How to Lie Effectively and Influence People

What Machiavelli knew about power, and what the post-truth age has perfected

Sometime in the middle of the sixth century BC, long before the democracy of Pericles made Classical Athens famous, an extraordinary procession approached the city. Riding in a chariot was Peisistratus, an Athenian aristocrat and military figure who had already seized political power once and lost it. Beside him stood a remarkably tall and handsome woman named Phye. She was dressed in full armor to resemble Athena, the divine protector of Athens.

Heralds went ahead of the chariot carrying an astonishing message. Athena herself, they announced, was bringing Peisistratus home to her Acropolis.

Herodotus, writing a century later, tells us that the Athenians accepted the spectacle. They honored the mortal woman as the goddess and welcomed Peisistratus back. But Herodotus was troubled — more by the reaction of the audience than the spectacle itself. These were Athenians, members of a people he regarded as exceptionally clever. How could such people be taken in by something so transparently theatrical?

The episode has troubled modern scholars too, although for rather different reasons. It is possible that Herodotus took too literally what had originally been a consciously staged religious and political performance. The procession drew upon familiar imagery of divine epiphany and may have been modeled on Athenian ritual. Phye did not have to convince every spectator that she had suddenly become immortal. The political meaning of the scene could work at another level entirely. Modern interpretations have accordingly explored the episode as ritualized political legitimation rather than simply an astonishing act of mass credulity.

Athena favored Peisistratus. The city’s sacred order favored his return. To welcome him was therefore to place oneself inside a story in which Athens itself appeared to be welcoming him.

This possibility makes the episode considerably more interesting than a simple tale about gullible people.

It was not, if Herodotus is to be believed, Peisistratus’s first success in manufactured reality. Earlier, when rival aristocratic factions were struggling for influence in Athens, he had wounded himself and his mules and then driven into the marketplace claiming that political enemies had attacked him. Because he already possessed military prestige, the visible evidence of injury gave plausibility to the story. He asked the citizens for protection. They granted him a bodyguard. He then used those guards to seize the Acropolis.

The lie did not need to deliver absolute power at the moment of its delivery. It only had to obtain one apparently reasonable concession. Once Peisistratus possessed an armed following sanctioned by the citizens themselves, the political situation had changed. What had been impossible before the deception became possible afterward.

That is worth remembering. Effective political lying is often incremental. The ambitious deceiver need not begin by asking an audience to swallow the most extravagant conclusion. A much smaller claim may be enough if accepting it changes the conditions under which the next claim will be heard.

Something equally important may have happened when Phye entered Athens in the dress of a goddess. Perhaps some citizens believed literally. Others may have understood the theater but approved of its message, while those who doubted both could still decide that resistance was unwise. The spectacle offered several roads to the same political destination.

Literal belief was only one of them.

Here we encounter the first lesson in effective lying, and it is much older than social media. A falsehood does not always have to replace reality in every mind. Sometimes it succeeds because it organizes behavior.

More than two thousand years later, one of Europe’s most acute observers of political behavior reached a related and deeply uncomfortable conclusion. Niccolò Machiavelli had served the Florentine Republic as a diplomat and senior official until the Medici family returned to power in 1512. Dismissed from office, imprisoned and tortured on suspicion of conspiracy, he withdrew to his family property outside Florence. There, in 1513, he wrote the short political work that eventually made his name synonymous with ruthless calculation: The Prince.

Machiavelli’s notoriety can obscure what makes the book genuinely disturbing. He did not discover that rulers could lie, and he certainly did not invent political cruelty. Antiquity had provided more than enough evidence of both. His real offense was much colder. He examined political behavior without first insisting that successful behavior conform to a moral theory. He watched what rulers actually did, then asked why some of it worked.

In Chapter XVIII, discussing whether princes should keep their promises, Machiavelli invokes the famous image of the lion and the fox. The lion possesses force, but force alone cannot recognize every trap. The fox, by contrast, survives through cunning. A ruler who understands only coercion therefore understands only one component of power.

