In many situations, if you are on the receiving-end of disagreement or conflict, giving others the benefit of the doubt helps to preserve the relationship and let go of hurt feelings.
Moving to a place where we can discount the possibility of the other persons bad intentions towards us, helps to preserve an agreement and feeling of trust. Especially if the person is a close loved one with whom you normally have trust in and feel respected by.
However I have noticed ways in which the benefit of the doubt seems deliberately misused by a person, organisation or media campaign to disguise or evade wrongdoing, avoid accountability or to be persuasive to people and / or polarising to onlookers.
What is the plausible deniability tactic?
What this might look like in real terms can be very broad. It generally involves using a level of dishonesty and deception towards others, by deliberately misrepresenting actions, omissions or words as intended in good faith, when in reality they were not.
Defences designed to be plausibly deniable, may not appear as outright lies or deceit on the surface, but ultimately they rely on distorting facts or actuality to serve a particular narrative or function that benefits the offender.
The culprit then deceptively claims blamelessness, due to a reason that can’t truly be discounted or proven as untrue or invalid.
It can then seem any wrongdoings, hurt or harm that results is unintentional. The person/s on the receiving-end may look unreasonable for feeling upset, wronged or attacked. Perhaps they get framed as too sensitive, to have misunderstood what’s happened or simply as wrong.
Observers then tend to give the culprit the benefit of the doubt, due to how it appears there is a possibility of innocence or harmlessness to the remark, oversight or behaviour.
The offender is let off the hook, both from accountability and a bad reputation. In this way plausible deniability becomes a useful strategy for meeting wants and needs regardless of the means, or to getting a free pass to be hostile or harm.
I have noticed it can happen strikingly in public discourses. But perhaps you might also notice it with that one tricky family member, friend, or colleague? Perhaps in some workplaces and groups it may even have become an organisational or communication culture?
Plausible deniability is often intentional
Sometimes the sad truth is that some people and organisations purposefully employ plausible deniability tactics to cover their wrongdoing, escape blame, to bully, or abuse. For some it may even seem less a tactic, and more a relational style.
By claiming for example they are joking, did not know something would be harmful or they had a different plausible intention, the resulting uncertainty helps to engineer enough doubt to allow the offender to avoid blame.
A large scale public example was the ‘party-gate’ scandal by UK government officials in 2020. This happened simultaneously to the strict lockdowns and social distance the same officials imposed on the public in response to the global coronavirus pandemic.
In this situation, while the ordinary population was strictly prohibited from funerals or hospital visits, Boris johnson and his colleagues at the time were engaging in numerous secret social events and celebrations at 10 Downing Street.
The plausible deniability tactics used to cover their wrongdoing when the story broke, were claiming they were well assured at the time that no rules were broken. They also repeatedly misrepresented the gatherings as official events.
These defences collapsed due to leaked photographs that showed the contrary. This resulted in public outrage and further deteriorated public trust in the government generally and in their ability to protect the population.
This example demonstrates the effectiveness of the plausible deniability tactics falling quickly in the face of scrutiny and evidence. However, when plausible deniability is implemented in sophisticated ways, it can help the culprit evade valid blame for a long time. The truth can be distorted to such an extent that the impact can be multilayered and devastating.
A high profile example is the UK post office scandal, where between 1999 and 2015, the national post office prosecuted over 7000 local postmasters for alleged stealing and inaccurate record keeping. It was later found that these vendors were innocent and the liability lay with a seriously faulty computer system called Horizon.
For over 10 years the post office maintained plausible deniability at the level of organisational leadership. They achieved this by pursuing individuals legally for the theft and losses, avoiding publicly publishing reports that highlighted problems with the computer system, and relying on legal and technical advice over the experiences of individual vendors.
When the company prosecuted vendors individually, this also helped the problems appear as disconnected rather than widespread issues.
The CEO and other executive level leaders escaped liability and blame, by insisting they relied on the technical expertise of those below them, and so thus far have directly evaded prosecution.
For those on the receiving-end of harm caused by plausibly deniability defences, there can be emotional and psychological consequences, such as experiencing being gaslit, and moral injury. Circumstantial consequences can be victimisation that is unapparent to others, ruined relationships due to lost trust, and a tarnished reputation.
