PoliticalMANIPULATIVE

Paltering

What it is

Misleading with truthful statements — selectively true, technically accurate, or true of a different question than the one asked — so that the listener draws a false conclusion the speaker never had to state.

How it works

Listeners assume cooperative speech: Grice's maxims hold that a relevant, informative answer is being offered, so an accurate statement is taken as an accurate answer. Paltering exploits that assumption. Rogers, Zeckhauser, Gino, and Norton (2017) defined it as the active use of truthful statements to create a mistaken impression, and distinguished it from lying by commission (false statements) and by omission (silence). In their negotiation studies a majority of participants admitted paltering in at least some deals; palterers judged it far more acceptable than their targets did, and once discovered, a palterer was trusted little more than a liar. The tactic works because it defends itself: every sentence survives fact-checking, so the palterer can produce the transcript as proof of honesty while the false impression stands. Familiar forms include answering the question you wish you had been asked, citing a true but irrelevant statistic, and using the present tense to avoid the past. The tell is a defense that rests on the literal words rather than on what any reasonable listener would have understood.

Real-world examples

  • •In January 1998, Bill Clinton told an interviewer that there is no improper relationship with Monica Lewinsky — accurate in the present tense — and in August grand-jury testimony explained that it depends upon what the meaning of the word is is.
  • •A Mitt Romney campaign ad in October 2012 said Chrysler had been sold to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China; Fiat did plan Chinese production for the Chinese market, but the implication that American Jeep jobs were moving was false, and PolitiFact named it the 2012 Lie of the Year.
  • •Barack Obama's assurance that if you like your health care plan, you can keep it was true for most insured Americans and false for the several million whose individual-market plans did not meet the new standards; PolitiFact named it the 2013 Lie of the Year.
  • •The Vote Leave claim that the United Kingdom sends £350 million a week to the European Union used the gross figure before the rebate and returned spending; in 2017 the UK Statistics Authority called its continued use a clear misuse of official statistics.
  • •Commercial paltering is routine: a used car that started right up this morning, fruit snacks made with real fruit, and a lender advertising rates from 2.9 percent are all true statements engineered to produce a false expectation.

Ethical guidelines

  • ●A statement is honest only if the impression it is designed to produce is true; literal accuracy is not a defense when the speaker intended the misreading.
  • ●Answering a different question than the one asked, without saying so, is deception however true the answer.
  • ●Negotiators and marketers should expect that discovered paltering costs trust roughly as much as a discovered lie — the technique is not the safe alternative it appears to be.

How to defend against it

  • ►Re-ask the question in the narrowest possible form and require a yes or no: Was the car serviced this year? Are these figures net or gross? Will any jobs here be lost?
  • ►When a statement is accurate but oddly specific — present tense, one product line, one time window — ask what the sentence would say if the tense, scope, or window were changed.
  • ►Separate the words from the takeaway: write down the conclusion you were meant to draw, then check whether anything actually said supports it.
  • ►Treat the defense but everything I said was true as confirmation rather than rebuttal; honest speakers defend the impression they created, not the transcript.
  • ►In negotiations, ask directly whether there is anything material you have not been told, and get the answer in writing; paltering thrives on questions never asked.

From the Defense Playbook

Pin the Baileyminutes

When a position seems to change size depending on whether it is being advanced or defended, write down the bold version and the modest version side by side and ask which one is being claimed, so the speaker cannot enjoy the conclusions of one and the defensibility of the other.

TARES Self-Auditminutes

Before a campaign, advertisement, fundraising appeal, or pitch goes out, test it against the five TARES duties: Truthfulness of the message, Authenticity of the persuader, Respect for the audience, Equity of the appeal, and Social responsibility for the common good.

Every playbook entry states how strong its evidence is and when not to use it. Browse the full playbook.

References

  1. Rogers, T., Zeckhauser, R., Gino, F., Norton, M. I., & Schweitzer, M. E. (2017). Artful Paltering: The Risks and Rewards of Using Truthful Statements to Mislead Others. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 112(3), 456–473
    The definition of paltering, its prevalence in negotiation, and the trust penalty when it is discovered.
  2. Schauer, F., & Zeckhauser, R. (2009). Paltering. In B. Harrington (Ed.), Deception: From Ancient Empires to Internet Dating. Stanford University Press
    The earlier conceptual treatment of paltering as a distinct category between lying and honesty.
  3. Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and Conversation. In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 3: Speech Acts (pp. 41–58). Academic Press
    The cooperative principle and conversational implicature that paltering exploits.
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