Machiavelli then states the principle at the heart of the post-truth problem:

Ognuno vede quel che tu pari; pochi sentono quel che tu sei.

Everyone sees what you appear to be; few experience what you really are.

The gap between appearance and reality is where manipulation acquires room to operate. Most citizens cannot personally inspect the machinery of government, just as employees cannot independently verify every assertion made by senior management. Investors work from accounts and disclosures rather than witnessing every transaction, while voters necessarily judge candidates through mediated fragments of conduct. Human beings must therefore form much of their picture of reality indirectly.

That is not a defect peculiar to foolish people. It is a condition of life in any complex society.

The capable deceiver exploits the condition by managing what others are able to see. Machiavelli’s own example was Pope Alexander VI, the Borgia pope who ruled at the end of the fifteenth century. Alexander, Machiavelli observed, repeatedly offered solemn assurances and repeatedly broke them, yet somehow continued to find people ready to accept the next assurance. What impressed Machiavelli was not merely the willingness to lie. Alexander also understood how to renew credibility after it would normally have been exhausted.

Everyone knows that politicians sometimes lie. We also know that advertisements exaggerate and corporations manage impressions. Governments have concealed embarrassments throughout history, while individuals habitually present edited versions of themselves. Yet knowing in advance that deception exists has never rendered it unable to work.

To understand why, it helps to move to a historical episode in which the claims became increasingly implausible while their consequences became increasingly serious.

England in 1678 was a country still living among the political and religious wounds of the previous generation. Civil war had ended with the execution of King Charles I; republican government under Oliver Cromwell had followed before, in 1660, the monarchy was restored under Charles II. The kingdom remained overwhelmingly Protestant, and Catholic political power was regarded by many with profound suspicion. That anxiety intensified because Charles’s brother and likely heir, James, Duke of York, was himself a Catholic. Meanwgile, across the English Channel, Louis XIV ruled an extraordinarily powerful Catholic France.

Into this atmosphere stepped Titus Oates, an English clergyman whose previous career did little to recommend him as a reliable witness.

Oates had nevertheless acquired enough familiarity with Jesuit institutions and Catholic personalities to make invention sound like inside knowledge. And in 1678 he alleged the existence of a vast Catholic conspiracy, supposedly centered upon Jesuits, to assassinate Charles II and overthrow England’s Protestant order. As the story developed, names multiplied and detail accumulated. What began as accusation expanded into an alternative map of political reality.

The very expansion of the narrative is revealing. A conspiracy story can possess a curious resilience when challenged. Missing information creates room for another explanation. A denial may itself acquire an aura of suspicion, while evidence that never appears can be attributed to the supposed efficiency with which conspirators have concealed their work. Before long, refuting the construction demands vastly more labor than adding another branch to it.

Oates’s testimony contained serious weaknesses. He contradicted himself and made claims that could be tested, and found wanting, against evidence. Charles II himself was skeptical. Yet events then supplied Oates with something far more persuasive than another allegation.

Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey disappeared.

Godfrey was a London magistrate before whom Oates had sworn part of his testimony. His body was found in October 1678 near Primrose Hill, an outlying part of London of the day. He had been strangled, and a sword driven through his body after death. The murder has never been conclusively explained.

For the emerging Popish Plot, however, mystery was enough.

Oates now possessed something that looked like corroboration. The alleged conspiracy had been followed by the violent death of a magistrate who knew about it. Godfrey’s murder did not prove Oates’s story, but the story immediately gave the murder a meaning, while the murder made the story feel more real. Fear began validating fear.

The process soon moved beyond the testimony of one man. Parliament became deeply involved, further accusers appeared, and the supposed plot acquired public form through official proceedings and print. Broadsides and images carried it far beyond hearings and courtrooms. A claim of doubtful origin was gradually clothed in the authority of institutions, documents and repetition. Contemporary material preserved by the British Museum shows how vividly the alleged conspiracy and Godfrey’s death were presented to the public.

