The Psychology of Why Carly Fiorina Continues To Defend Planned Parenthood Claims

She’s on the defense, but Fiorina is sticking to her story, even though most major media organizations are calling her out on it. Experts offer opinions as to why. (Photo: Getty Images)

Continuing her insistence that the Planned Parenthood video she described in the most recent GOP Presidential Debate — the one that has been universally denounced by journalists and fact-checkers as being non-existent and the one that the Carly for America Super-PAC attempted to will into being last week — former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina told Chuck Todd on Meet the Press on Sunday (Sept. 27) that this video is, she swears, real.

“Are you willing now to concede that you exaggerated that scene?” Todd asked Fiorina regarding her description of an aborted fetus kicking while Planned Parenthood staff shout that it must be kept alive to harvest its brain.

“No, not at all,” Fiorina said with the same conviction that made her the run-away winner of the most recent debate. “That scene absolutely does exist, and that voice saying what I said they were saying, “We’re going to keep it alive to harvest its brain” exists as well.”

“You saw that moment on the tape?” Todd continues, to which Fiorina replies, “Yes, and I would challenge Planned Parenthood.…Planned Parenthood will not and cannot deny this because it is happening.”

“The footage you describe at best is a re-enactment. The videos – even the people that made the videos admitted stock footage, yet you went right along and said it’s Planned Parenthood.”

“Chuck, Chuck, Chuck – do you think this is not happening?” Fiorina concluded, exasperated and resolute.

Fiorina, it seems, cannot not tell a lie.

As Columbia Journalism School professor and director of the school’s digital media program Duy Linh Tu told Yahoo Health last week regarding the video released by the Carly for America super PAC, “I’m not quite sure what Fiorina’s new video proves. It’s a series of quick cuts of fetuses, combined with her statements at the CNN debate. Makes for a great political ad, but there’s no sequencing to the shots that gives the viewer any better idea of what the raw footage really showed. If Fiorina wants to put this issue to rest, she should find and release any unedited footage. Anyone can take footage of the pope and make him look like the devil with the right editing.”

Related: Fact-Checking Carly Fiorina’s Debate Statements on Planned Parenthood

“In the case of Carly Fiorina, there may actually be a video being passed off as one she is referring to, though it is not actually a video of an abortion,” Art Markman, PhD, and the Annabel Iron Worsham Centennial Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, tells Yahoo Health. “So it’s possible she’s doubling down on something, because she actually has a — flawed — source. That said, there are lots of examples of people doubling down on lies. Lance Armstrong, for example, continued to maintain that he was not doping for years and even took people to court.”

A 1996 study by the psychologist Bella DePaulo, PhD, found that most people fib once to twice a day. According to DePaulo’s study, a lie is defined as something that misleads and deliberately conveying a false impression. A subsequent study done by DePaulo and Deborah A. Kashy, PhD, found that liars are “manipulative,” “Machiavellian,” and “overly concerned with the impression they make on others.”

Related: Undercover Antiabortion Video Showed Images of Stillborn — Not Aborted — Fetus

And yet, the two also found that liars, “don’t always fit the stereotype of caring only about themselves. Further research reveals that extroverted, sociable people are slightly more likely to lie, and that some personality and physical traits – notably self-confidence and physical attractiveness – have been linked to an individual’s skill at lying under pressure.”

This weekend, The Washington Post’s Editorial Board ran an editorial entitled, “Fiorina’s falsehoods,” in which they point out that while Fiorina “could have acknowledged her error while maintaining, fairly, that the tapes contain other disturbing images and language and while affirming her objections to Planned Parenthood.” She instead has done nothing but insist that the video she describes exists and that it is the naysayers who are wrong. “Ms. Fiorina may have deeply felt objections to abortion. That doesn’t excuse her use of mistruths to justify her willingness to shut down the government,” they conclude.

When questioned about the Washington Post’s editorial by Todd on Meet the Press, Fiorina answered that “I don’t think the Washington Post has a lot of credibility here.”

Markman also explains that “when you have defended yourself a few times for something that you know is a lie, you have few other options. Either you come clean or you redouble your efforts to convince others that you are telling the truth. When the consequences of being caught in a lie are significant (as they clearly were for Lance Armstrong), then the only option is to engage in the kind of behavior you would use if you were, in fact, telling the truth.”

“You defend yourself and hope that other people back down,” says Markman.

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