs for Caroline. This
betrayal was not just about what Joel did, It was
about the lengths he went to to cover it all up.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
Our marriage has just been lie after lie after.

Speaker 1 (00:47):
Lie, day after day. Joel deceived her. He lied about
where he was, who he was with, and what he
was really up to all those long nights on duty,
And even during his investigation by the Colorado Springs Police Department,
when he signed a document guaranteeing honesty, he continued to
hide the truth.

Speaker 3 (01:07):
To me, this is the.

Speaker 4 (01:08):
Most disturbing piece of the entire case. The fact that
you like the fact that you're willing to put this
on a third person is absolutely horrific and constitutes a
violation of your owth in office.

Speaker 1 (01:20):
While reporting on Caroline's story, our team has been fascinated
by the idea of liars, people who refuse to be
honest even when their back is up against the wall.
We wanted to understand why people lie and how someone
like Joel could have kept lying for so long. So

(01:40):
we track down two of the world's leading experts in deception.

Speaker 2 (01:49):
Drew Curtis and my name's Chris Hart.

Speaker 1 (01:52):
They're both psychology researchers and professors. Together they wrote a
book called Big Liars. What Psychological Science tells Us about
Lying and How you can Avoid being duped. They've spent
years studying pathological lying, so I asked them to define
it for me.

Speaker 3 (02:10):
Most people are honest most of the time, but it's
a small percentage of the population who tells excessive amounts
of lies. So there's these groups of prolific or big
liars who tell lots of lies, and those lies don't
always put them at some disadvantage. And then there's a
smaller subset of individuals who would say are pathological liars,

(02:30):
where their lies do disadvantage them, typically in their relationships,
causing them to stress and so forth.

Speaker 1 (02:38):
You guys say in your book Big Liars, that lying,
at its core is the attempt to persuade. Can you
tell us a little bit more about what you mean
by that.

Speaker 2 (02:50):
Oftentimes our goals and ambitions are in alignment with other people,
but there's always a certain degree to which that's not true,
and so we're always navigating that tension between satisfying our
own goals and trying to match someone else's goals. But
I think ultimately we all find ourselves bending the truth
and sometimes outright lying when we feel like that's our

(03:13):
best option at persuading other people to essentially do what
we want.

Speaker 1 (03:18):
People are coming to the show because in some ways
they relate to either Caroline story or Ashley or Stacey's
story from past seasons. In a lot of the cases,
they were with someone that deceived them for their own game.
What kind of resources could we give to anybody who's
trying to help someone who cares about the liar? Where

(03:39):
do you start? Where do you go to help advocate
for them to get help? Is there actually a path
forward for these individuals?

Speaker 3 (03:47):
What you're saying makes me think of two pieces to this,
and one is how do we overcome deception within our
relationships or betrayals that are coupled with deception. One of
the challenges with exception is that it really damages trust,
and so the restoration of trust is a kind of
at the seat of this. But you're right, there's not

(04:08):
a lot of help. And to make this clear, pathological
lying is not currently recognized as a formal diagnostic entity
in the DSM.

Speaker 1 (04:17):
For those unfamiliar with the term, the DSM is a
manual for mental health professionals. It lays out diagnoses recognized
by the medical establishment, and doctor Curtis is saying the
pathological lying is not something clinicians can formally diagnose.

Speaker 3 (04:32):
And so that leaves a lot of people helpless, you know,
who might reach out to me or Chris or experts saying, hey,
can you help me?

Speaker 1 (04:40):
Why do you think that this isn't a formal diagnosis
in the DSM.

Speaker 3 (04:45):
It's surprising to me because some of the most prolific
writers in psychiatry and psychology identified pathological lying and it
comes with different names. And that's one of our hypotheses
is that maybe it was too fragmented. We called it
all these different things, and maybe it didn't cohesively come together.
The other part of this is a lot of the

(05:05):
research on pathological lying and the case studies were late
eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds, but after about nineteen fifteen,
there's really not a lot of writing on it until
maybe the nineteen eighties, so as the DSM was really
being developed in the fifties, you know, it doesn't necessarily
make its way in there, but I'm hopeful. I've been

(05:27):
working with some colleagues psychiatrists from Yale and Colombia, and
we're working actively to get it recognized.

