For months, we’ve been hit with regular updates on the latest uncovered lies of George Santos. We get it, he lies about everything. Each individual lie is hardly breaking news at this point. What’s more interesting is trying to understand why people like Santos—and there are a few I can think of in modern public life—lie so much. For that, let’s turn to Maria Konnikova who spent years researching a book about con artists. The Atlantic: What Psychology Can Teach Us About George Santos. “True narcissism lets you rationalize all manner of sin; it’s self-delusion taken to an extreme. Narcissism breeds, as well, a self-reinforcing cycle: The more you lie, the more entitled you feel—and the more qualified … The result is a perverse dynamic. The more a person like George Santos misrepresents himself and cons others for his own gain, the more entitled he feels to keep going. Why should I resign when I’m the most qualified for the job? The con artist, at least to some degree, comes to believe his own lies. One recent series of studies found that people who were confronted with evidence of self-deception—believing themselves to have performed better than they actually did, and better than the average person, on a series of trivia questions—not only failed to acknowledge their self-delusion but began to see others as the ones prone to it.”