reasons for lying essay

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Argumentative Essay about Lying

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Introduction, the harm that lying can cause, the benefits of telling the truth, why people lie, conclusion .

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Greater Good Science Center • Magazine • In Action • In Education

What’s Good about Lying?

Do you teach children to lie?

I do. All the time. And you do, too! If you’re like most American parents, you point to presents under the Christmas tree and claim that a man named Santa Claus put them there. But your deliberate deceptions probably go beyond Santa, the Tooth Fairy, or the Easter Bunny.

How many of us tell our kids (or students) that everything is fine when, in fact, everything is totally wrong, in order to preserve their sense of security? Have you been honest about everything having to do with, say, your love life, or what happens at work? Do you praise drawings they bring home from school that you actually think are terrible?

We don’t just lie to protect our kids from hard truths, either. We actually coach them to lie, as when we ask them to express delight at tube socks from Aunt Judy or Uncle Bob’s not-so-delicious beef stew.

These are what scientists call “prosocial lies”—falsehoods told for someone else’s benefit, as opposed to “antisocial lies” that are told strictly for your own personal gain.

Most research suggests that children develop the ability to lie at about age three. By age five, almost all children can (and will) lie to avoid punishment or chores—and a minority will sporadically tell prosocial lies. From ages seven to eleven, they begin to reliably lie to protect other people or to make them feel better—and they’ll start to consider prosocial lies to be justified . They’re not just telling white lies to please adults. The research to date suggests that they are motivated by strong feelings of empathy and compassion.

Why should that be the case? What is going on in children’s minds and bodies that allows this capacity to develop? What does this developmental arc reveal about human beings—and how we take care of each other? That’s what a recent wave of studies has started to uncover.

Taken together, this research points to one message: Sometimes, lying can reveal what’s best in people.

How we learn to lie

At first, the ability to lie reflects a developmental milestone: Young children are acquiring a “theory of mind,” which is psychology’s way of describing our ability to distinguish our own beliefs, intents, desires, and knowledge from what might be in the minds of other people. Antisocial lying appears earlier than prosocial lying in children because it’s much simpler, developmentally; it mainly requires an understanding that adults can’t read your mind.

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But prosocial lying needs more than just theory of mind. It requires the ability to identify suffering in another person ( empathy ) and the desire to alleviate that suffering ( compassion ). More than that, even, it involves anticipation that our words or actions might cause suffering in a hypothetical future. Thus, prosocial lying reflects the development of at least four distinct human capacities: theory of mind, empathy, compassion, and the combination of memory and imagination that allows us to foresee the consequences of our words.

How do we know that kids have all of these capacities? Could they just be lying to get out of the negative consequences of telling the truth? Or perhaps they’re simply lazy; is it easier to lie than be honest?

For a paper published in 2015 , Harvard psychologist Felix Warneken had adults show elementary-aged children two pictures they drew—one pretty good, one terrible. If the adults didn’t show any particular pride in the picture, the kids were truthful in saying whether it was good or bad. If the grown-up acted sad about being a bad artist, most of the kids would rush to reassure her that it wasn’t too awful. In other words, they told a white lie; the older they were, they more likely the kids were to say a bad drawing was good. There were no negative consequences for telling the truth to these bad artists; the kids just wanted these strangers to feel better about themselves.

In other words, says Warneken, it’s a feeling of empathic connection that drives children to tell white lies. In fact, children are trying to resolve two conflicting norms—honesty vs. kindness—and by about age seven, his studies suggest, they start consistently coming down on the side of kindness. This reflects increasingly sophisticated moral and emotional reasoning.

“When is it right to prioritize another person’s feelings over truth?” says Warneken. “Say, if someone cooks something for you, and it just doesn’t taste good. Well, if they’re applying for cooking school somewhere, the prosocial thing is to be honest, so that they can improve. But if they just cooked it on their own just for you, then perhaps it’s better to lie and say it tastes good.”

