雅虎（Yahoo）首席执行官斯科特•汤普森在简历造假风波中黯然离职，留给我们的一个问题是：他为什么要这么做？

    不管是汤普森自己在个人简历上添加了从未获得的大学专业，还是他只是在他人造假的文件上签上了自己的名字，这个谎言断送了他的大好前程，也让他入围因简历作假名誉扫地、最终下台的高管名单，这名单中还包括RadioShack 前首席执行官戴夫•埃德蒙森和圣母橄榄球队（Notre Dame）主教练乔治•奥利瑞。

    他们为什么要这么做？为什么要在一番大事业里为这样一个小小的谎言冒这么大的风险?

    汤普森没有策划几十亿美元的庞氏骗局，也没有挪用几百万美元的公司资金。过去几年的某个时候，他把简历中实际从石山大学（Stonehill College）获得的会计学位更改为会计和计算机学位——这个错误的履历在他担任贝宝（PayPal）总裁时就阶段性地出现在他的在线简介中。今年1月份加入雅虎（Yahoo）后，这份包含双专业的官方简历就进入了雅虎向美国证券交易委员会（SEC）提交的年报，首席执行官本人必须亲自证明年报内容的真实可靠。

    “无论自己捏造，还是与他人串通造成这个错误，他都没勇气纠正，”常驻纽约的消费文化专家和品牌策略师亚当•汉夫特表示。

    虽然有在媒体上对某人进行公开精神分析之嫌，汉夫特和其他领导力、人类行为专家对此类欺骗行为给出了四大类解释：

不安全感

    当事实过于痛苦、难堪或不足时，人们就会说谎。“显然，他没有进入一流的学校。因此，我认为，他有些不安全感或缺憾，”汉夫特说。“尽管如此，某人还是取得了成功，但（还是像常人一样）有一些不安，担心被发现。”

    虽然外界看来，汤普森就是成功的化身，是美国企业界一颗冉冉升起的新星，也是雅虎力争从贝宝挖来拯救这家陷入困境的互联网巨头的人选，但他的自我认知可能截然不同。.

    “说谎源自一个根深蒂固的信念：我其实是个窝囊废。我需要打造一个光鲜、闪亮的自我展现在世界面前。如果任何人一旦发现我真实的样子，一切都会崩塌，”纽约精神分析学家伊丽莎白•辛格说。“捏造学历让他陷入了他一直竭力避免的耻辱。”

    In the wake of Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson's departure amid controversy over his padded resume, the question remains: why did he do it?

    Whether Thompson embellished his bio with a college major he didn't earn, or simply signed his name to a document that someone else falsified, the lie cost him a flourishing career. It also added him to an ignominious list of powerful leaders who stepped down in disgrace over resume deceptions, including former RadioShack (RSH) CEO Dave Edmondson and Notre Dame head football coach George O'Leary.

    Why do they do it? Why do they risk so much over what, in the grand scheme of things, is a small dishonesty?

    Thompson didn't devise a multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme or embezzle millions in company funds. At some point in the last few years, his actual accounting degree from Stonehill College on his bio changed into a degree in both accounting and computer science -- a false credential that appeared periodically in his online bio when he was PayPal president. After he joined Yahoo (YHOO) in January, his official bio containing the double major became part of the company's annual report filed to the SEC, a document that CEOs must personally attest is truthful.

    "Whether he was the fabricator or complicit in the perpetuation of the falsehood, he didn't have the courage to correct it," says Adam Hanft, a consumer culture expert and branding strategist based in New York.

    At the risk of psychoanalyzing someone through the media, Hanft and other experts in leadership and human behavior offer four broad categories of explanation for this kind of deception.

Insecurity.

    People lie when the truth is too painful, embarrassing, or simply perceived as inadequate. "Clearly he didn't go to a first-tier school, so I would suggest that he was operating under some feeling of insecurity or inadequacy," Hanft says. "Here's somebody who achieved despite that, but -- as people do -- harbors some anxiety and the fear of being found out."

    While Thompson might appear to the outside world to embody success -- a rising star in corporate America whom Yahoo wooed from PayPal to turn around the struggling Internet giant -- his own self-perception could be wildly different.

    "Lying results from a deep-seated belief: I am horrible on the inside. I need to make up a bright, shiny self to show the world. If anyone ever finds out who I truly am, everything will come crashing down," says New York-based psychoanalyst Elizabeth Singer. "Look how fudging his academic record has brought about the shame he sought to avoid."

绝望

    在当前就业市场的竞争和经济状况下，对个人背景润润色的状况绝不少见。实际上，据戴尔卡耐基培训学校（Dale Carnegie Training）副总裁迈克尔•克罗姆称，雇主发现简历中公然说谎的数量正在增加，比如改变雇佣日期以掩盖空档期或者罗列一些夸大的职责。

    “僧多粥少，随着失业率上升、求职竞争加剧，人们开始在简历中夸大其词，甚至干脆撒谎，”克罗姆说。有几项研究显示，所有简历中有一半至少会有一处信息不那么准确，无论是有意为之还是无心之过。

    从波士顿郊区一所小型天主教学院获得的一个学位可远不如硅谷办公室内充斥的哈佛（Harvard）或斯坦福（Stanford）文凭那般闪亮。因此，汤普森或许感到他需要一个科技学位作为自己的优势。唐纳德•川普和川普房地产公司（Donald Trump and the Trump Organization）顾问理查德•S•伯恩斯坦恩说：“如今的世界竞争如此激烈。如果你没有读一流的MBA，没有上一流的学校，没有良好的教育背景，人们就会看低你。”