Speaker 1 (05:33):
How would saying curtly this is a diagnosis help the
individual or help other people? Like, why would that be important?

Speaker 3 (05:43):
One of the most important reasons is just a standard
label by which we can communicate as professionals but also
communicate with patients. You know, so you think of any
kind of disorder like major depressive disorder. When we say that,
all clinical professionals understand the cluster of symptoms that come
with that. But then also people who receive that diagnosis,

(06:03):
they can associate that label with the symptoms they already feel.
So it gives a standard language for people to communicate.
That's kind of at the very basic aspect of it.
More pragmatically looking for like insurance reimbursement, so insurance is
not going to reimburse treatment of something that what are
you treating where you're not treating anything that actually exists

(06:23):
or that's formally recognized. Other pragmatic concerns are We did
a study looking at psychotherapists, and the majority of psychotherapists
indicated they had worked with someone who they considered to
be a pathological liar, but in the absence of this label,
they end up giving another diagnosis. And so when you
do that, you're somewhat misdiagnosing and then maybe even arguably

(06:47):
ineffectively offering a treatment. And that's the last piece of
this too, is that if you can identify a formal diagnosis,
then you can set forth research to look at what
is the most effect of treatment for this.

Speaker 1 (07:22):
Where Caroline is left today is that she's kind of
living with two different realities. There was her perspective of
what her life was and what her family looked like
and what she thought her family looked like, and on
the other track, there's the life that Joel was doing
behind the scenes, and she now has to kind of
integrate those two realities because she has to look back

(07:43):
on major memories and wonder what was real, what wasn't real,
And so when I look at someone like Caroline, or
if I'm Caroline, I don't even know where to start
on rebuilding trust or understanding the world in which I live.
That's why I f this topic fascinating because he lied
to her for twenty years.

Speaker 2 (08:05):
Our research shows that most people are really good at lying.
It's a pretty easy thing for most humans to pull off.
And I think we go through the world trusting everyone
as being honest with us, and especially those people who
are close with us. But it's important to remember that
they're probably not being fully honest with us all the time,
even the people who are the very closest people in

(08:27):
our lives. If we catch someone close to us telling
us a rather minor lie, it has the same effect
as these bigger lies that we're talking about in this case,
where we start to question, well, if they lie about this,
what else are they lying about.

Speaker 3 (08:41):
It's a natural proclivity, I believe to go back and
start investigating. And one of the pieces about the advice
I'd say too is to not necessarily let that overcloud
or overshadow places where you did have good experiences.

Speaker 1 (08:54):
But it's easier said than done.

Speaker 3 (08:57):
Sure, I think another part of that is really commitment
to where do you want to be now and where
do you want to go forward? And I imagine anyone
who's been lied to for a very long time that
is going back. You know it's going to impact trust
of other relationships or at least you know. The analogy

(09:17):
I use as walls. You know, when you've lowered your
wall and you've been vulnerable and you've gotten crushed, the
walls are going to come up, probably higher than before,
and you're probably going to have a hard time letting
people in because you've seen what people can do to
you and you're developing these new beliefs that if I
let people in, they will crush me, they will lie
to me, they will take advantage of me, and those thoughts,

(09:40):
those are hard to guard against. Right, But you are
making decisions about what it is you want to do,
and maybe you do want to keep the walls up.
But there's a consequence of that too, and it's not
letting people in who may not do that to.

Speaker 1 (09:53):
You, right. I mean, I imagine your brain is helping
you create that story for a sense of safe because
your world has just kind of been taken away from you.
Or your perception of what your life was like has
been taken away. As much as you want to beat
yourself up, people who lie all the time are very
good at it, you know.

Speaker 2 (10:14):
We do see that people who are really practice at
lying get good at it. And one of the things
we see is for people that lie prolifically, they have
this diminished fear response when they're lying. So probably if
any of us were lying, we'd be really nervous about
being caught, you know, because for a lot of reasons,
like it would destroy our reputations and cause ruptures in

(10:35):
our relationships. But but people who lie a lot and
do it every day, that fear response subsides, and so
they can lie and their emotional reactions are going to
be about the same as if they're telling you what
they had for dinner last night. There's just not much there.