It’s a good sign, developmentally, when kids show the ability to make that kind of calculation. Indeed, there is a great deal of evidence that we tend to see prosocial lies as the more moral choice. For example, people seem to behave more prosocially —more grateful, more generous, more compassionate—in the presence of images depicting eyes. While one would expect people to lie less under the eyes, in fact it appears to influence what kind of lie they tell: When Japanese researchers gave students an opportunity to make someone feel good with a lie, they were much more likely to do so with a pair of eyes looking down on them .

No eyes? They were more likely to tell the cold, hard truth!

How lies change as we grow

This moral self-consciousness appears to grow in tandem with the child’s self-control and cognitive ability.

Another study published last year in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology found that “children who told prosocial lies had higher performance on measures of working memory and inhibitory control.” This especially helped them to control “leakage”—a psychologist’s term for inconsistencies in a fake story.

To tell a prosocial lie, a child’s brain needs to juggle many balls—drop one, and the lie will be discovered. Some children are simply better truth-jugglers than others. Far from reflecting laziness, prosocial lying seems to entail a great deal more cognitive and emotional effort than truth-telling. In fact, one 2014 paper found tired adults are much less likely to engage in prosocial lying.

Studies by other researchers show that as kids grow older, the relationship between theory of mind and dishonesty starts to shift. Young children with high theory of mind will tell more antisocial lies than peers. This pattern flips as we age: Older children who have a stronger theory of mind start telling fewer antisocial lies—and more prosocial ones.

Kids also gradually become more likely to tell “blue lies” as they advance through adolescence: altruistic falsehoods, sometimes told at a cost to the liar, that are intended to protect a group, like family or classmates. (Think: lying about a crime committed by a sibling, or deceiving a teacher about someone else’s misbehavior.)

Though adults can (and do) teach children to tell polite lies—and in a lab context, kids can be primed by adults to tell them—Warneken says it’s more likely that successful prosocial lying is a byproduct of developing other capacities, like empathy and self-control. When kids acquire those skills, they gain the ability to start telling both white and blue lies.

But how do other people feel if these lies are found out?

The lies that bind

As they grow older, kids are also developing the ability to detect lies —and to distinguish selfish from selfless ones. The distinction comes down to intent, which studies show can be discerned through recognition of telltale signs in the face and voice of the liar.

In a study published last year, researchers used the Facial Action Coding System , developed by Paul Ekman , to map children’s faces as they told lies that served either themselves or others. The team, based at the University of Toronto and UC San Diego, found that the two different kinds of lies produced markedly different facial expressions.

“Prosocial lying reflects the development of at least four distinct human capacities: theory of mind, empathy, compassion, and the combination of memory and imagination that allows us to foresee the consequences of our words.”

Prosocial lies (which in this case involved delight in a disappointing gift) were betrayed by expressions that resembled joy—a “lip raise on the right side” that hinted at a barely concealed smile, and a blinking pattern associated with happiness. The faces of children lying to conceal a misdeed showed signs of contempt, mainly a slight lip pucker that stops short of being a smirk.

It’s almost certainly the case that we are subconsciously picking up on these signs (along with tells in the liar’s voice) when we catch someone in a lie. But research finds that the consequences of catching someone in a prosocial lie are often very different from those of an antisocial lie, or “black lie,” as they’re sometimes called. In fact, detecting a prosocial lie can increase trust and social bonds.

A series of four 2015 studies from the Wharton School had participants play economic games that involved different kinds of trust and deception. Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that black lies hurt trust. But if participants saw that the deception was altruistic in nature, trust between game-players actually increased. A complex mathematical 2014 study compared the impact of black and white lies on social networks. Again, black lies drove wedges into social networks. But white lies had precisely the opposite effect, tightening social bonds. Several studies have found that people are quick to forgive white lies, and even to appreciate them.

These differences show up in brain scans—and how different types of lies affect the brain can actually influence behavior down the road. A research team led by Neil Garrett at Princeton University assigned 80 people a financial task that allowed them to gain money at another person’s expense if they kept on lying.

“We found that people started with small lies, but slowly, over the course of the experiment, lied more and more,” they write . When they scanned the brains of participants, they found that activity lessened (mainly in the amygdala) with each new lie.

