The Most Dangerous Person Isn't the Liar. It's the One Who Doesn't Care What's True.
Friday, July 17, 2026.
There was a time when calling someone a liar ended the conversation.
Today it often starts a podcast.
We've become remarkably good at spotting deception.
We fact-check politicians in real time. We annotate viral posts. We demand receipts.
We insist upon sources. We have built an entire cultural immune system around the assumption that the greatest threat to truth is the deliberate lie.
Psychology now suggests we've been guarding the wrong gate.
A fascinating new study published in Current Psychology argues that the truly corrosive force isn't the liar at all.
It's the bullshitter.
Not because bullshit is necessarily more false.
Because it is more psychologically contagious.
That sounds absurd until you stop and think about what a liar actually is.
A liar still pays reality the compliment of acknowledging its existence. Every successful lie begins with an accurate understanding of the truth.
The liar knows precisely what happened and hopes you'll believe something else.
Strange as it sounds, lying requires a continuing relationship with reality.
Bullshit operates under a different set of rules.
Or perhaps no rules at all.
The philosopher Harry Frankfurt made this distinction famous nearly forty years ago.
The defining characteristic of bullshit isn't falsity. It's indifference. A bullshitter may tell the truth.
The next sentence may be wildly inaccurate. The point isn't deception. The point is expression. Reality becomes optional. Evidence becomes decorative. Confidence becomes the product.
The unsettling discovery is that our minds appear to respond very differently to these two personalities.
When we discover someone has lied to us, psychological alarm bells begin ringing. We become cautious. We scrutinize the next claim more carefully.
Someone who simply doesn't care whether they're right often receives a surprisingly generous benefit of the doubt.
That instinct, the researchers suggest, may be exactly backwards.
We've Been Guarding the Wrong Gate
For decades, psychologists devoted enormous attention to deception.
How do folks lie?
Can we detect it?
Does eye contact matter? Does body language betray guilt? Can facial expressions reveal dishonesty?
Television turned these questions into entertainment. Popular books promised to teach us how to spot liars. Entire professions emerged around behavioral analysis and deception detection.
The assumption underneath all of this seemed perfectly reasonable.
Lies are the enemy.
But notice something curious.
A successful liar must remain tethered to reality. They have to remember what actually happened, invent an alternative version, keep the story internally consistent, anticipate questions, and avoid contradiction.
In other words, lying is surprisingly hard work.
Truth never leaves the room.
It merely changes clothes.
Bullshit demands much less.
There is no burden of consistency because consistency was never the objective. There is no obligation to evidence because evidence was never consulted. The speaker isn't trying to replace reality with another reality.
Reality has simply become irrelevant.
That distinction sounds philosophical.
It turns out to be profoundly psychological.
A Liar Respects Reality. A Bullshitter Doesn't.
Harry Frankfurt's insight has endured because it captures something most of us have observed without quite having the language to describe it.
Liars can be dangerous.
Bullshitters can be everywhere.
The difference isn't merely moral.
It's cognitive.
A liar still acknowledges that truth exists.
A bullshitter doesn't grant truth that privilege.
The liar asks,
"How can I hide reality?"
The bullshitter asks no such question.
Reality isn't being concealed.
It's being ignored.
That subtle shift changes everything.
Because our brains appear to recognize deception more readily than indifference.
We instinctively raise our defenses when someone has been caught lying.
We often lower them when someone appears merely careless.
"They're exaggerating."
"They're just talking."
"They don't really know."
Those phrases sound charitable.
They also leave the front door wide open.
Why Familiarity So Often Masquerades as Truth
The researchers believed this difference might become especially important once repetition entered the picture.
Human beings rarely adopt beliefs after hearing something once.
We absorb ideas gradually.
A friend mentions it.
Someone repeats it on social media.
A podcast host says something similar.
A politician echoes the same claim.
Before long, the statement begins to feel strangely comfortable.
Psychologists call this the illusory truth effect.
The phenomenon is deceptively simple.
Repeated statements become easier for the brain to process.
That ease produces familiarity.
Familiarity quietly produces credibility.
The mind doesn't consciously conclude,
"I've heard this before, therefore it's true."
It experiences something far subtler.
"That sounds right."
The difference seems trivial.
Entire financial bubbles have been inflated by repeated stories.
Medical myths survive because they become familiar.
Conspiracy theories often spread through repetition rather than evidence.
Even family narratives can harden into unquestioned history simply because they've been told for years.
Our brains mistake fluency for accuracy.
Reality has terrible marketing.
Familiarity has an excellent publicist.
When Repetition Feels Like Evidence
To test whether Harry Frankfurt's philosophical insight actually influenced belief, researchers conducted a series of experiments.