Speaker 3 (10:52):
And the other part you mentioned is Blaine, you know,
you can beat yourself up, Like you said, what did
I not see?

Speaker 2 (10:58):
Right?

Speaker 3 (10:58):
Hindsight's twenty two? How did I not see all these things?
And maybe you see them much clearer now. You know,
most of us, you know, don't want to catch those
awful things. We don't want to be confronted with that
even if it's true. And so I think you know
that aspect too is helping someone deal with beating themselves
up for not being super light detector. But there is

(11:21):
an initial impulse to not necessarily want to know that
the person's lying because what that brings about or the
consequences of what they were lying about.

Speaker 2 (11:31):
Yeah, and especially within the context of you know, romantic
relationships and marriage, is if I'm going to call my
spouse out for lying, does that mean we have to
split up? And it gets really complicated and scary really quickly,
And it's just so much easier and less frightening to
just turn a blind eye to that thing that's giving

(11:54):
rise towards suspicion.

Speaker 1 (11:56):
Can people who are pathological liars change? Is there a
path for them to move about life in a more
honest way if they want to work on it.

Speaker 3 (12:07):
I think people always have the opportunities to change, and
change is kind of the business we're in in one
of those really cognitive behavioral therapy. You know, it's aspects
like modeling honesty even when it's hard, So trying to
encourage people to be honest even when it's hard, Really
having those tough conversations, showing that you're willing to have

(12:28):
tough conversations with people.

Speaker 2 (12:31):
Yeah, I think a lot of it is just the
intention to change. Lying is really a social strategy that
people adopt and cultivate and reinforce over decades and decades.
And it's just like any behavioral pattern, whether it's you know,
alcohol consumption, smoking, using sarcasm, anything that you've been doing

(12:51):
for decades. It's hard just to flip the switch and
turn it off. But the key and the first step
in Drew and I both hear from these people periodically,
is people decide they finally want to change. They finally
hit some point in their lives where they realize that
their patterns of laing are causing such upheaval and turmoil

(13:12):
that they really have a strong desire to change. I
think we can all become more honest than we are
right now, but we have to make that a goal,
we have to make a priority. And if we just
take one moment every day and think, how can I
be more honest about this situation with someone who I
care about that I'm interacting with, we can move that needle,

(13:32):
and each day, as we practice that habit, we start
to see some change, and the change might be gradual.
But I assume if everyone made an intention to be
more honest every day, if they looked at themselves a
year from now, they find they've made some considerable progress.

Speaker 1 (13:49):
If you want to hear more of this conversation and
see it in video, check out our brand new substack.
Just head to Betrayal dot substack that's sub stac or
just go to subsack dot com, search beyond Betrayal and
hit subscribe. You can find Curtisonhart's book Big Liars on
the American Psychological Association website, Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

(14:19):
Thank you for listening to Betrayal season four. If you
would like to reach out to the Betrayal team, email
us at Betrayalpod at gmail dot com. That's Betrayal Pod
at gmail dot com. Also, please be sure to follow
us on Instagram at Betrayal Pod and me Andrea Hgunning
for all Betrayal content, news and updates. One way to

(14:40):
support the series is by subscribing to our show on
Apple Podcasts. Please rate and review Betrayal. Five star reviews
help us know you appreciate what we do. Betrayal is
a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group,
in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The show is executive produced
by Nancy Glass and Jennifer Fasin. Betrayal is hosted and

(15:02):
produced by me Andrea Gunning, written and produced by Caitlin Golden,
also produced by Carrie Hartman and Ben Fetterman. Our associate
producer is Kristin Melcurie. Our iHeart team is Ali Perry
and Jessica Krincheck. Story editing by Monique Leboard, audio editing
and mixing by Matt Delvecchio, editing by Tanner Robbins, and

(15:24):
special thanks to Caroline and her family. Betrayal's theme is
composed by Oliver Baines. Music library provided by my Music
and For more podcasts from iHeart, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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