These negative outcomes and many more came to fruition for the victims of the post office scandal, even resulting in bankruptcy and suicide in some cases.
Plausibility through exaggerating details or emphasising truth
I’ve noticed that similarly to persuading others through plausible but erroneous excuses, a truth can be intentionally emphasised or accentuated to convince someone of the culprit’s good intentions or of the validity of a cause.
Often when this happens people’s moral or ethical codes seem deliberately exploited or used against them, to sway them into a controversial or even extremist viewpoint.
Specifically by skilful or subtle use of a truism, this can persuade someone of something they may not usually believe, or of a perspective that might otherwise be a stretch to subscribe to.
A truism is an obvious statement or fact, or stating a series of widely agreeable facts. The next move is then a sneaky pivot. This looks like introducing a more controversial or radical statement, example then an implied or direct request for you agreement.
The truisms soften the receiver up to accepting the controversy. It puts the person on the receiving-end in the difficult position of seeming inconsistent, or even to lack credibility when challenged.
The person stating the truism then literally or figuratively holds you accountable for your agreement with the previous truthful statements they made. This effectively influences you into a position or view.
A very public example was in the 2023 UK Labour party election campaign. Social media adverts were released featuring pictures of Conservative Party leader at the time: Rishi Sunak, and the words “Do you think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison? Rishi Sunak doesn’t.”
This statement is deliberately emotive, provocative, and presented as fact. The obvious intention, considering the context, was to stop the public voting for the conservative party.
The words deliberately misrepresented that the conservative leader at the time was somehow solely responsible for statistics that showed over a 12 year period since 2010, that over 4000 convicted offenders of sexual assault against children under 16, all received custodial sentences or served community service rather than going to prison.
Again, these figures are also clearly morally challenging and thought-provoking. They may naturally spark many strong opinions and feelings. However the adverts about the short-lived ex prime-minister before his party was elected, do little to explain or determine the nuanced reasons and contributing factors behind these statistics. The adverts inaccurately implied that one individual in one political party was liable, unhelpfully politicising a significant longstanding societal problem.
Whether one does or does not support or agree with the politics of the Conservative Party or its previous leader is not relevant here — it is not the issue I am pointing out. Political parties across the spectrum in many countries frequently use truisms and plausible deniability tactics as their default style of communication and survival, especially when competing for election.
Rather my point is to draw attention to these extremely unhelpful and persuasive communication patterns that can be used to convince us through part truths, and extreme miscommunications.
These strategies can nudge us into strong emotional reactions in response to something highly divisive. A strong feeling may quickly tip us into deciding before we have had a chance to question or investigate the source or accuracy of the claim being made. These communication strategies function to flatten complexity, to portray and spread misinformation as fact or truth, whether believed by the persuader or not.
Why might these tactics get used and transmitted ?
As someone that values clear, explicit communication and tries insofar as possible to communicate with integrity, I can only weigh-in with some educated suppositions about why people or entities use these ways of communicating, through what I understand about individuals and groups.
Perhaps when we hear and accept highly regarded, powerful and high profile people communicating to us and about each other in these unhealthy ways via social and traditional media, it normalises and validates these ways of communicating.
On an individual level, through repeated exposure, we may internalise, then learn from these behaviours and communication strategies as acceptable ways to navigate everyday conflict, disagreement, and debate.
Perhaps for some organisations, powerful people and cooperations, using truisms and plausible deniability tactics has helped to increase societal polarisation in turn too, which may make these communication styles and the claims they aim to instil more effective.
At an organisational level, cooperations in particular, have inbuilt structural rules, policies, hierarchies and reporting lines that mean executive level individuals are often considered less legally important than the cooperation as an entity itself.
Add to this, that the hierarchy itself is structured with governing power at the top, while cooperation activities are operationalised at the bottom. This means there are multiple layers of legal ‘blame and deniability’ to go through before it reaches the top, if at all.
These systems are designed this way purposefully. Anyone at executive level may be legally, personally and professionally invested in protecting the organisation and its interests, and therefore in any means and communication strategies that help to do this.