Participants evaluated statements attributed to three different kinds of people:
an ordinary person.
a known liar.
or a known bullshitter.
The statements themselves remained the same.
Only the source changed.
That alone produced an unexpected result.
Participants judged statements from the bullshitter as more believable than identical statements coming from the liar.
The later experiments became even more revealing.
Participants repeatedly encountered false statements.
Some were warned beforehand.
Others weren't warned until afterward.
When people knew in advance that someone might lie—or might speak without regard for truth—the illusory truth effect largely disappeared.
Critical thinking still worked.
But when participants learned only after repeated exposure that the speaker had no concern for truth, something remarkable happened.
The lies lost credibility.
The bullshit often didn't.
Repeated exposure continued making those statements feel true even after participants learned that the speaker had been indifferent to reality all along.
That may be the study's most important finding.
The brain appears remarkably good at correcting for deception.
It is considerably less successful at correcting for indifference.
Bullshit Doesn't Need to Be Convincing. It Only Needs to Be Repeated.
This is where the study stops being about psychology and starts becoming about civilization.
Bullshit doesn't spread because it's persuasive.
It spreads because repetition quietly substitutes for evidence.
Every repetition smooths another rough edge.
Every repetition reduces another moment of skepticism.
Every repetition makes the statement feel just a little more familiar.
Eventually, familiarity begins wearing truth's clothing.
The greatest danger isn't believing one ridiculous claim.
It's slowly losing the habit of asking whether any claim deserves to be believed at all.
That's a far more consequential problem than misinformation.
It's a problem of epistemology.
Of culture.
Of relationships.
Of democracy.
And, as we'll see next, of marriage itself.
Bullshit Doesn't Need to Be Convincing. It Only Needs to Be Repeated.
One of the most unsettling conclusions of this research is that persuasion may be overrated.
We like to imagine that ideas spread because they are powerful, logical, emotionally compelling, or brilliantly argued. We flatter ourselves into believing that beliefs are earned through careful deliberation.
Most of the time they aren't.
Many ideas spread because they simply refuse to go away.
A statement appears on social media.
Someone repeats it on a podcast.
A television personality mentions it in passing.
An acquaintance forwards an article.
An AI summarizes it.
A family member repeats it over dinner.
By the fifth or sixth encounter, the claim has acquired something that looks remarkably like credibility.
Nothing new has been added.
No fresh evidence has emerged.
The argument hasn't improved.
The statement simply feels familiar.
And familiarity is often mistaken for truth.
That is the genius of bullshit.
It doesn't have to survive cross-examination.
It doesn't need citations.
It doesn't require coherence.
It simply has to remain in circulation long enough for the brain to stop experiencing it as foreign.
The researchers demonstrated exactly this phenomenon. Repeated exposure to truth-indifferent statements continued to increase their perceived credibility, even when participants later learned that the speaker had no commitment to factual accuracy.
The implications reach far beyond laboratory psychology.
They suggest that repetition itself has become one of the most valuable currencies in modern culture.
The Attention Economy Has No Loyalty to Reality
The internet did not invent bullshit.
It monetized it.
For most of human history, spreading nonsense required considerable effort. You had to gather an audience, publish a pamphlet, stand on a street corner, or persuade your neighbors one conversation at a time.
Today the distribution costs approach zero.
One careless assertion can reach millions before breakfast.
This isn't because technology prefers lies.
Technology is almost completely indifferent to truth.
Algorithms optimize for attention.
Attention is measured in clicks.
Clicks are measured in time.
Time becomes advertising revenue.
Truth rarely appears anywhere in the equation.
This helps explain one of the defining frustrations of our era.
The most carefully researched article may disappear into obscurity.
A confidently delivered absurdity may accumulate ten million views before lunchtime.
Confidence has become a performance.
Evidence has become a luxury.
As the old saying goes, a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth has put on its shoes.
Today, bullshit livestreams the journey.
Social Media Didn't Invent Bullshit. It Industrialized It.
There is a temptation to blame technology for every cultural pathology.
That gives technology too much credit.
Bullshit is ancient.
Every civilization has produced confident people with very little interest in whether their certainty corresponded with reality.
The difference today is scale.
Social media has transformed individual acts of truth-indifference into a continuous industrial process.
Every minute produces another opinion.
Another certainty.
Another explanation.
Another outrage.
Another expert.
Another thread.
The sheer volume changes our relationship with knowledge itself.
Silence begins to look suspicious.
Humility starts feeling like weakness.
"I don't know" becomes a terrible branding strategy.
The loudest voices often sound like the wisest voices simply because they are the easiest to hear.
