The Excitement of Being Fake Happy

A deep dive into what drives us to play the social game to the point of lying to ourselves & others.

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I love making you believe
What you get is what you see
But I'm so fake happy
I feel so fake happy
And I bet everybody here
Is just as insincere
We're all so fake happy
And I know fake happy

— Paramore

Do you remember that moment when you were a young child and your mom or dad asked you if you had eaten that last cookie from the cookie jar — and you sheepishly looked up [with the crumbs still dropping off the front of your Izod t-shirt?] and emphatically said, “NO!”.

Both of you knew you were lying. It was simultaneously innocent, cute and also the moment you learned that lying has its benefits. It’s true — lying has value in different social settings.

[However, and its important to keep this in mind, lying only exists because we have socially agreed upon the idea that how we use our words are inherently true or false. ]

Depending on where we are or who we are with, telling a small lie might be worth saving a friendship or a marriage. It becomes problematic though, when we think the loss is greater than the lie itself. For example, telling someone they look good even when they don’t, is a more acceptable lie than someone who lies (or witholds) their taxes. Loads of other examples exist that assume loss aversion is guiding whether or not we tell the truth to others.

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Context is king — especially when it comes to telling the truth. It’s a purely subjective idea and yet we have universal rules; both unspoken & spoken.

We show that loss aversion predicts that the extent to which individuals behave dishonestly is sensitive to the probability of observed outcomes because this probability affects the payoff that is expected to be observed; the expected payoff in turn affects the loss-averse utility of honest and dishonest reports. If individuals suffer more from losses than they enjoy equivalent gains, as loss aversion contends (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979, Kahneman and Tversky, 1992), then they gain more utility from being dishonest the further the realized outcome is below the payoff that they expected to observe.

This is just a glorified way of saying that we are more willing to lie if there is a greater chance of getting what we want. So, its the achieved desire that drives us to increase a level of lying, as well as how much we will continue to lie. The frequency of lying is determined by how close we think we are to getting our achieved desire.

To put lying in an ethical category hides the reality that lying is inherent to how we all operate as human beings.

The guilt we have associated to lying is all down to the cultural beliefs around it. Some religious groups have determined that truth is about the words the we use and nothing more.

In this though, we limit the experience of lying to a false-dichotomy; it has been oversimplified to binary logic rather than explored as a natural way to relate to others. This misunderstanding then forces a bias in all research — which is to ask the question, assuming its already wrong, why do humans lie — which in this context continously leads to the argument that we lie to protect ourselves or the perception of others toward us.

Although there might be truth and value to this proposition, it only allow us to understand how we relate to each other through lopsided linguistic power dynamics. We need a more robust understanding of why humans lie, and if lying should be perceived as an ethical category at all — as a postmodern science researcher — I do not believe we should.

However, all of the research does point to another reality about lying — that being how normalized it is in other areas of our everyday lives. That of faking happiness for the sake of group cohesion. But, this is way too wordy, lets unpack what this implies.

We are conditioned [without words] from childhood that being angry is socially unacceptable and that being happy is how you become more socially accepted by friends, family, stranger & friends. Smiling becomes the measure by how we show others when we are happy. We’ve invented a way to be that imbues us with guilt, if we don’t play by the rules. Meaning, we feel guilty if we share wit others that we feel sad, angry, dissatisfied, and any other emotion outside of being happy about life.

It’s a cocktail not worth drinking from.

So, why do we play the game of being fake happy? Remember, how I shared earlied that its the desired goal (outcome) that drives our behavior? Yep, that applies here too.

We don’t want others to think we’re the next ‘Debbie Downer’, or the ‘Eeyore’ in our group. We care about how others see us, even more than that, we value it. We find value in the communities we are part of. When we’re ostracized, exiled or kicked out of these groups, we feel like someone physically punched us in the gut.

Social exclusion activates the same regions as physical pain. Those hurt feelings when you're the last one picked for a team may register in the brain just like a scraped knee or a kicked shin, according to new research that finds that the brain responds to social rejection in the same way it responds to physical pain.

No matter what groups we identify with, when we are kicked to the curb, we react internally as if we’ve been injured externally. Rejection is the thing we so desperately try to avoid. If the majority of our friend group likes a restaurant we don’t care for - we might play along with their choices and say things like, “Oh, I don’t care where we go to eat!”, or, “I can’t decide, why don’t you!” — we mask our indecisiveness as a form of playing it cool, so we don’t have to take the the hit of feeling rejected.

The feeling of being a part of something is what drives us to ‘put on a happy face’.

The risk of rejection keeps us from telling others how we really feel. Some call this a defense mechanism while others call it survival, acceptance, and many other synonyms.

IN simple terms, we care so much about being a part of the group that we justify turning our frown upside down, so we can play the role of being happy even when we’re not. Of course, a much better option is to find a group where being real is highly valued over and above just playing the social game of loss aversion and fear of rejection.

It’s true what science says, we are all hardwired for being a part of a community — and many will do anything to stay —but, a healthy group dynamic is a group we can leave and come back and never be judged for how we feel.