Fluffy, on 2012-May-16, 16:32, said:
East took some time before playing the diamond 10, which was inconsistent with his planned defense contention. East denied that he took any appreciable time before switching to the diamond 10.
So who's lying?
Why conclude that anyone is 'lying'?
I know, in the popular media, whenever there is a blatant contradiction between two versions of events, one side or the other is always 'lying'.
In real life, that simply isn't true, and I think that there is an abundance of psychological evidence and opinion backing me up on this, although I come to this view primarily from having questioned or read transcripts of questioning of literally thousands of witnesses to disputed events.
In my experience, few people actually lie, in the sense of telling deliberate falsehoods. However, we are all imperfect (well, other than say Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory) recorders of our own lives, and our memories, in any event, do not appear to be stored in a fashion analogous to a recording on a hard drive. We store aspects of experience and, when we retrieve the memory, we retrieve these aspects and our brains fill in the gaps, all without any conscious intent or knowledge on our part.
In addition, we tend to reconstruct events in a manner favourable to our image of ourselves.
As I once read: we all are the stars of our own videos....
Add to the mix the extreme pressures of the situation, the intensity of focus, the desire to win, the desire to look good, and the rivalry that existed (no matter how well the players respect each other or may (or may not) be friends away from the table) and we have all the makings of a situation in which there could be honestly held disagreements about detail.
Black and white explanations are very popular, and underly the success of so many politicians, especially of the populist variety, but they are often profoundly wrong and unfair.
'one of the great markers of the advance of human kindness is the howls you will hear from the Men of God' Johann Hari