A friend asks if you liked the soup she made.
A colleague asks what you
think of his suit. In moments such as these, telling the truth could harm
someone’s feelings or self-esteem. Does that make lying seem like the
right choice?
Research by Chicago Booth’s Emma Levine, focusing on this question,
suggests that for many people, merely sparing someone’s feelings isn’t
enough to justify lying. It is only when the truth causes “unnecessary
harm” that most people find lying to be ethical.
“Unnecessary harm is a function of how much value the truth has in the
long run, whether you can learn and grow from it, and how much
emotional pain and suffering it will cost you,” Levine says. If telling the
truth will cause someone emotional pain and suffering without leading to
growth or long-term value, many think lying is justifiable.
For example, if your colleague in the ill-fitting suit is about to give an
important presentation and cannot change first, many people think that
answering truthfully would cause unnecessary harm. In situations such as
this one, people believe lying is ethical, the research finds. What’s more,
people also want to be lied to in these situations. “We think of deception
as bad, but yet, we want people to deceive us all the time,” says Levine.
She conducted a series of experiments involving hundreds of participants
to understand at a fundamental level how people make moral judgments
about honesty and dishonesty. In one study, she gave participants a
scenario in which a manager received a list of employees to lay off within
the next month due to a company reorganization. When told that one of
the employees on the list dropped in on a Friday afternoon for an update
about the reorganization, just under 23 percent of participants said it
would be acceptable for the manager to lie. But when told that the
employee who dropped in was getting married the next day, the
proportion endorsing deception more than doubled to 52 percent. In this
case, they saw telling the truth—and disrupting the potential bliss of a
wedding and honeymoon—as causing unnecessary harm, and therefore
saw lying as ethical.
The research identifies eight “community standards of deception,” or
situations in which the majority of respondents agreed it was ethical to lie.
Many deemed it acceptable to lie to people who were emotionally fragile,
near death, or would be confused by the truth. They also found it more
ethical to lie when doing so would help others save face in public or
concentrate on something important. Lies that were subjective or trivial
were also considered in bounds, and those about a situation the recipient
was ultimately unable to control.
The truth hurts, but it could be helpful
In a series of vignettes, study participants were more likely to approve of
lying the lower the perceived value of telling the truth and the higher its
perceived harm.
Participants in the experiments said they would value ethical deception
both as the liars and as the people being lied to. In one study, Levine
divided participants into three groups: communicators, third-party judges,
and targets. No matter how participants were asked to view themselves—
as the liar, the lied-to, or separate from the lie—a majority endorsed
deception when the truth might cause considerable immediate harm and
would have low long-term value. If telling the truth will hurt someone
emotionally or physically and won’t encourage learning or growth, why be
honest?
“I would want someone to lie to me when the alternative of telling the
truth would make me feel worse off and I would have no control over what
happens,” wrote one participant. “For example, if my beloved dog died
after being hit by a negligent driver, I’d much rather my parents or friends
have told me the dog died peacefully in its sleep than to tell me the
facts.”
Others explained that they would want people to lie about something that
couldn’t be changed, and one person gave the example of asking friends
whether they “looked OK” for a night out. If the question was posed from
home, “I hope they would tell me the truth, so I could change whatever
looked bad (as best I could),” wrote the participant. But if the same
person asked the same question when already out, and received an
honest but negative response, “my night would be ruined and I would
have to stay at the bar knowing I looked bad.”
Levine says that a lot of research in this area, including hers, documents
cases where “communicators think it’s OK to lie and the targets don’t
agree.” But when a lie clearly involves unnecessary harm, targets and
communicators largely agree it’s preferable to the truth, she finds.
Philosophical opinion is divided as to whether lying is morally wrong. Plato
claimed in the Republic that rulers of a just society
must promulgate “noble” lies to promote social harmony among the
masses, but he also condemned the Sophists’ cavalier attitude toward
truth. He apparently thought that the moral valence of lying depends
upon the context in which the lie is told.
In contrast, St. Augustine—whose De mendacio, in the Reconsiderations,
was the first systematic discussion of lying—argued that lying is always
impermissible, although he granted as sometimes allowable that one may
avoid telling the truth, a view that was later endorsed by Thomas
Aquinas (c. 1224/25–1274 ce) in the Summa theologiae.
Centuries later, Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) argued that the notion of moral
wrongness is built into the notion of lying. For Grotius, a harmless
falsehood is by definition not a lie, so saying that lying is immoral is
tautological.
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) proposed that there are no conceivable
circumstances in which lying is morally acceptable. He argued
that morality is rooted in our capacity to make free, rational choices and
that lying is, in effect, an assault on morality because it aims to
undermine this capacity. Kant also affirmed that the moral law demands
that we treat others as ends-in-themselves, whereas lying involves
treating others merely as means. The Kantian perspective contrasts
sharply with that of consequentialists, who hold that the moral value of an
act lies entirely in the degree to which it maximizes some nonmoral good.
According to John Stuart Mill (1806–73), an act is morally obligatory only if
it creates the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people,
relative to its alternatives. Because there are circumstances in which lying
serves the general good more effectively than truth telling does, we
sometimes have a moral obligation to behave dishonestly.
The psychology of lying
Although lying was discussed by some developmental psychologists such
as Jean Piaget (1896–1980) early in the 20th century, psychologists did
not carry that work forward until the century’s closing decades.
Psychologists have mainly been concerned with developmental aspects of
lying, the frequency with which people lie, motives for lying, and methods
for detecting when a person is lying.
The capacity to lie is an important developmental acquisition. Children are
unable to lie until they develop a theory of mind—that is, until they are
able to understand that other people are centres of experience
and initiative. Once children develop a theory of mind and become able to
grasp the fact that people perceive the world from a variety of
perspectives, they begin to realize that people can conceal information
from one another. The theory of mind is usually in place by the age of
three, although there is evidence that children begin to behave
deceptively as early as six months of age.
Psychologists have found that most people lie far more frequently than
they are prepared to admit, even to themselves. The most commonly
mentioned figure for the incidence of lying comes from a 2002 study
conducted by American psychologist Robert S. Feldman that suggests that
people lie on average two to three times for every 10 minutes of
conversation time. Psychologists have identified a number of motives for
lying, chief among which are the need to preserve self-esteem, the wish
to avoid conflict, and the desire to manipulate others to behave in ways
that are in one’s self-interest.
Experimental studies have revealed the disquieting fact that most people
are extremely bad at detecting lies. Most are able to correctly identify lies
just over 50 percent of the time, while seasoned law-enforcement officers
and judges fare only marginally better. However, a small proportion of the
population (less than 1 percent of the people studied) are naturally
talented at detecting lies. American psychologist Paul Ekman showed that
people who are good at detecting mendacity pay careful attention to
nonverbal cues. Fleeting alterations in the speaker’s facial expression
(“microexpressions”) are especially revealing. Ekman also showed that
subjects can be taught to recognize and interpret microexpressions, a skill
that results in dramatic improvement to their ability to discern lies.
