How far would you stretch the truth to impress people?

A chef from Swindon faces losing his US cooking show after it was discovered that he had lied about his achievements. His desire to promote himself to open up career opportunities seems to have got the better of him.

Robert Irvine claimed to have made part of Charles and Diana’s wedding cake, and to have prepared meals for Presidents, despite having only picked fruit for the cake and worked in the White House mess. He also claimed to have a Knighthood, and that the Queen had given him a Scottish castle as a present, both of which Buckingham Palace dispute.

Irvine had not only worked on Dinner: Impossible, but had also written a book to accompany the show and lent his name to a “Royal Titanium” cookware range (which some vendors are now withdrawing from sale).

Irvine is far from alone in getting a career boost from half-truths, however; reportedly, one in four people lie on their CVs. Vested interest can affect us all.

A recent poll has shown that the public continue to support women having the right to choose to have an abortion. The poll was commissioned by Bpas, a charity that provides around 50,000 abortions each year, and conducted by Mori. 63% of those asked agreed with the statement, “If a woman wants an abortion, she should not have to continue with her pregnancy.” Bpas have reportedly cited the data collected as a reason to liberalise current abortion legislation.

There is always a concern with surveys commissioned by a group with a clear vested interest, such as this one: the way that the questions were framed might have distorted the results. Interestingly, some of the questions in this poll were varied, making it possible to see this phenomenon in action.

Half of those polled were asked about their attitude towards the current law which allows abortion up to 24 weeks with the consent of two doctors. The other half were asked about their attitude towards the current law which allows abortion up to 24 weeks but were not told about the requirement for doctors’ consent. 54% of the first group agreed with the current law, while 28% opposed it; 46% of the second group agreed with the current law, while 38% opposed it. This serves to illustrate how much difference the way that questions are framed can make.

The conclusion drawn from the data by Bpas is also of interest. If their argument were that the public endorsement of abortion implies that there is nothing wrong with it (call this “the moral argument”), then it would clearly commit the appeal to popularity fallacy. The moral status of an action and public opinion towards it are two different matters. If the majority of the population backed racial discrimination, for example, then that wouldn’t make it right.

If, on the other hand, Bpas’s argument is not to do with the moral status of abortion but with the legal status of abortion (call this “the legal argument”), then they may be on more solid ground. The argument, “The public backs abortion on demand, therefore the government should permit abortion on demand”, need not be understood as drawing a conclusion about whether abortion is morally right or wrong. Instead, it could be understood as drawing a conclusion about how the government should legislate.

Why is the second argument better than the first? Because it rests on a more plausible assumption.

The moral argument, in inferring the conclusion “There is nothing wrong with abortion” from the reason “Most people believe that there is nothing wrong with abortion”, makes an assumption: “Whatever most people believe is the case.” This assumption, however, is often false; often the majority opinion is incorrect. This is why appeals to popularity are fallacious.

The assumption made by the legal argument is slightly different. The legal argument infers the conclusion “The government should permit abortion on demand” from the reason “Most people want the government to permit abortion on demand.” The assumption made by this argument is that the government ought to do whatever most people want the government to do. This assumption is not obviously true–we can imagine situations in which following public opinion would lead to catastrophe–but it is more defensible than that made by the moral argument. In a democratic system, where the government is elected to rule for the people, the legal argument might just fly.

One thing that this shows is the importance of clarifying precisely what an argument is before it can be assessed. Several different conclusions are attributed to Bpas in several different places: e.g. that abortion should be available on demand, that the current legislation should be relaxed, and that it is time for the government to review abortion legislation. The stronger the conclusion they draw from the data, the weaker their argument gets.

In October 1999, Warren Blackwell was convicted of indecent assault. He had, it had been alleged, raped a woman at knife-point on New Year’s Eve. He served more than 3 years in prison for this alleged crime. The conviction was overturned, well after his release, this month.

Mr Blackwell’s conviction was quashed because the credibility of his accuser was undermined. His initial conviction rested in large part on the testimony of his alleged victim. Once an investigation by the Criminal Cases Review Commission had damaged her reputation, her testimony was no longer deemed sufficient grounds for a safe conviction. The verdict on Blackwell was changed, belatedly, to ‘not guilty’.

The accuser, it turned out, had a history of making rape allegations. She had previously accused at least five men of rape, but never before had her claims been substantiated.

It would be dangerous to argue from the mere fact that a woman has alleged rape on a number of occasions without her alleged attackers ever being prosecuted to the conclusion that she is a serial liar. The conviction rate for rape is only 5%, and this is plausibly due to difficulties in proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt rather than because most allegations are spurious. A woman might genuinely be raped several times without getting justice.

However, in this case there was enough to call the accuser’s credibility into question. Not only had she made an unusual number of accusations in the past, but at least one of those accusations had been conclusively disproven. She had a history of making false allegations, a track-record of lying.

This case illustrates the importance of reputation in establishing a witness’s credibility. If someone is known to have lied in the past then their credibility is reduced, particular regarding similar claims in similar situations. Once the facts about Blackwell’s accuser were revealed, the case against him was substantially weakened, and he was rightly treated as a victim of a false accusation rather than as an assailant.