The consequences were lethal. Innocent people were imprisoned, persecuted and executed before Oates’s credibility finally collapsed. He would later be convicted of perjury. By then, however, the essential point had already been demonstrated. A defective story can acquire formidable social power when it enters a population prepared to receive it.

Oates did not invent anti-Catholic fear. He found it waiting for him.

That distinction takes us closer to the psychology of propaganda. The most successful propagandist seldom manufactures the deepest emotion of an audience from nothing. He discovers what already hurts. An anxiety that has never quite found an explanation can suddenly be given one; humiliation acquires an author, or resentment discovers moral permission. Once a complicated discomfort has been attached to a recognizable enemy, the story begins to do more than explain events. It relieves uncertainty.

For this reason, powerful lies are often parasitic upon truths. Institutions do sometimes fail the people who depend upon them. Governments have concealed information, and businesses have exploited those without the power to resist. Communities can also suffer genuine economic or cultural loss. The deceiver gains purchase by fastening an invented explanation to an authentic wound.

This is one reason that factual correction, although essential, may not remove everything that makes a false claim attractive. A correction answers the proposition. But the proposition may also be answering an emotion.

Modern psychology has given us a more precise understanding of several parts of this process. One of the most robust is the illusory truth effect: repeated statements tend, on average, to be judged as somewhat more truthful than comparable statements encountered for the first time. A major meta-analysis published in 2026 examined 182 studies involving more than 31,000 participants. The effect was not enormous, but it was reliably present.

Repetition matters partly because familiarity changes the experience of information. What we have encountered before is usually easier to process. That mental fluency can contribute to a feeling of plausibility, especially when we are not already making a deliberate judgment about accuracy. Significantly, the same 2026 analysis found that asking people to assess truthfulness at their first encounter with a statement greatly reduced the later influence of repetition.

This does not mean that repeating absurdities turns them automatically into convictions. Human beings are not passive recording devices. It means something subtler: repetition can tilt judgment, and in politics a small tilt repeated across millions of people can have significant overall effect.

The first appearance of an extraordinary claim may provoke disbelief. After it has circulated for days, however, the psychological setting changes. The claim is familiar. Public argument has formed around it, and perhaps people one knows have repeated it. What once sounded bizarre can begin to sound like a controversy with two established sides.

Corrections of untruths do matter. Yet such corrections face a greater difficulty. Facts do not arrive in an empty mind, and in a modern society none of us can personally verify more than a fraction of what we need to know. A citizen cannot rerun a clinical trial before taking medicine or reproduce economic statistics before deciding whether inflation is rising. Neither can one person inspect every governmental record, courtroom proceeding or scientific dataset relevant to public life. We know much of what we know through relationships of warranted trust.

That dependence is unavoidable. It is also exploitable.

A propagandist may try to insert a false claim into a trusted channel, but there is another strategy with greater long-term value: damage the channels themselves. If every institution that produces inconvenient evidence can be dismissed beforehand as corrupt, captured or hostile, then contrary information arrives already weakened. The manipulator no longer has to win each individual argument. He has helped decide which referees the audience will permit onto the field.

Recent scholarship on strategic misinformation identifies this broader ambition explicitly. Disinformation can be used not only to persuade people of one false proposition but to create uncertainty, erode confidence in shared standards of evidence and construct rival realities. The result may be less a population convinced of one coherent story than a population increasingly doubtful that any common account can be established at all.

Such doubt can itself become politically useful.

If competing explanations multiply until every source appears compromised, some people eventually stop asking which account is better supported. “They all lie” can feel like worldly sophistication. In practice, it may leave the habitual liar freer than before, because accountability requires evidence to retain some authority.

