e-FOCUS Online Seminars - How To Get Away With Lying: Understanding Deceptive Communication

Ideal uses of language involve cooperation, honesty, and trust. Real-world communication isn't like this at all. We often use language to lie, mislead, insinuate, and manipulate. In this seminar, you will examine communication in our non-ideal world. Your focus will be several forms of deceptive communication (lying, misleading, and "B.S."ing) in a range of settings with a special focus on deception in political speech (both how to expose it and how to resist it). Among other case studies, we will examine Donald Trump’s use of deceptive speech, focusing on the Washington Post compilation and analysis of the more than 30,000 falsehoods that Trump produced during his presidency. Along the way, we will address the following questions: what is the survival value of deception and self-deception? what are the linguistic cues to deceptive communication? does lying necessarily involve an intention to deceive? how is perjury related to lying? why is there so much manipulation in political speech? has technology made that problem worse? if so, how? Together we will develop the tools and concepts you need to understand and challenge the varieties of deception that characterize human language interaction.