Not everyone lied or lied to their own advantage. One variation in the experiment allowed participants to lie so that another participant would gain more money—and the behavior and the brain scans of those people looked very different. Dishonesty for the benefit of others did not escalate in the same way selfish lies did; while people did lie for others, the lies did not get bigger or more frequent, as with black lies. And it did not trigger the same pattern of activity in the amygdala, which previous research has found lights up when we contemplate immoral acts. (Their methods are described more fully in the video below.)

In short, the brain’s resistance to deception remained steady after participants told prosocial lies—while self-serving lies seemed to decrease it, making black lies a slippery slope.

The upshot of all this research? Not all lies are the same, a fact we seem to recognize deep in our minds and bodies. We may indeed teach children to lie, both implicitly with our behavior and explicitly with our words; but some of those lies help to bind our families and friends together and to create feelings of trust. Other kinds of lies destroy those bonds.

This all might seem overly complex, more so than the simple prescription to not tell a lie. The trouble with do-not-lie prohibitions is that kids can plainly see lying is ubiquitous, and as they grow, they discover that not all lies have the same motivation or impact. How are we supposed to understand these nuances, and communicate them to our children?

In fact, the argument for prosocial lies is the same one against black lies: other people’s feelings matter—and empathy and kindness should be our guide.

About the Author

Jeremy Adam Smith

Uc berkeley.

Jeremy Adam Smith edits the GGSC's online magazine, Greater Good . He is also the author or coeditor of five books, including The Daddy Shift , Are We Born Racist? , and (most recently) The Gratitude Project: How the Science of Thankfulness Can Rewire Our Brains for Resilience, Optimism, and the Greater Good . Before joining the GGSC, Jeremy was a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University.

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5 Ways Lying Can Destroy Self-Esteem

Research shows the harm a lie causes on the day it's told..

Updated January 9, 2024 | Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer

• Lying generally lowers self-esteem and leads to negative emotions.
• Even remembering a lie has negative consequences on psychological well-being.
• People lie more about themselves than about other people.

People lie for all sorts of reasons and some even do it daily. If someone finds out that they have been lied to, they typically feel negative emotions like anger or sadness. One thing that is not well understood about lying is what the psychological consequences of lying are for the liar. Lying is considered an immoral behavior in society, so lying may lead to negative feelings in the liar, but this process is not well understood.

A new study in The British Journal of Social Psychology focused on the psychological consequences of lying for the liar ( Preuter and collaborators, 2023 ). The study, first authored by scientist Sanne Preuter from the University of Twente in Enschede (The Netherlands) consisted of four different experiments which led to five interesting new insights on lying.

1. Lying lowers self-esteem and leads to more negative emotions.

The basic hypothesis of the study was that since lying is considered immoral, it may lead to lower self-esteem and negative emotions in the liar.

The first part of the study was an online experiment in which volunteers had to read about different self-centered (e.g., lying about expertise in a job interview) and other-centered (e.g., lying about liking a new dress that a friend bought) dilemmas. Volunteers had to answer whether they lied or told the truth the last time they were in a similar situation. Moreover, the self-esteem of the volunteers and four negative emotions (nervousness, regret, discomfort, and unhappiness) were determined with questionnaires.

The results revealed that for self-centered dilemmas, 41.6 percent of volunteers had lied. For other-centered dilemmas, 45.5 percent had told a lie. Participants who lied had significantly lower self-esteem and more negative feelings than those who told the truth for both types of dilemmas.

2. Just remembering a lie is enough to lower self-esteem and reduce positive emotions.

In experiment two, a similar design was used, but in this part of the study, no dilemmas were presented. Instead, volunteers had to come up with past dilemmas themselves. They were asked to either come up with situations in which they lied or a situation in which they decided to tell the truth. Moreover, negative and positive emotions were determined. The results were clear: Volunteers who remembered a situation in which they lied had lower self-esteem and less positive emotions than people who remembered a situation in which they told the truth.

3. People lie more about themselves than about others.

In the third experiment, the scientists aimed to replicate the findings of the first two experiments using a diary research approach. Volunteers were asked to keep track of all their lies for one day. They were also asked to write down their lies and the motives behind lying. Overall, 22.1 percent of volunteers told a self-centered lie, 8.2 percent an other-oriented lie, and 69.7 percent did not lie. People who lied had lower self-esteem and felt less positive about themselves than those who told the truth.

