Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. Why Do You Fall for Narcissist’s “Lies”, “Gaslighting”? (Hindsight Bias, Illusory Truth Effect)

1. 00:02 Shalom coffee. Are you sure it’s coffee and not for example vodka tonic? No, you trust me, isn’t it? But that’s the question of today’s video. Why do we trust narcissist and border lines? My name is Sam Vaknin. I’m the author of Malignance of Love, Narcissism
2. 00:32 Revisited, and a professor of psychology. Why do we often believe and trust narcissists and border lines when they tell us what had happened? What are the facts? What is and what is not? Why do we fall for the statements, promulgations, proclamations, and very often lies?
3. 00:57 The answer is surprising because these are not lies. Psychopaths lie. Psychopaths prearicate in order to secure goals because they’re goal oriented. They would lie in order to obtain a goal to manipulate to deceive the Machavevelian. Narcissists and border lines lie. Of
4. 01:20 course they do. And they lie as much as as the general population. However, they don’t lie malevolently, maliciously. Their lies are not goal oriented, not premeditated. They’re not cunning. They’re not scheming. They’re not machavellia. They’re not psychopaths.
5. 01:42 Most commonly, narcissists and border lines, especially narcissists, confabulate. Now, confabulation appears to be a lie. When you look at confabulation from the outside, when you when you listen to a confabulating person, that person would appear to be
6. 02:01 lying. It’s very difficult to tell the difference between confabulation and lying. And we’ll discuss confabulation a bit uh a bit later. Confabulation is a desperate attempt to bridge dissociative memory gaps, kind of lost time or minimal episodic blackouts.
7. 02:24 And so the narcissist and the borderline moreo experience this dissociation on a daily basis, hundreds of times a day. And the memory gaps don’t don’t have to be like five hours. The memory gap could be five 5 seconds or 1/5ifth of a second but the memory gaps are there. The lost
8. 02:46 time is there and it induces anxiety. This constant discontinuity and disjointedness they induce anxiety. They make it very difficult to maintain a stable identity across time. And so they require compensation. When you are disabled in any way
9. 03:09 physically or mentally, you compensate for it somehow. If your right leg is damaged in an accident, you would tend to lean more on your left leg and your gate would change. That is known as compensation. Similarly, if you for example um are ashamed of yourself, you have a
10. 03:32 repository of shame. If you regard yourself as unworthy, inferior somehow and so on, you would you would tend to compensate by pretending that you’re exactly the opposite, that you are superior, that you’re godlike, that you are a perfect being. This is known as
11. 03:47 pathological narcissism. So compensation is a classic and very prevalent and dominant mechanism in psychology especially the psychology of deficiencies. And so the memory gaps, the lost time, the the the tiny blackouts, the the micro blackouts, they they require compensation.
12. 04:15 Somehow the narcissist needs to reestablish the continuity of his life and of of his sense of self. And the way to do it is to confabulate. Confabulation can be thought of as a bridge bridge a bridge between two islands of memory. The narcissist and the borderline
13. 04:37 contabulate by extrapolating from past experience. They assume that the future is going to look very much as the past and that the present reflects both of them faithfully. So they extrapolate, they creatively generate a piece of fiction, a concoction, a plot, a narrative as to
14. 05:04 what probably what plausibly might have happened in the missing minutes or seconds. what might have happened. But the confabulation is not outlandish. It’s not surrealistic. It’s not crazy. It doesn’t resemble hallucination. A hallucination. The confabulation is very
15. 05:25 reasonable, very logical, very rational. The confabulation is simply a theory equival equivalent of a scientific theory. I I know the narcissist says I know what transpires between point A and point C in time. Usually in order to traverse from point A to point C, you
16. 05:49 need to go through point B. So the confabulation is I remember point A in time. I remember point C in time. I assume the existence of point B because point B is highly probable. I think I regard it as true. Confabulating, the act of confabulation is intended to restore identity
17. 06:12 continuity and cohesion and to hide from others the missing segments in the narcissist and border lines personal history. Now, contribulation is not a new concept. Although I’ve been the I’ve been the first to apply to borderline and narcissistic disorders, it’s not a new concept.
