Would you ever lie to get ahead? How can you tell when someone’s feeding you a line? In both work and personal life, we’ve all seen information twisted or hidden to push an agenda. While some information gaps happen naturally, it gets scary when people weaponize these gaps on purpose. The roots of this go back to Plato’s cave allegory which illustrates how our perceptions of reality can be shaped by the limited information we have access to (which I’ve written about before) – but this topic is a little different. Information manipulation has become a powerful tool for gaining advantages*. When this happens, telling truth from fiction becomes nearly impossible.

Why do people do this? Often it’s pure self-interest. Whether chasing a promotion, recognition, or money, folks get tempted to exaggerate their contributions. I watched an engineer and their manager push an unnecessarily complex design, not because it solved any real problems, but as a “promo artifact” to showcase their technical skills. Within two years, the whole system failed spectacularly – but guess what? That engineer still got promoted for it, and their manager later got promoted too. Go lookup how many people lie on their resume to get a job.

Sometimes lies aren’t obvious, especially when dressed up with a fancy complex analysis. I witnessed one study in particular using overly complicated statistics that showed correlation, but it was so complex and tediously long that no one dove deeper to see that there was no causation. Few people actually scrutinized the study – they just repeated the headline conclusions and claimed causation in their references.

Silencing opposing voices is particularly troubling. The Asch conformity experiments revealed the powerful influence of social pressure on individuals’ perceptions and decision-making processes. A bleak takeaway is that you don’t need to silence everyone – just a few dissenters. This creates enough social pressure that others will doubt their own perceptions and fall in line with the group.

While outright lying is obviously unethical, “bending” truth through selective data or a “white lie” is more subtle but equally harmful. I saw this in a particular design review where criteria was cherry-picked to make one option look better, when a fair assessment would have shown another option was superior**. The team went with the inferior choice, and sunk cost fallacy kept us stuck with it.

So how do we fight back? Stay alert for information that seems deliberately complex or when experts are excluded from conversations. Dig into references to check if they’re accurate. Create space for different viewpoints and encourage people to speak up without fear. Different people have different moral compasses, and I’ve watched some folks repeatedly game the system. Life isn’t fair – we all know that. But, you should at the very least recognize when the game is rigged. You can still win against loaded dice, but it’s a much tougher challenge.

I’m not suggesting you use these tactics – quite the opposite. Have I ever done this? Yeah, I’d be lying if I said otherwise. I once exaggerated my contributions to get promoted faster. It worked, but it’s weighed heavily on me and shaped who I am today. The key is maintaining your integrity even when it seems everyone else is cutting corners. Its not everyone else, I promise - that perception is just sample bias. When something challenges your beliefs, are you willing to question the prevailing narrative? Remember, your character is worth more than any short-term gain you might achieve through deception.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments

• Lets not even talk about media manipulation, that’s another topic entirely

** Hind sight would show us the person really wanted to learn a new technology and would use that to land a new job