Are You a Liar?

Monday, February 19th, 2007
The Washington Post article Almost Everyone Lies, Often Seeing it as a Kindness suggests that “experiments have found that ordinary people tell about two lies every 10 minutes, with some people getting in as many as a dozen falsehoods in that period.”

Wow, a lie a minute. I don’t profess or pretend that I am perfectly honest or even GW never-tell-a-lie honest but I can’t believe that I am spouting a lie every minute. Think about the last conversation you had with your child, spouse, friend, co-worker or aquaintance. Did you tell a lie? How about 2?3?6? How many lies did they tell you? Do you think that the expert Robert Feldman knows what he is talking about?

Feldman says that “if the psychological experiments are accurate, being socially skillful almost always involves the ability and willingness to deceive.” We teach our kids to always tell the truth but then encourage them to say thank you for a crappy gift. Are we setting a model of deception in place or teaching them that ‘white lies’ out of kindness are okay?

“We want everyone to be honest, but it is not clear what to do when honesty bumps up against other values — caring about another person, their feelings,” said Bella DePaulo, a social psychologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “People say they want to hear the truth, but that is in the abstract. Would you tell someone, ‘Tell me all the things about me you don’t like, all the things that annoy you’?”