18. 06:33 The dictionary of the American Psychological Association defines confabulation this way. The falsification of memory in which gaps in recall are filled by fabrications that the individual accepts as fact. It is not typically I’m reading from the dictionary
19. 06:51 confabulation is not typically considered to be a conscious attempt to deceive others. You heard that’s not some vaknim. That’s a dictionary of the American psych psychological association. I repeat this sentence is very crucial because online self-styled
20. 07:08 experts and their dogs would tell you otherwise. And as usual, they’re spreading misinformation. Even those with academic degrees and huge channels, they’re spreading misinformation. Confabulation, I’m reading from the dictionary, is not typically considered
21. 07:26 to be a conscious attempt to deceive others. It’s not a lie. Therefore, it’s not manipulative in nature. It’s defensive. Whereas, a lie is offensive. It’s intended to modify other people’s behaviors and perceptions of reality through gaslighting, for example, so
22. 07:45 that they adhere to certain expectations. They cater to certain needs and therefore meet certain or obtain certain goals. So whereas lies are goal oriented, confabulations are defensive. They are intended to hide the distressing reality of dissociative
23. 08:07 memory gaps from others and they are intended to make sense of the narcissist and the borderline’s life, personal history, recent past. They are intended to restore a false sense of continuity of having it all together of a core identity where there’s none. The
24. 08:31 identity of the narcissist and borderline is diffused. It’s disturbed. So confabulation occurs most frequently in mental health disorders where there is a disruption in memory, a disruption in long-term memory formation, for example, hypocmpal uh issues and or a disruption in the
25. 08:56 ability to maintain a coherent cohesive narrative. For example, in narcissistic and borderline personality disorder, something that is known as identity diffusion, confabulation occurs, and I’m coming back to the dictionary. I’m reverting to the dictionary.
26. 09:15 Confabulation occurs most frequently in Kosakov syndrome. It’s an alcohol alcoholism induced damage to the brain and to a lesser extent in other conditions associated with neurologically based amnesia. for example, Alzheimer’s disease. In forensic contexts, eyewitnesses may
27. 09:34 resort to confabulation if they feel pressure to recall more information that they can than they can remember. So, confabulation is not lying. It’s not the same. And the reason we believe narcissists and psychopaths is because they believe their own stories.
28. 09:54 When a narcissist or or sorry narcissist and border lines, I’m sorry. When a narcissist or a borderline is telling you something, they’re not lying, they’re contabulating. They believe the veracity and and factfulness of their own uh stories, of their own narratives. So
29. 10:13 when a narcissist insists that something has happened or when the borderline contests something you have said is not because they’re trying to manipulate you or to lie to you or to deceive you or to drive you to any specific behavior or to obtain a goal. No, none of this. They’re
30. 10:29 just being defensive. They’re trying to convince you of their own reality. Part of which is reconstructed. Part of which comprises the confabulation. Confabulations are effectively a form of false memory, false recall. And they are irresistibly convincing and alluringly
31. 10:50 reassuring because number one, the narcissist or borderline honestly and firmly believe the confabulations to be true and they communicating this authenticity to you. Number two, they have the power of memories. Contabulations have the power of memories and therefore appear to be
32. 11:12 objective and authentic. And number three, confabulations are always very likely, very plausible, highly probable, easy to accept by everyone involved, including you, the listener. But in many cases, there’s a fourth reason which is neglected in literature.
33. 11:32 Confabulation allows everyone involved to negate and to efficaciously ignore painful reality or an uncomfortable alternative scenario or set of facts. All of us including the confabulator want to believe the confabulation because the confabulation affords us
34. 11:52 comfort, sakor, peace of mind. It is soothing. Narcissists and border lines dissociate and confabulate ceaselessly. It is easy to be drawn into their counterfactual alt reality, alternative reality, the twilight zone of their inventive probabilities, the psychotic
35. 12:13 or pseudoscsychotic realm of their discontinuous existence. Confirmation bias does the rest. In this twilight zone, having committed ourselves to the narcissist or borderline version of events, we filter out and we suppress all counterveailing information and contradictory or
36. 12:32 challenging stimuli facts and possibilities. This is very common in politics by the way and in cults. Contabulation is part of a larger picture of cognitive distortions, a larger landscape of cognitive distortions and cognitive biases. So as you see the confabulator
37. 12:59 confabulator is deceiving himself first and foremost deceiving himself into believing that a piece of counterfactual fiction is actually reality. that the narrative that is fantastic is actually closer to reality than for example anything science has to say or
38. 13:22 or other people have to say. The first stage in confabulation is a conversion. The confabulator converts himself or herself into the into the confabulation. And at that at that moment, the moment of conversion, this this epiphany, the confabulation
39. 13:41 becomes real, uh an artifact of truth that cannot be contested and the confabulator becomes very aggressive and accuses other people of gaslighting if they dare to challenge the confabulation. And as I said, it’s part of a larger landscape of biases and so on.
40. 13:59 One relevant bias is known as the hindsight bias. The hindsight bias is a tendency after an event had occurred to overestimate the extent to which the outcome could have been predicted. So cognitive inputs become selective. People selectively
41. 14:19 recall information consistent with what now they know to be true. In other words, future information affects past information. Present information affects past information. What you know now reframes, rearranges and rewrites the your history. You’re telling yourself, I’ve known it
42. 14:41 all along. I have predicted this or I could have predicted this. So there is in hindsight bias there is a situation where present knowledge falsifies the past. thereby generating identity diffusion on the go and eradicating whole swaths of memory.
43. 15:12 The minute we interfere with memory, the minute we eliminate the authenticity of memory, the minute we challenge the veracity of memory, at that moment we are actually creating dissociation. Hindsight bias involves retroactive or retrograde dissociation,
44. 15:33 retrograde amnesia in a way which then allows to rewrite the personal history in a way which conforms to the present data to the present information. Metacognitive inputs are involved. People may misattribute their ease of understanding an outcome to its assumed prior likelihood.