4. Twenty-two percent of people lie every day, and 19 percent claim to rarely tell a lie.

In the fourth and last experiment, a longitudinal approach was used. Volunteers had to track their lying behavior and self-esteem for five days. The results showed that there are a lot of differences between people regarding how much they lie. Twenty-two percent of people reported that they had lied on each of the five days and 19 percent said they did not tell a single lie on any of the five days.

5. Lying specifically lowers self-esteem on days a lie is told.

In the fourth experiment, the scientists were able to replicate the findings of the previous experiments that lying was associated with lower self-esteem on the day the lie was told. Moreover, they analyzed the association between lying and self-esteem over five days. When someone told a lie, their self-esteem was lower than on the day before. This shows that people who lie do not generally have low self-esteem but that the act of lying decreases self-esteem.

People are in general rather bad at detecting lies. But as the study shows, even if a lie stays undetected, it will have negative consequences for the liar. The results of the study were crystal clear: Lying makes people feel bad and lowers their self-esteem.

While it may seem like an easy solution to an awkward situation to tell a friend that their horrendous new dress looks great, it is not a good idea to lie regularly if we want to feel good about ourselves. The truth may hurt, but it is sometimes the better option for long-term psychological well-being.

Facebook image: christinarosepix/Shutterstock

LinkedIn image: fizkes/Shutterstock

Preuter, S., Jaeger, B., & Stel, M. (2023). The costs of lying: Consequences of telling lies on liar's self-esteem and affect. The British journal of social psychology, 10.1111/bjso.12711. Advance online publication.

Sebastian Ocklenburg, Ph.D., is a professor for research methods in psychology at the Department of Psychology at MSH Medical School Hamburg, Germany. His research focuses on left-handedness and brain asymmetries.

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The Truth about Lying

You can’t spot a liar just by looking, but psychologists are zeroing in on methods that might actually work.

Police thought that 17-year-old Marty Tankleff seemed too calm after finding his mother stabbed to death and his father mortally bludgeoned in the family’s sprawling Long Island home. Authorities didn’t believe his claims of innocence, and he spent 17 years in prison for the murders.

Yet in another case, detectives thought that 16-year-old Jeffrey Deskovic seemed too distraught and too eager to help detectives after his high school classmate was found strangled. He, too, was judged to be lying and served nearly 16 years for the crime.

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One man was not upset enough. The other was too upset. How can such opposite feelings both be telltale clues of hidden guilt?

They’re not, says psychologist Maria Hartwig, a deception researcher at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York. The men, both later exonerated, were victims of a pervasive misconception: that you can spot a liar by the way they act. Across cultures, people believe that behaviors such as averted gaze, fidgeting and stuttering betray deceivers.

In fact, researchers have found little evidence to support this belief despite decades of searching. “One of the problems we face as scholars of lying is that everybody thinks they know how lying works,” says Hartwig, who coauthored a study of nonverbal cues to lying in the Annual Review of Psychology . Such overconfidence has led to serious miscarriages of justice, as Tankleff and Deskovic know all too well. “The mistakes of lie detection are costly to society and people victimized by misjudgments,” says Hartwig. “The stakes are really high.”

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Tough to tell

Psychologists have long known how hard it is to spot a liar. In 2003, psychologist Bella DePaulo, now affiliated with the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her colleagues combed through the scientific literature, gathering 116 experiments that compared people’s behavior when lying and when telling the truth. The studies assessed 102 possible nonverbal cues, including averted gaze, blinking, talking louder (a nonverbal cue because it does not depend on the words used), shrugging, shifting posture and movements of the head, hands, arms or legs. None proved reliable indicators of a liar , though a few were weakly correlated, such as dilated pupils and a tiny increase — undetectable to the human ear — in the pitch of the voice.

