Prof Sam Vaknin
@samvaknin·443K subscribers·2.3K videos
Why Do You Fall for Narcissist’s “Lies”, "Gaslighting"? (Hindsight Bias, Illusory Truth Effect)
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October 24, 2025
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23:16Now PlayingNarcissistConfabulates, Gaslights, Or Lies?
Why do we often believe and trust narcissists and borderlines when they tell us what had happened? Why do we fall for their lies?
Because they are not lies. Psychopaths prevaricate to secure goals. Narcissists and borderlines rarely do: more commonly they confabulate.
Confabulation is a desperate attempt to bridge dissociative memory gaps ("lost time" or "blackouts") by extrapolating from past experience and creatively generating a fiction, a narrative as to what probably and plausibly might have happened in the missing hours or days.
Confabulating is intended to both restore identity continuity and cohesion and to hide the missing segments in the narcissist's or borderline's personal histories.
Confabulations - effectively false recall - are irresistibly convincing and alluringly reassuring because: 1. The narcissist or borderline honestly and firmly believe them to be true; 2. They have the power of memories and therefore appear to be objective and authentic; 3. They are always very likely, plausible, and even highly probable - so easy to accept by all parties.
In many cases, there is a fourth reason: the confabulation allows everyone involved to negate and efficaciously ignore a painful reality or an uncomfortable alternative scenario or set of facts. We all - including the confabulator - want to believe the confabulation because it affords us comfort, succor, and a peace of mind.
Narcissists and borderlines dissociate and confabulate ceaselessly. It is easy to be drawn into their counterfactual alt reality, the twilight zone of their inventive probabilities, the psychotic realm of their discontinuous existence. Confirmation bias does the rest: having committed ourselves to the narcissist's or borderline's version of events, we filter out and suppress all countervailing information and contradictory or challenging facts and possibilities.
If confabulations or lies are soothing or cater to psychological needs, we may develop a hindsight bias and illusory truth effect.
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