I’ve been spending some time lately thinking about what I’m calling “glass mountain theory.”

Most people like to think of themselves as honest. Most people don’t like to lie directly, even when they want you to believe something that isn’t true. So rather than out and out lie, many people will palter: that is, tell the literal technical truth, but do it in such a way as to manipulate and mislead.

Paltering is a specific form of manipulation involving lies of omission and misdirection while sticking only to the precise technical truth. What the palterer says is factually correct…from a certain point of view. It’s a common tool of manipulation.

There’s quite a body of research on this that shows people palter when they have two conflicting desires: they want to see themselves as good, trustworthy, and honest, and want to be able to tell themselves they aren’t liars; but at the same time, they want to create an impression or a belief that isn’t compatible with truth.

I did quite a lot of research about paltering and other forms of deception while I was working on the first draft of my new nonfiction book about social justice. I found a Harvard Business School article on paltering, which provided this example of paltering:

In one study, they asked participants to imagine this scenario: Over the last 10 years your sales have grown consistently, but next year you expect sales to be flat. If you are asked by your counterpart “How do you expect sales to be next year?” the response will be different depending on the type of deception: […]

If you mislead with paltering, you might say, “Well, as you know, over the last 10 years our sales have grown consistently.” This answer is technically true, but it doesn’t highlight your expectation that sales will be flat in the year ahead, and you are aware that it is likely to create the false impression by your counterpart that sales will grow.

There’s an interesting thing about this palter: it doesn’t actually answer the question. If the question is “how do you expect sales to go next year?”, then “our sales have increased over the last ten years” isn’t an answer to the question that was asked.

What is the glass mountain?

Imagine a mountain made completely of absolutely transparent glass: it’s invisible, but still solid.

You wouldn’t be able to see it directly, but you would still be able to see its shape, its contours, by the way the environment moves around it.

On a foggy day, you’d be able to see the mist rolling off its slopes. On snowy days, you’d see the snow accumulating in its crevices. You wouldn’t see the mountain, but you’d see the shape of the mountain by its absence, by the way things move around it.

I think that happens with paltering.

When you read examples of paltering (and while I was researching my book, I read a lot of examples), you start noticing something peculiar: palters form a linguistic glass mountain. They steer around questions. They fail to offer details. You see them by the way words move around the absence of the thing you aren’t supposed to notice.

Paltering manipulates by steering you away from the truth, by leading your eye away from the thing the palterer doesn’t want you to see. But like the glass mountain on a foggy day, you can, if you look, still see the shape of it, hidden in the negative space between words.

The problem is that sneaky little qualifier: if you look.

People largely hear what they want to hear. People are not rational animals, we are rationalizing animals. A person who wants to hear that the next few quarters will still show growth is unlikely to question the “over the last 10 years our sales have grown consistently” non-answer. It’s an answer-shaped space, a conversational void where an answer should be, that gives the person asking the question a reason to believe what she wants to believe, and that’s good enough. It’s a glass mountain.

I mean, we live in a world where people can create romance scam profiles using broken English and stolen photos of famous celebrities and still find marks. Motivated reasoning is a hell of a drug.

The thing is, though, the glass mountain is a bit like the arrow in the FedEx logo: once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it. (Yes, it’s an intentional part of the logo.)

Paltering as Collaboration: Scaling the Glass Mountain Together

Paltering is occasionally a collaboration between palterer and person being paltered, and when that happens, you can see the form and shape of the glass mountain not only in what the palterer doesn’t say, but when the person being paltered to doesn’t ask.

There is, for example, a phenomenon I only became aware of a few years ago, where someone in the public eye is accused of wrongdoing and then people that person has never had a romantic or sexual connection with at all begin describing themselves as that person’s “ex” and describe being abused or mistreated by that person.

This happens so often that therapists and psychologists are aware of it and have described the reasons it happens, which generally fall into one of four broad categories of reasons: delusional thinking (which is a whole area of psychologiy of its own; when it manifests as false stories of being involved with someone you were never involved with, it’s called “delusional erotomania”), control/manipulation, attention-seeking, and jealousy/revenge.

I watched in fascination a few years back when a TV actor was accused of abusing his partner, and then another woman came forward to report he’d abused her, too. This other woman was interviewed in New York magazine and The New York Post, both of which described her as an “ex-girlfriend” even though it later turned out they’d never even met.

The glass mountain became obvious in the questions the interviewers didn’t ask her, which showed up like the arrow in the FedEx logo: they didn’t ask how they’d met, or how long they’d been dating, or how their relationship unfolded—questions you’dnormally expect to hear from someone trying to uncover truth rather than sell an agenda.

Sometimes this is intentional, as a newspaper that wants to sell a sensational story, and sometimes it’s motivated reasoning, as someone who wants to believe the lie so doesn’t want to poke too closely at the story for fear of undoing the illusion.

Once you’ve learned to see the glass mountain in the spaces left unsaid by the palterer, you also start to see the dance, the collaboration between palterer and palteree, in the spaces left unasked by the palteree.