The truth about lying

All of us lie. Not necessarily with somebody, but to someone sometimes. However, most of us lie in order to avoid embarrassing or hurting others. Lying may refer to: lie - a deliberate untruth; or lying a horizontal position with which we are not concerned at the moment, however much it might be a tempting proposition.

Studies show that the average person lies several times a day. Some of those are biggies like I’ve been faithful to you. Others are par for the course: ‘No, your new dress looks good.’ Some forms of deception aren’t exactly lies: comb-overs like nodding when you’re not listening. And then there are lies we tell ourselves, as part of healthy self-esteem maintenance or serious delusions. What all this means in the end is: it appears that we can’t handle the truth. Thus, deception becomes rampant. The Truth About lying is that we tell the biggest lies to those we love most. Lying has long been a part of everyday life. We couldn’t get through the day without being deceptive. Yet, until recently, lying was almost entirely ignored by psychologists, leaving serious discussion of the topic in the hands of ethicists and theologians.

Decade

If, as the clich has it, the turn of the century brought about the decade of greed; then the quintessential sin of the 2010s might be lying. After all, think of the accusations of deceit levelled at politicians, bureaucrats, businessmen, sports personalities, husbands, wives, etcetera; and the fact that even Hollywood noticed our apparent deception obsession: witness films like Quiz Show, True Lies, The Crucible, Secrets & Lies, and Liar, Liar; and we realize that we are truly into the decade of lying.

For starters, the work by Bella DePaulo, Ph.D., a psychologist at the University of Virginia, confirms Nietzsche’s assertion that the lie is a condition of life. In a 1996 study, DePaulo and her colleagues had 147 people between the ages of 18 and 71 keep a diary of all the falsehoods they told over the course of a week.

Most people, she found, lie once or twice a day - almost as often as they snack from the refrigerator or brush their teeth. Both men and women lie in approximately a fifth of their social exchanges lasting ten or more minutes; over the course of a week they deceive about thirty percent of those with whom they interact one-on-one. Furthermore, some types of relationships, such as those between parents and teens, are virtual magnets for deception: “College students lie to their mothers in one out of two conversations,” reports DePaulo. (Incidentally, when researchers refer to lying, they don’t include the mindless pleasantries or polite equivocations we offer each other in passing, such as “I’m fine, thanks” or “No trouble at all.”

An “official” lie actually misleads, deliberately conveying a false impression. So complimenting a friend’s awful haircut or telling a creditor that the check is in the mail both qualify.) Most of us receive conflicting messages about lying. Although we’re socialized from the time we can speak to believe that it’s always better to tell the truth, in reality society often encourages and even rewards deception. Show up late for an early morning meeting at work and it is best not to admit that you overslept. You’re punished far more than you would be if you lie and say you were stuck in traffic.

Moreover, lying is integral to many occupations. Think how often we see lawyers constructing far-fetched theories on behalf of their clients or reporters misrepresenting themselves in order to gain access to good stories or diplomats recreate the art of lying.

Romantics

Dishonesty also pervades our romantic relationships, as you might expect from the titles of books like 101 Lies Men Tell Women (Harper Collins), by Missouri psychologist Dory Hollander, Ph.D. Eighty-five percent of the couples interviewed in a 1990 study of college students in the United States of America reported that one or both partners had lied about past relationships or recent indiscretions. And DePaulo finds that dating couples lie to each other in about a third of their interactions - perhaps even more often than they deceive other people.

Protection

Fortunately, marriage seems to offer some protection against deception: Spouses lie to each other in “only” about 10 percent of their major conversations. The bad news? That 10 percent just refers to the typically minor lies of everyday life.

DePaulo recently began looking at the less frequent “big” lies that involve deep betrayals of trust, and she’s finding that the vast majority of them occur between people in intimate relationships. “You save your really big lies,” she says, “for the person that you’re closest to.” Though some lies produce interpersonal friction, others may actually serve as a kind of harmless social lubricant.

“They make it easier for people to get along,” says DePaulo, noting that in the diary study one in every four of the participants’ lies were told solely for the benefit of another person.

In fact, “fake positive” lies - those in which people pretend to like someone or something more than they actually do (“Your cakes are the best ever”) - are about 10 to 20 times more common than “false negative” lies in which people pretend to like someone or something less (“That two-faced rat will never get my vote”).

Certain cultures may place special importance on these “kind” lies.

A survey of residents at 31 senior citizen centers in Los Angeles recently revealed that only about half of elderly Korean Americans believe that patients diagnosed with life-threatening cancer should be told the truth about their condition. In contrast, nearly 90 percent of Americans of European or African descent felt that the terminally ill should be confronted with the truth.

Not surprisingly, research also confirms that the closer we are to someone, the more likely it is that the lies we tell them will be altruistic ones.

This is particularly true of women: Although the sexes, even while lying together, lie with equal frequency; women are especially likely to stretch the truth in order to protect someone else’s feelings. Men, on the other hand, are more prone to lying about themselves - the typical conversation between two guys contains about eight times as many self-oriented lies as it does falsehoods about other people. Men and women may also differ in their ability to deceive their friends.

In a University of Virginia study, psychologists asked pairs of same-sex friends to try to detect lies told by the other person. Six months later the researchers repeated the experiment with the same participants. While women had become slightly better at detecting their friend’s lies over time, men didn’t show any improvement evidence, perhaps, that women are particularly good at learning to read their friends more accurately as a relationship deepens.

Studies reveal that frequent liars tend to be manipulative and Machiavellian, not to mention overly concerned with the impression they make on others. Still, DePaulo warns that liars “don’t always fit the stereotype of caring only about themselves.

Further research reveals that extroverted, sociable people are slightly more likely to lie, and that some personality and physical traits - notably self-confidence and physical attractiveness - have been linked to an individual’s skill at lying when under pressure.

On the other hand, the people least likely to lie are those who score high on psychological scales of responsibility and those with meaningful same-sex friendships. Research has also found that a certain amount of self-delusion, basically lying to yourself, is essential to good mental health. Thus, it seems that anyone under enough pressure, or given enough incentive, will lie. Hence, until this day next week, and for the rest of your life, keep lying, keep thinking, and keep laughing. It seems that life is mostly about these three actions.

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