Three years later, DePaulo and psychologist Charles Bond of Texas Christian University reviewed 206 studies involving 24,483 observers judging the veracity of 6,651 communications by 4,435 individuals. Neither law enforcement experts nor student volunteers were able to pick true from false statements better than 54 percent of the time — just slightly above chance. In individual experiments, accuracy ranged from 31 to 73 percent, with the smaller studies varying more widely. “The impact of luck is apparent in small studies,” Bond says. “In studies of sufficient size, luck evens out.”

This size effect suggests that the greater accuracy reported in some of the experiments may just boil down to chance , says psychologist and applied data analyst Timothy Luke at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. “If we haven’t found large effects by now,” he says, “it’s probably because they don’t exist .”

Police experts, however, have frequently made a different argument: that the experiments weren’t realistic enough. After all, they say, volunteers — mostly students — instructed to lie or tell the truth in psychology labs do not face the same consequences as criminal suspects in the interrogation room or on the witness stand. “The ‘guilty’ people had nothing at stake,” says Joseph Buckley, president of John E. Reid and Associates, which trains thousands of law enforcement officers each year in behavior-based lie detection. “It wasn’t real, consequential motivation.”

Samantha Mann , a psychologist at the University of Portsmouth, UK, thought that such police criticism had a point when she was drawn to deception research 20 years ago. To delve into the issue, she and colleague Aldert Vrij first went through hours of videotaped police interviews of a convicted serial killer and picked out three known truths and three known lies. Then Mann asked 65 English police officers to view the six statements and judge which were true, and which false. Since the interviews were in Dutch, the officers judged entirely on the basis of nonverbal cues.

The officers were correct 64 percent of the time — better than chance, but still not very accurate, she says. And the officers who did worst were those who said they relied on nonverbal stereotypes like “liars look away” or “liars fidget.” In fact, the killer maintained eye contact and did not fidget while deceiving. “This guy was clearly very nervous, no doubt,” Mann says, but he controlled his behavior to strategically counter the stereotypes.

In a later study, also by Mann and Vrij, 52 Dutch police officers did no better than chance at distinguishing true and false statements given by family members who’d murdered their relatives but denied it in anguished displays during televised press conferences used in the study. Notably, officers who performed the worst were those who felt that the emotional displays were genuine. But what did that signify? “If a husband killed his wife, he could be upset for all kinds of reasons, like remorse or getting caught,” says Mann. “Nonverbal behavior is so idiosyncratic. If you focus on the nonverbal behavior like emotions, you will trip up.”

Confirming these results on a large scale years later, Hartwig and Bond reviewed the literature for studies comparing people’s abilities to detect high- and low-stakes lies. They found no evidence that people were any better at detecting lies told by criminals or wrongly accused suspects in police investigations than those told by laboratory volunteers.

Something to hide

From serial killers to students fibbing in laboratory experiments, the lies in all these experiments were spoken. In a study published in 2019, Mann examined nonverbal deceit, such as when someone is trying to conceal illicit activity — a type of deception relevant to detecting bombers or smugglers . She recruited 52 university student volunteers and asked half of them to transport a laptop said to contain sensitive photographs on a ferry ride between two cities. The volunteers were told to try to blend into the crowd and not look “suspicious,” because people would be trying to identify them. The other half of the group were given a regular cell phone to transport, with no instructions to conceal what they were doing.

When Mann showed videos of the ferry rides to 104 other volunteers and asked them to pick out the “smugglers,” the spotters did no better than chance. In interviews afterward, the “smugglers” said they were nervous, but they consciously tried to act normal and control their nerves with tactics such as listening to music or using their phones.

Next, Mann raised the stakes. Half of a new group of 60 volunteers were given an envelope of Russian, Egyptian and Korean currency to conceal, while the other half didn’t “smuggle” anything. But this time, Mann sent two researchers onto the ferry to pace around and scrutinize the passengers, appearing to compare their faces to photos on a cell phone.

This time, 120 observers trying to pick out the “smugglers” on video guessed correctly just 39.2 percent of the time — well below chance. The reason, Mann says, is that the “smugglers” consciously made an effort to look normal, while the “innocent” control volunteers just acted naturally. Their surprise at the unexpected scrutiny looked to the observers like a sign of guilt.