45. 15:55 And there are motivational inputs. People have a need to see the world as orderly and predictable. All this leads to a situation where people would confabulate confronted with new information that is unsettling, that is challenging, that is upsetting, that is threatening.
46. 16:17 Confronted with this kind of information which is egoistonic and problematic, people would rather falsify the past. They would rather in rather induce artificial dissociation to allow them to fill in the gaps with confabulation especially if the confabulation is
47. 16:38 soothing or it caters to psychological needs. There is something known as the illusory truth effect. It’s also known as illusion of truth effect or validity effect or truth effect or reiteration effect. It’s a tendency to believe false information to be correct after repeated
48. 16:58 exposure. One of the things with confabulation is that the narcissist and the borderline insist on it. They keep repeating it. And as Gerbles had said, if you repeat a lie often enough, it is widely perceived to be true, to be the truth. So the repetition the entrainment if you
49. 17:19 wish the repetition of the lie uh the sorry the repetition of the confabulation creates a situation where people finally subscribe to the confabulation as a fact and ignore actual facts by suppressing them refraraming them denying them ignoring them attacking them and
50. 17:40 attacking the people who believe in them. People believe false information to be correct after repeated exposure. This was first identified in 1977 study at Villanova University and Temple University. You see, we have a very complicated relationship with what we think is true
51. 18:01 with the truth. And this allows narcissists and border lights to induct us, to lure us, to bait us into their counterfactual confabulated shared fantasy. It also allows psychopaths to take advantage of us and to abuse us and and you know to obtain all kinds of things from us like
52. 18:27 sex, money, whatever. Our relationship with the truth is not monovent. It’s not a one-way street. It’s not yes. It’s not binary. It’s not yes. Yes. True, not no false. That’s not how we relate to the truth. People assess the truth. They evaluate the truth. They
53. 18:48 gauge the truth. It’s a constant process of iteration, constant process of examination, constant stream of evaluation and re-evaluation. People rely on new information to reassess previous truth. People um people accept um information only when it is in line
54. 19:14 with their understanding or when it feels familiar. That’s the confirmation bias. And so when people compare new information with what is already known to be true, that’s actually a beneficial process. It’s logical. It’s rational. But then emotions or effects intervene
55. 19:38 and the comparison is not neutral, is not objective, is not scientific, it’s not logical, it’s not rational. The comparison is effective. People say, “Do I feel comfortable with this with the way I see this new information or do I need to rewrite everything to make me
56. 19:55 feel comfortable?” Repetition makes statements easier to process relative to new unre repeated statements. It actually creates physical pathways in the brain. People believe that the repeated conclusion is truthful because it’s forcefully asserted.
57. 20:15 The illusory truth effect is linked to the hindsight bias. The hindsight bias um involves this rewriting of of reality. And these biases help the narcissist and the borderline to convince us uh of the truthfulness of their confabulations. Why? Because they sell
58. 20:39 us on the fantasy. When we want the fantasy to be true, we would rewrite reality even renounce it and we would accept the confabulations because they make the fantasy possible. They enable the fantasy. They underline. They are the fundaments of the fantasy and without
59. 20:58 them the fantasy will fall apart, will disintegrate. So we adopt the confabulations as wholeheartedly as a narcissist and borderline who believe the confabulation to be 100% true. Make therefore a distinction between lies, confabulations, and gaslighting.
60. 21:15 Lies and gaslighting are the instruments of the psychopath. Confabulation is not an instrument. It’s not about obtaining goals or manipulating. Confabulation is about making sense of the world, imbuing the world with meaning, purpose, and direction,
61. 21:33 interpreting the world. Confabulation is part of an organizing uh theory about the world. A theory of the world. Confabulation is u an explanatory hermeneutic principle. And the narcissists and border lines who are trying to sell you on the confabulation,
62. 21:50 they don’t know it’s a confabulation. By that by the time they’re trying to introduce you to the confabulation, communicate it to you, they are fully invested in it. They fully believe in it. to them the the confabulation is factual. It’s a truth. It’s a fact. And
63. 22:07 if you dare to challenge this, if you dare to disagree or criticize them or expose them or something, that means either that you are delusional, the problem is yours. You are misperceiving reality somehow. Or you’re malevolent and malicious. And make a clear distinction between
64. 22:27 this defensive posture. I my memory is short. I can’t make sense of my life and of reality. So, I’m going to invent a story or a narrative that would help me to make sense of of it. Imbue everything with meaning. That’s a narcissist and borderline state of mind
65. 22:44 and the psychopath state of mind, which is I want power, I want sex, I want money. And to obtain all these, I’m going to invent stories and fantasies and lies and deceptions that would manipulate people into behaving in ways which would grant me these goals.
66. 23:02 So these are worlds apart. There’s no connection between narcissistic confabulation and psychopathic lies and gaslighting.