Motivated reasoning adds another layer. Decades of psychological research show that our goals can influence how we search for, interpret and evaluate evidence. When we want a conclusion to be true, we are often surprisingly resourceful in discovering respectable-sounding reasons for reaching it. The process remains constrained — we generally need to construct a justification that seems plausible to ourselves — but intelligence does not remove the motivation.

This is especially important in politics because a factual claim may threaten much more than an isolated opinion. It can disturb a person’s sense of belonging or challenge a moral identity; sometimes accepting the evidence also means conceding that trusted companions have been mistaken. Under those conditions, rejecting evidence may protect an entire structure of relationships and self-understanding.

A widely discussed 2006 brain-imaging study of committed American partisans during the presidential contest between George W. Bush and John Kerry is sometimes described in sensational terms, as though researchers had watched the “reasoning centers” of political supporters simply shut down. The study showed nothing so crude. Its far more interesting implication was that politically threatening contradictions could engage emotion-laden motivated reasoning when participants had a strong stake in defending their preferred candidate. Later reviews of the emerging neuropolitics literature treat the study in precisely that more qualified context.

Stupidity is not required. An intelligent person may have more intellectual resources with which to interrogate hostile evidence. They can question the source more skillfully, find exceptions more readily and construct alternative explanations with greater sophistication. Intelligence is an invaluable instrument for discovering truth, but like most instruments it can serve another master.

Successful propaganda therefore often flatters before it persuades. It reassures its audience that their suspicions were justified and that they, unlike the deluded majority or corrupt elite, can see what is really happening. The reward is not simply possession of another opinion. The believer also acquires membership in a community of the perceptive.

Once that community exists, it begins to reproduce the message for itself.

A statement heard from one voice remains identifiable as one person’s assertion. Encountered later through friends and commentators, or rediscovered from what appears to be an unrelated source, it starts to feel socially established. Many apparently independent voices may nevertheless descend from one original claim. By the time the story returns, its origin may have faded while its familiarity remains.

Experimental work on source credibility helps explain why this matters. People can retain a statement without retaining the information needed to judge where it came from or how trustworthy that source was. Familiarity can then supply some of the confidence that forgotten provenance no longer provides.

None of this began with the internet. Every great change in communications technology altered the conditions under which stories could travel. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Napoleon Bonaparte understood with exceptional clarity that military power and narrative power could reinforce one another.

Napoleon, the Corsican-born general who rose from the Revolution and crowned himself Emperor of the French in 1804, did not merely fight campaigns; he also explained them to France. The Bulletins de la Grande Armée offered accounts of military events to a public hungry for news, but they also served the regime as instruments of propaganda. The Fondation Napoléon describes their propagandistic purpose without ambiguity.

The Battle of Eylau in East Prussia in 1807 demonstrates the method particularly well. French forces fought Russian and Prussian troops amid snow and appalling bloodshed. The result lacked the clean decisiveness that Napoleon preferred. What followed was therefore not silence but interpretation. Official bulletins and press accounts helped establish the desired meaning of the battle, while an artistic program carried the process into another medium. Antoine-Jean Gros’s famous painting of Napoleon visiting the battlefield presented the emperor amid the wounded, turning a scene of terrible carnage into an image of humane command. The propaganda campaign surrounding Eylau was extensive and consciously directed toward shaping French perception of the event.

Napoleon understood something that remains fundamental to information power: events do not explain themselves. The first coherent account of an event enjoys an advantage because every later interpretation must compete with a story already occupying the ground.

The post-truth age, however, has transformed the scale and speed at which that advantage can be exploited. A false claim no longer needs to wait for a pamphlet press, a sermon or the next edition of a newspaper. It can cross a continent before professional investigators have established the underlying facts.

Once online, the claim can change form as it travels. A political assertion may return as a short video or a joke, its original context already gone, before reaching people who are several steps removed from its source. Generative AI adds another multiplier by making plausible text and synthetic media easier to produce at scale. Research on strategic misinformation identifies both social media and generative AI as important accelerants of these older processes.

