Twenge's research and contributions to psychology

Twenge

Would I Lie to You, Baby?

One of the fundamental truths of life as it is lived by human beings is that people are largely the sum of their experiences. Experiences comprise many different forms and aspects of life, nearly all of which are filtered through the lens of an individual person's perception. It is virtually impossible to distinguish the information that we receive from our conception, and perception, of it, which is one of the primary reasons why there are a number of variations of the truth, as well as of what truth itself is. This concept of truth and deception are explored in a pair of essays written, respectively, by Tim O'Brien and Jean Twenge. In the former, "How to Tell a True War Story," the author discusses the many different shades of truth that exist and are found within a military context. His patrol unit in Vietnam is utilized for a number of examples which mostly indicate the deliberately subjective nature of the truth. In Twenge's article, "An Army of One: Me," the author examines the ramifications and the deliberate incongruences found with truth by analyzing the generational tendencies of what she terms the MeGen, which appears to consist of people born in the late 70's, as well as in the 80's and the 1990's. The author alludes to a number of specific ramifications that a masking of truth, or deception, can have on the identity of a person. However, a careful synthesis of both of these written works indicates that people largely see that which they desire to see, and that such a subjective interpretation of events and experiences that form the truth for us and our identities is often used for situational purposes to aid us.

To that end, deception informs people's identities by allowing them to believe that they are something that they are not when situations arise in which they have reached their limitations, yet they still need to cope with something in which more is required of them. In instances such as this, it is extremely helpful, and perhaps even necessary, for people to replace the truth with an alternative that is considerably more convenient for their ability to deal with such a situation. This concept is demonstrated a number of times within O'Brien's essay, largely due to the fact that in detailing an armed forces patrol in Vietnam, the author describes a number of traumatic experiences in which the soldiers need to cope with psychological and physical events that are devastating. Bending the truth, or even deliberately deceiving themselves, is extremely helpful for many of the soldiers described within this story, as the following quotation demonstrates. "I got a confession to make," Sanders said. "Last night, I had to make a few things up (O'Brien, 273). The diction of this quotation is highly important. Sanders tells the author that he "had" to exaggerate a story which he swore, at the time that he was telling it, that was verbatim truth. Sanders felt compelled to deceive O'Brien, who he told the story to, because the events of the story were so traumatic to him that the only way he felt he could properly do them justice was by lying about them. The need to stray from the truth because of a person's limits is also evident in Twenge's essay, particularly when she references issues of self-esteem with students, which is illustrated in the following quotation. "…education psychologist Harold Stevenson found that American children ranked very highly when asked how good they were in math. Of course, their actual math performance is merely mediocre…" (Twenge, 490). This quotation is another illustration of the fact that people will deliberately deceive others when faced with situations in which their limits are reached, which is how the American students who know they are mediocre math students must have felt when they lied and said they were good at it. In instances like this, people choose to deliberately make the truth what they want it to be, which is an integral part of their identities and their reaction to situations of adversity.

The consequences of such a deliberate evasion of the truth for people who have internalized the habit of deceiving people as a part of their identity can be manifold, and are quite frequently negative. This fact can quite often be attributed to the fact that in order to live with the lies that people have created to compensate their limitations, they must engage in other nefarious behavior that allows them to sustain the perception of the false truth they have created. In fact, Twenge spends a good portion of the conclusion of her essay discussing some of these negative ramifications revolving about the identity of students who have been deliberately deceived by educators and who in turn now deliberately deceive others to make up for their shortcomings. The condition known as narcissism is just one of the many pitfalls that people may fall into when they cannot live up to the lies that they have substituted for the truth. As the author herself writes, "Narcissists are also more likely to be hostile, feel anxious, compromise their health, and fight with friends and family. Unlike those merely high in self-esteem, narcissists admit that they don't fell close to other people" (Twenge, 493-494). Hostility and anxiety can lead to other subversive behavior, such as cheating in school or committing criminal activities out of a perceived sense of entitlement. This feeling of entitlement, much like narcissism itself, is due to people having higher expectations than they are capable of achieving, since they are used to accounting for their shortcomings by fictitious means. Negative consequences of a propensity for being selective about what is truth are also discussed in O'Brien's essay. Oftentimes, people who are used to taking liberty with the truth and deceiving people actually lose sight of what is the truth, which is a definitely noxious development in someone's identity that this phenomenon causes. The lack of the ability to perceive a definite truth is shown in this quotation from O'Brien. "Somebody tells a story, let's say, and afterward you ask, "Is true?" And if the answer matters, you've got your answer" (O'Brien, 276). This quotation implies that the truth of stories, and the events that they are based on, is something that does not "matter." Truth no longer matters when it is too difficult to discern. As one of the soldiers involved in the Vietnam cadre the author discusses in "How to Tell a War Story," the author himself was one of the victims of trauma who has difficulty conceiving of a definite actual, truth. His ambivalence towards the importance of truth is illustrated in the preceding quotation, and is also highly indicative of the fact that deception yields negative traits in a person's identity which, in this instance, goes beyond the mere situational. This fact is important because it demonstrates that what starts out as a reflex to an uncomfortable situation or one in which someone is lacking can actually turn into a permanent part of our identity that is negative.

This progression of what starts out as initially a situational reflex to compensate for someone's inadequacies can actually have lasting effects that are potential devastating in nature. When someone chooses to replace truth with deception, the boundaries for such falsehood, which initially start out as well defined, inevitably dissolve to the point where our identities can actually become mired in lies that yield dangerous consequences. Narcissism has been the root cause of some of the most egregious crimes in the late 20th century, as an examination of Twenge's text, in which she cites the narcissism exemplified by the so-called Trench Coat Mafia killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, proves. "On a videotape made before the shootings, Harris picked up a gun, made a shooting noise, and said, "Isn't it fun to get the respect we're going to deserve." (Chillingly similar to narcissism item "I insist on getting the respect that is due me.")" (O'Brien, 495). In this quotation, the author demonstrates how similar the behavior exhibited by these two young men who killed a number of people at their high school, including themselves, is to narcissists and to tests which are used to evaluate this condition in people. The potential for someone's identity to actually encompass all of the negative traits that a loose relationship with the truth, or a deliberate deception on the part of a person, yields can have dire ramifications. This notion is further elucidated within O'Brien's essay as well. What is most dramatic and effective about this concept in O'Brien's essay is that it directly shows the effects of deceiving ourselves on our identities. In the following quotation, the author sums up what a real war story is about. This quotation is so powerful because the author has spent the duration of the essay explaining that a true war story has a tenuous relationship with the truth at best, and may be outright deceptive at worse. Furthermore, the author has also eluded to the negative consequences in which there is a complete lack of ability to define what truth is. In this context, O'Brien ends his essay by stating that a true war story is actually "…about love and memory. it's about sorrow" (O'Brien, 278). The memory referred to in this quotation is decidedly skewed, since the author has already proven that war stories, which are told by people who have endured trauma, are not necessarily true. Therefore, the memory of the events of a war story must be poor, since such events were subjectively -- or rather deceptively -- remembered. Finally, the fact that the author describes a true war story as being about "sorrow," not only alludes to the facts of the story, but also the condition of the teller of the tale -- who has a warped since of memory and is decidedly detached from reality. This detachment may be an even worse consequence of deception than the violence referred to by Twenge, since it is self-induced and shows how negatively one's identity can be affected by a selective perception of the truth.