自欺欺人

    一旦说了一个谎，长时间不加纠正，可能自己都会开始相信这是真的。“说多了，他们自己都信了，”圣地亚哥精神分析学家戴维•瑞斯说。

    “回顾一下这些人的成长历史，他们早在掌权之前就已经形成了这种行为模式。他们养成了一种由于缺乏自信而虚夸的习惯，”瑞斯说。“等他们升迁到了更高的职位，如果他们从未被戳穿，他们就会认为永远都不会被抓住。”

    一旦升到管理顶层，他们可能被谄媚者所簇拥，开始相信种种赞扬之声，看不见真相。“必须对人问责。管理者面临的问题是没人对权贵说真相，”波士顿Skout Group总裁戴维•盖伯勒表示。这家公司帮助企业管理员工和文化带来的风险。戴维说：“他们把自己封闭在这样的一个世界中：认为自己一贯正确。”

人性

    我们总是会为自己处于道德或伦理灰色地带的行为辩解，很多人还会更进一步，尽力掩盖赤裸裸的谎言。我们无师自通，总是文过饰非，以便相关行为符合自己的身份。如果我们自认是诚实人，不管中立的第三者怎么看，我们都会给自己的行为套上一层道德的外衣。

    “大脑总是不停地在跳舞，‘我如何才能得到更多我想要的东西，同时又不违背自己的本性，’”Grey Matters Intl.的凯文•弗莱明称。Grey Matters Intl.是一家基于神经科学的高管发展和培训公司，总部位于怀俄明州Jackson Hole以及俄克拉荷马州塔尔萨。“大脑总是在不断消除这种不和谐。”

Desperation.

    In this competitive job market and economy, credential embellishing is far from rare. In fact, employers are seeing an increase in the number of outright lies on resumes, such as changing employment dates to hide an employment gap or listing enhanced responsibilities, according to Michael Crom, vice president at Dale Carnegie Training.

    "With the higher levels of unemployment and the increased competition to get a few jobs, people begin to exaggerate and outright lie on their resumes," says Crom. Half of all resumes contain at least one inaccuracy, whether deliberate or inadvertent, according to several studies.

    A degree from a small Catholic college outside Boston doesn't quite have the same shimmer as the Harvard and Stanford diplomas littering Silicon Valley offices, so Thompson might have felt he needed the edge of a technology degree. "Today's business world is so competitive. If you don't have the right MBA, didn't go to the right school, don't have the right educational background, people look down on you," says Richard S. Bernstein, an adviser to Donald Trump and the Trump Organization.

Self-Deception.

    Once you tell a lie, and leave it uncorrected long enough, you can start to believe it's true. "People start saying something enough that they start believing it themselves," says David Reiss, a psychiatrist based in San Diego.

    "Looking back on the history of these people, the pattern started before they were powerful. They got into the habit of inflating things out of lack of confidence," Reiss says. "Once they got to a higher level, if they've gotten away with it, they think they'll never get caught."

    Once executives reach the top levels of management, they can become surrounded by sycophants, start believing their own accolades, and lose sight of the truth. "You have to be able to hold people accountable. What happens with leaders is there's nobody who is speaking truth to power," says David Gebler, president of Skout Group in Boston, which helps organizations manage people and culture based risks. "They've got themselves locked into a world where they really believe they're not doing anything wrong."

Human Nature.

    We all have the tendency to rationalize behavior that falls in an ethical or moral grey area, and many of us stretch that line to cover outright lies. We're wired to adjust the narrative of our actions to align with our identity. If we believe we're fundamentally honest people, we will rationalize our behavior to ourselves as ethical -- regardless of how it looks to an impartial observer.

    "The brain is doing this constant dance of, 'How do I get more of what I want while holding onto the identity that I think I actually have,' " says Kevin Fleming, owner of Grey Matters Intl., a neuroscience-based executive development and coaching firm based in Jackson Hole, Wyo. and Tulsa, Okla. "The brain is always wired to reduce dissonance."

    像汤普森这样的社会名流公开被人揭短可能会给社会带来风险，其中之一是，它可能会让大众更加心安理得地合理化自己的可疑行为。“这种事让我们感觉良好，因为我们的行为与之相比只是小巫见大巫，”汉夫特称。“因此，我们喜欢看到名人或专家垮台。这让我们继续活在自己的幻想里，认为自己的行为依然可以接受。”

    不过，这些小小的谎言可能铸就大错。慢慢地，我们可能会习惯于更大的不诚信做法。因此，不管我们从汤普森风波中学到什么，我们都不应该幸灾乐祸，因为这种想法可能导致我们在生活中编出更大的骗局。

    雅虎一位发言人没有立即回复寻求置评的请求。

    译者：老榆木

    Indeed, one of the dangers of a prominent individual being publicly shamed, as Thompson has been, is that the general public grows more likely to rationalize their own shady behavior. "They make us feel good because it puts our own behavior in perspective," Hanft says. "It's why we love celebrity meltdowns or professional meltdowns. They allow us to continue in our delusion of acceptable behavior."

    However, the little lies can lead to big missteps. They pave the way for us to rationalize larger dishonesty. So whatever we take away from the Thompson episode, we should resist schadenfreude -- it could actually lead us to greater deception in our own lives.

    A spokesperson from Yahoo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.