Still, it is too convenient to blame technology as though algorithms invented the appetite they amplify. Human beings choose what to reward with attention. We readily share material that pleases us, while outrage can make other material equally irresistible. Digital systems magnify such tendencies; they did not create them.

The struggle over truth therefore becomes entangled with the struggle over belonging.

This returns us to the strangest possibility raised by Peisistratus and Phye. What if a political falsehood does not require every supporter to believe it, in the ordinary factual sense, in order to remain powerful?

Political scientists have studied what they call expressive responding: occasions when people state a politically congenial belief partly because saying it performs an identity or allegiance. While genuine differences in belief remain important, evidence also suggests that some political statements do more than report what their speakers privately think.

Repeating a disputed claim can announce membership. It can tell one’s own group, and its opponents, where one stands. Under those conditions the question “Is this true?” has not disappeared, but it is competing with another question:

“Whose side are you on?”

That changes the value of disproving the claim. A statement may fail as description while continuing to succeed as a badge.

Perhaps that is one reason the procession of Phye remains so haunting after two and a half millennia. Whether every Athenian truly mistook a mortal woman for Athena may be less important than Herodotus assumed, the city was being invited to participate in a political reality, and participation itself helped make that reality effective.

Readers who have followed the argument this far may be tempted to enjoy it chiefly as an explanation of others. But such temptation deserves a little suspicion.

Education offers no immunity, nor does professional status. Scientific training and historical knowledge can improve our ability to test claims, but neither abolishes the emotional interests with which claims may collide.

Sophisticated minds are capable of sophisticated self-deception.

The workplace provides subtle evidence of the same dynamics. A senior executive may announce that an obviously troubled project remains “on track.” At first the phrase could represent genuine optimism. If difficulty continues, however, people begin to learn which numbers are welcomed and which qualifications make meetings uncomfortable. No order to falsify anything is required. Careers teach their own lessons. Eventually an organization can reach the curious condition in which many intelligent people privately know that the public narrative is false while the institution continues to act as though it were true.

The falsehood has become coordinated behavior.

Here the subject returns, finally, to leadership. Power changes the information environment around the person who possesses it. Advisers gradually learn what pleases, so unwelcome evidence begins to arrive increasingly polished. Meanwhile, the dissenter who repeatedly makes the room uncomfortable may simply cease to be invited into it. A leader can begin by manipulating appearances for everyone else and end by living inside the appearance others have learned to maintain for him.

The gravest deception in an organization may therefore be the one that eventually deceives its own leader.

Responsible leadership requires what can be called reality-contact: the continuing ability of evidence to correct the story, especially when the story is attractive to those in authority. A leader who repeatedly punishes inconvenient truth eventually changes what people are willing to say in his presence. The damage reaches beyond dishonesty. The institution loses part of its capacity to know what is happening to it.

Societies can suffer the same failure on a larger scale. Disagreement is normal, error is unavoidable, and rival interpretations are inseparable from political life. The greater danger begins when claims are no longer expected to answer to any reality outside the emotional or strategic needs of the group making them.

The instruments have changed dramatically since a chariot carrying a counterfeit Athena entered archaic Athens. Yet the same underlying problem can be recognized in the panic that made Titus Oates credible, in Machiavelli’s anatomy of political appearance, and later in Napoleon’s determination to tell France what its battles meant. Across those centuries, the machinery of persuasion became steadily more powerful while the human susceptibility beneath it remained remarkably familiar.

The post-truth age has not invented a new weakness.

It has given ancient weaknesses unprecedented reach.

That may be the most useful lesson for a reader of this article. The techniques work because they exploit capacities without which society could scarcely function. Trust is indispensable when nobody can verify everything alone. Raw events, meanwhile, do not magically arrange themselves into meaning, so human beings necessarily understand much of experience through narrative. Even our need to belong, dangerous though it sometimes becomes, is inseparable from social life.

Our vulnerability begins when somebody learns to redirect those necessary capacities away from reality.