The researchers never studied social media directly.
They didn't need to.
The psychological mechanism they identified maps almost perfectly onto the architecture of modern platforms.
Repetition.
Familiarity.
Perceived truth.
Repeat.
No conspiracy required.
Just ordinary human cognition meeting extraordinary technological amplification.
AI Doesn't Lie. It Hallucinates.
Artificial intelligence introduces an entirely new wrinkle to this discussion.
People often say that AI "lies."
That isn't quite right.
A lie requires intention.
A lie presupposes knowledge.
A liar knows what is true and deliberately substitutes something false.
Large language models don't possess that kind of relationship with reality.
They generate statistically plausible language.
Sometimes those sentences happen to be correct.
Sometimes they are spectacularly wrong.
The mistake isn't deception.
It's indifference.
That should sound familiar.
AI doesn't care whether a statement corresponds to reality because caring is not part of the process.
It predicts the next likely word.
Nothing more.
Nothing less.
That makes AI an unexpectedly vivid illustration of the distinction Frankfurt described decades ago.
The machine isn't trying to fool you.
It simply has no internal experience of truth.
The danger emerges when human beings mistake fluency for understanding.
The response is articulate.
Therefore it feels intelligent.
It is coherent.
Therefore it feels reliable.
It sounds authoritative.
Therefore it feels true.
Once again, familiarity quietly impersonates evidence.
Ironically, AI may force us to become better thinkers.
Not because it always produces accurate information.
But because it makes a timeless intellectual virtue newly indispensable.
We can no longer ask only,
"Is this answer convincing?"
We must also ask,
"What relationship does this answer have to reality?"
That question matters whether the speaker is a politician, a neighbor, a spouse...
or a machine.
The Real Problem Isn't Misinformation. It's Indifference to Reality.
If this research teaches us anything, it is that our cultural vocabulary may be too small.
We spend enormous energy discussing lies.
We spend comparatively little discussing truth-indifference.
Yet indifference may prove more corrosive precisely because it is harder to recognize.
Liars activate our defenses.
Bullshitters often bypass them.
The result is not simply more misinformation.
It is a gradual weakening of one of civilization's most important habits:
The habit of asking,
"How do we know?"
Once that habit begins to disappear, reality doesn't vanish overnight.
It simply loses its privileged place in the conversation.
And that is where the story stops being about psychology.
It becomes a story about all of us.
Every Healthy Marriage Is a Truth-Seeking Institution
The most profound implication of this research may have nothing to do with politics, social media, or misinformation.
It may have everything to do with marriage.
After decades of working with couples, I've become convinced that healthy relationships are built on many things—affection, commitment, generosity, forgiveness—but underneath them all lies a quieter virtue that receives remarkably little attention.
A shared commitment to reality.
That phrase may sound clinical.
It isn't.
It's deeply romantic.
Every successful marriage is, in its own way, a truth-seeking institution.
Two life partners spend years comparing perceptions.
"Did I hear you correctly?"
"Is that what you meant?"
"Help me understand."
"Maybe I misunderstood."
Those ordinary questions accomplish extraordinary work.
They prevent assumptions from hardening into certainty.
They keep curiosity alive.
They allow two imperfect observers to build something neither could construct alone: a shared map of reality.
That map is never perfect.
It doesn't have to be.
It simply has to remain open to revision.
Healthy couples understand something that distressed couples often forget.
Memory is fallible.
Perception is incomplete.
Emotion is not the same thing as evidence.
Love flourishes where curiosity survives.
When Couples Stop Investigating and Start Narrating
Most relationships do not collapse because one person suddenly becomes evil.
They collapse because investigation quietly gives way to narration.
At first the stories are tentative.
"I think you were disappointed."
"Maybe you felt ignored."
Eventually they become declarations.
"You never respected me."
"You always choose your mother."
"You don't care."
Notice what disappears.
Questions.
Curiosity.
Verification.
The narrative begins replacing observation.
The story becomes more important than the evidence.
Then something remarkable happens.
Every new interaction is interpreted through the existing story.
Confirmation bias quietly takes the wheel.
The partner who forgets to text isn't simply forgetful.
They're selfish.
The interrupted sentence isn't an interruption.
It's proof.
The forgotten anniversary isn't a mistake.
It's another exhibit in an already completed trial.
This is one reason distressed couples often describe entirely different marriages.
They are no longer discussing events.
They are defending narratives.
The tragedy isn't that someone is lying.
More often, neither partner is.
They're simply no longer asking whether their interpretations remain tethered to reality.
Like the participants in the study, repetition has quietly transformed familiarity into certainty.
The marriage becomes organized around stories that no one remembers examining.