I’ve noticed some people take it even further and seem to genuinely believe their own or ‘the collective’s’ messaging and persuasion tactics.
Within organisational life and beyond it, for individuals who prefer these communication styles — perhaps both the tactics themselves and the persuasive nature of them can sometimes map onto a personal associative or black and white thinking style.
Perhaps an individual may be especially prone to parroting similar mannerisms if their identity somehow depends on the group or cause they care about. In other words, perhaps they were successfully persuaded in a similar way, and so attempt to do the same to you and others!
Other times, perhaps in certain situations the person using truisms and plausible deniability has simply discovered that they work, to convince others of something.
People usually maintain patterns of behaviour because of how effective they have learned them to be, to help them get their emotional and / or other needs met, no matter the means or wider impact of doing so.
Risk factors for unintentionally dishonest communication
In therapy I’ve noticed that sometimes, taking realistic accountability: noticing and truly owning our own part in wrongdoing, omissions, mistakes or conflict can be a real struggle for a range of valid reasons inclusive of and beyond intentional malice.
We may have picked up habitual but harmful ways of defending or protecting ourselves when responding to conflict. These strategies and patterns may have been learned from family, our care-givers or friends, which we may later discover can’t be healthily replicated in relationships beyond these groups (or even really sustained healthily within them).
Our nervous systems and feelings might be so reactive or big, that making space to understand others, or our hurtful or negative impact on others, could have understandably become almost impossible in the moment (in mentalization based therapy we call this losing our ability to mentalize).
Some relationship conflict can remind us of threatening or unsafe experiences we had in the past, and it can be difficult to disentangle what belongs to you, to history or to the other person in those moments.
Sometimes our good intentions may get misjudged or misinterpreted. The impact of our words or behaviour may sometimes elicit or result in rupture, conflict, or harm whether or not we meant it to.
If this happens, it is helpful to realise when we are, or are not intentionally doing something that aims to upset others.
If we are seriously committed to repair and accountability, beyond only apologising, it can be helpful to own for yourself and others, any words or actions used in anger, intended to hurt, or used for revenge or retribution — which are human feelings and experiences in moments of high emotion.
A notable caveat about owning neutral or good intentions, is that this does not automatically cancel out a harmful impact. What is important is being able to take accountability for your actions whether the outcome is positive or not.
If you find yourself in frequent relationship ruptures or conflict, and you repeatedly apologise without repair, and tell yourself and others that your intentions are good, perhaps it could be helpful to wonder whether how much your actions could be about keeping your self image as a good person?
Why may we fall victim to plausible deniability or truism tactics?
The world and human life is often messy, complicated and nuanced and this can feel frightening. There are often multiple contributors rather than one or two simple reasons for problems or conflicts.
As human beings, we prefer the world to be predictable and straightforward and when it is, this tends to help us with a sense of safety and certainty too.
Powerful or persuasive people, groups or entities offering uncomplicated explanations and information to us can be naturally seductive and may appear to meet these needs.
Their narratives and messages may intentionally play to our personal experiences, hopes, fears, identities and values — things like wanting belonging, safety and clarity.
If we have histories of experiencing emotional neglect, coercion, rejection, bullying, or other traumas and challenging experiences, these may have left us feeling apart from others. We may be carrying a sense of unmet emotional and connection needs.
We may want to take others at face-value due past experiences or our wiring or processing style.
These all may leave us prone to self doubt, or mistrusting ourselves. In turn we could be prone to seeking-out or believing people that seem to communicate they can meet our needs, or offer us a sense of certainty or belonging. We are also often primed and trained through family life, schooling and work to trust and listen to authority figures and to not question or critically evaluate the information we receive until much later.
So you can see there may be several overlapping reasons why we can end up believing in and trusting misleading forms of communication.
Something I often help people with in therapy regarding some of this, is noticing their relating patterns, beliefs, and their origins , towards becoming surer and clearer in themselves. This can progress to discovering or establishing your own truth and path, separate to misleading narratives and communication. I hope this article helps!
© 2026 Lorraine Welch. All rights reserved
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