Think of a child who broke a glass, Feldman says. When their parent asks if they broke the glass, they're probably going to say no, even though it's an obvious lie. People will also lie to protect others, like if the child's older sibling says they saw the dog knock the glass over People may lie to get an outcome they want for themselves or others, Feldman says.
Overstating experience on a resume or in a job interview is a classic way people lie to get what they want. The same goes for a person who's trying to help their friend get hired at their company.
Because who doesn't want a friend in the office? They may overstate their friend's experience to the hiring manager, saying how successful and personable they are, to increase their chances of landing the position—and landing themselves a coworker they already get along with. And let's not forget Anna Delvey, who passed herself off as a German heiress to impress socialites and live the high life Lies have a snowball effect, Feldman says.
No lie is too small to get you caught in a web—which is why honesty, as they say, is the best policy. Is it ok to fail? Is it ok to have feelings and need a break now and then? Find out. So why do we lie? Because it works for us. Temporarily, at least.
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here. More From Forbes. If discovered it harms the reputation of the boaster, but not much more than that. Claiming falsely to have earned money for previous investors moves into the criminal realm. To maintain privacy, without asserting that right, is another reason why people may lie.
Another topic I will return to in my newsletter about trust. Some people lie for the sheer thrill of getting away with it, testing their unsuspected power. Many children will at some point lie to their parents simply to see if they can do it. Some people do this all the time enjoying the power they obtain in controlling the information available to the target. Avoiding embarrassment is still another motive for some serious and many trivial lies.
The child who claims the wet seat resulted from spilling a glass of water, not from wetting her pants is an example, if the child did not fear punishment for her failure, just embarrassment.
Avoiding embarrassment is relevant to many less serious lies that come under the rubric of lies-of-everyday-life. Very often people lie to get out of an awkward social situation.
In all of these instances the target does not expect to be told the truth, there is notification. But the impostor is a liar, as is the con man, because they are taking advantage of our expectation that we will be told the truth. Santana quickly became something of a star on campus. His reserved manner and unusual background suffused him with an enigmatic appeal.
When a suite mate asked Santana how his bed always seemed to be perfectly made, he answered that he slept on the floor.
It seemed perfectly logical that someone who had spent much of his life sleeping outdoors would have no fondness for a bed. Princeton officials eventually learned that he was actually James Hogue, a year-old who had served a prison sentence in Utah for possession of stolen tools and bike parts.
He was taken away from Princeton in handcuffs. In the years since, Hogue has been arrested several times on theft charges. In November, when he was arrested for stealing in Aspen, Colorado, he tried to pass himself off as someone else. The history of humankind is strewn with crafty and seasoned liars like Hogue. Many are criminals who spin lies and weave deceptions to gain unjust rewards—as the financier Bernie Madoff did for years, duping investors out of billions of dollars until his Ponzi scheme collapsed.
Some are politicians who lie to come to power or cling to it, as Richard Nixon famously did when he denied any role in the Watergate scandal. People lie to cover up bad behavior, as American swimmer Ryan Lochte did during the Summer Olympics by claiming to have been robbed at gunpoint at a gas station when, in fact, he and his teammates, drunk after a party, had been confronted by armed security guards after damaging property.
These liars earned notoriety because of how egregious, brazen, or damaging their falsehoods were. The lies that impostors, swindlers, and boasting politicians tell merely sit at the apex of a pyramid of untruths that have characterized human behavior for eons. Lying, it turns out, is something that most of us are very adept at. We lie with ease, in ways big and small, to strangers, co-workers, friends, and loved ones. Our capacity for dishonesty is as fundamental to us as our need to trust others, which ironically makes us terrible at detecting lies.
Being deceitful is woven into our very fabric, so much so that it would be truthful to say that to lie is human. The ubiquity of lying was first documented systematically by Bella DePaulo, a social psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Two decades ago DePaulo and her colleagues asked adults to jot down for a week every instance they tried to mislead someone. The researchers found that the subjects lied on average one or two times a day. Some lies were excuses—one subject blamed the failure to take out the garbage on not knowing where it needed to go.
Researchers speculate that lying as a behavior arose not long after the emergence of language. The ability to manipulate others without using physical force likely conferred an advantage in the competition for resources and mates, akin to the evolution of deceptive strategies in the animal kingdom, such as camouflage. As lying has come to be recognized as a deeply ingrained human trait, social science researchers and neuroscientists have sought to illuminate the nature and roots of the behavior.
How and when do we learn to lie? What are the psychological and neurobiological underpinnings of dishonesty? Where do most of us draw the line? These insights suggest that our proclivity for deceiving others, and our vulnerability to being deceived, are especially consequential in the age of social media.
Our ability as a society to separate truth from lies is under unprecedented threat. When I was in third grade, one of my classmates brought a sheet of racing car stickers to school to show off. The stickers were dazzling. When the students returned, my heart was racing. Panicking that I would be found out, I thought up a preemptive lie. I told the teacher that two teenagers had shown up on a motorbike, entered the classroom, rifled through backpacks, and left with the stickers. As you might expect, this fib collapsed at the gentlest probing, and I reluctantly returned what I had pilfered.
My naive lying—I got better, trust me—was matched by my gullibility in sixth grade, when a friend told me that his family owned a flying capsule that could transport us anywhere in the world.
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