Curiosity Is More Romantic Than Certainty
Popular culture celebrates certainty.
Therapy celebrates curiosity.
Those are not the same thing.
One of the healthiest sentences a partner can utter is also one of the most difficult.
"I may be wrong here."
Not because uncertainty is inherently virtuous.
Because intellectual humility creates room for another person's experience.
Curiosity interrupts escalation.
Curiosity slows certainty.
Curiosity asks questions before delivering verdicts.
This is why the best couples I've ever known rarely insist they already understand one another.
Forty years into marriage, they're still conducting interviews.
Still surprised.
Still revising.
Still discovering.
Their confidence doesn't come from believing they have finally solved one another.
It comes from trusting that reality is always more interesting than assumption.
Perhaps that's what intimacy really is.
Not perfect understanding.
A lifelong willingness to keep investigating.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the main finding of this study?
The researchers found that repeated statements from someone known to be indifferent to truth may become more believable than identical statements from someone known to be a liar. The difference appears to stem from how the brain processes repetition and familiarity.
What is the difference between a liar and a bullshitter?
A liar knows what is true and deliberately tries to deceive. A bullshitter communicates without much concern for whether the statement is true or false. Truth is incidental rather than central.
What is the illusory truth effect?
The illusory truth effect is the tendency to perceive repeated statements as more credible simply because they become familiar, even when they are false.
How does this apply to marriage?
Healthy relationships rely on a shared commitment to investigating reality together. Distressed couples often replace observation with narrative, allowing repeated interpretations to harden into unquestioned "facts."
What can we do to protect ourselves?
Slow down. Ask how someone knows what they're claiming. Distinguish confidence from evidence. Practice intellectual humility, and remain willing to revise your beliefs when better information emerges.
The Cost of Losing Our Relationship With Reality
The research we've explored throughout this essay isn't merely about misinformation.
It's about epistemology.
How we human beings decide what deserves to be believed.
That question shapes far more than elections.
It shapes friendships.
Families.
Therapy.
Medicine.
Science.
Education.
Marriages.
Even democracy itself.
Democracies depend upon disagreement.
They cannot survive the disappearance of shared reality.
Marriages depend upon differing perspectives.
They cannot survive when both partners abandon the search for what actually happened.
Cultures survive astonishing amounts of conflict.
What they struggle to survive is widespread indifference toward truth itself.
The researchers remind us that our minds possess sophisticated defenses against obvious lies.
Our defenses are considerably weaker against people who simply don't care whether they're right.
That realization should make us less cynical.
Not more.
Because once we understand the vulnerability, we can begin compensating for it.
We can slow down.
Ask better questions.
Seek better evidence.
Remain curious longer.
Reality has never needed louder defenders.
It has always needed more patient ones.
Reality Rarely Disappears All at Once
Harry Frankfurt worried that bullshit posed a unique danger because it slowly dissolves our relationship with truth.
This research suggests his concern was well founded.
Reality rarely disappears dramatically.
It erodes.
Conversation by conversation.
Headline by headline.
Algorithm by algorithm.
Argument by argument.
Marriage by marriage.
One confident assertion repeated often enough.
One assumption left unchallenged.
One story mistaken for observation.
Then another.
Until familiarity quietly begins wearing truth's clothing.
The antidote is neither suspicion nor cynicism.
It is disciplined curiosity.
The willingness to pause before agreeing.
The humility to revise a cherished belief.
The courage to ask for evidence—even when the answer supports our preferred conclusion.
Perhaps the most psychologically sophisticated sentence in the English language is also one of the shortest:
"I could be wrong here."
That sentence has rescued more friendships than certainty.
More marriages than pride.
More discoveries than confidence.
And perhaps, in an age increasingly crowded with voices that speak fluently without caring whether they are true, it may become one of the most important sentences our culture can remember.
Final Thoughts
The deepest lesson of this research is not that we should become more suspicious of one another.
It is that we should become more devoted to reality together.
Healthy minds do it.
Healthy marriages do it.
Healthy democracies do it.
The search for truth has never been a solitary act.
It has always been a shared one.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Fazio, L. K., Brashier, N. M., Payne, B. K., & Marsh, E. J. (2015). Knowledge does not protect against illusory truth. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144(5), 993–1002.
Frankfurt, H. G. (2005). On Bullshit. Princeton University Press.
Hasher, L., Goldstein, D., & Toppino, T. (1977). Frequency and the conference of referential validity. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 16(1), 107–112.
Petrocelli, J. V., Rice, E. N., & Curran, J. M. (2026). When fools have greater influence than liars: Testing the insidious bullshit hypothesis with the illusory truth effect. Current Psychology.