The finding that deceivers can successfully hide nervousness fills in a missing piece in deception research , says psychologist Ronald Fisher of Florida International University, who trains FBI agents. “Not too many studies compare people’s internal emotions with what others notice,” he says. “The whole point is, liars do feel more nervous, but that’s an internal feeling as opposed to how they behave as observed by others.”

Studies like these have led researchers to largely abandon the hunt for nonverbal cues to deception. But are there other ways to spot a liar? Today, psychologists investigating deception are more likely to focus on verbal cues, and particularly on ways to magnify the differences between what liars and truth-tellers say.

For example, interviewers can strategically withhold evidence longer, allowing a suspect to speak more freely, which can lead liars into contradictions. In one experiment, Hartwig taught this technique to 41 police trainees, who then correctly identified liars about 85 percent of the time, as compared to 55 percent for another 41 recruits who had not yet received the training. “We are talking significant improvements in accuracy rates,” says Hartwig.

Another interviewing technique taps spatial memory by asking suspects and witnesses to sketch a scene related to a crime or alibi. Because this enhances recall, truth-tellers may report more detail. In a simulated spy mission study published by Mann and her colleagues last year, 122 participants met an “agent” in the school cafeteria, exchanged a code, then received a package. Afterward, participants instructed to tell the truth about what happened gave 76 percent more detail about experiences at the location during a sketching interview than those asked to cover up the code-package exchange . “When you sketch, you are reliving an event — so it aids memory,” says study coauthor Haneen Deeb, a psychologist at the University of Portsmouth.

The experiment was designed with input from UK police, who regularly use sketching interviews and work with psychology researchers as part of the nation’s switch to non-guilt-assumptive questioning, which officially replaced accusation-style interrogations in the 1980s and 1990s in that country after scandals involving wrongful conviction and abuse.

Slow to change

In the US, though, such science-based reforms have yet to make significant inroads among police and other security officials. The US Department of Homeland Security’s Transportation Security Administration, for example, still uses nonverbal deception clues to screen airport passengers for questioning. The agency’s secretive behavioral screening checklist instructs agents to look for supposed liars’ tells such as averted gaze — considered a sign of respect in some cultures — and prolonged stare, rapid blinking, complaining, whistling, exaggerated yawning, covering the mouth while speaking and excessive fidgeting or personal grooming. All have been thoroughly debunked by researchers.

With agents relying on such vague, contradictory grounds for suspicion, it’s perhaps not surprising that passengers lodged 2,251 formal complaints between 2015 and 2018 claiming that they’d been profiled based on nationality, race, ethnicity or other reasons. Congressional scrutiny of TSA airport screening methods goes back to 2013, when the US Government Accountability Office — an arm of Congress that audits, evaluates and advises on government programs — reviewed the scientific evidence for behavioral detection and found it lacking, recommending that the TSA limit funding and curtail its use. In response, the TSA eliminated the use of stand-alone behavior detection officers and reduced the checklist from 94 to 36 indicators, but retained many scientifically unsupported elements like heavy sweating.

In response to renewed Congressional scrutiny, the TSA in 2019 promised to improve staff supervision to reduce profiling. Still, the agency continues to see the value of behavioral screening. As a Homeland Security official told congressional investigators, “common sense” behavioral indicators are worth including in a “rational and defensible security program” even if they do not meet academic standards of scientific evidence. In a statement to Knowable , TSA media relations manager R. Carter Langston said that “TSA believes behavioral detection provides a critical and effective layer of security within the nation’s transportation system.” The TSA points to two separate behavioral detection successes in the last 11 years that prevented three passengers from boarding airplanes with explosive or incendiary devices.

But, says Mann, without knowing how many would-be terrorists slipped through security undetected, the success of such a program cannot be measured. And, in fact, in 2015 the acting head of the TSA was reassigned after Homeland Security undercover agents in an internal investigation successfully smuggled fake explosive devices and real weapons through airport security 95 percent of the time.

In 2019, Mann, Hartwig and 49 other university researchers published a review evaluating the evidence for behavioral analysis screening, concluding that law enforcement professionals should abandon this “fundamentally misguided” pseudoscience, which may “harm the life and liberty of individuals.”

Hartwig, meanwhile, has teamed with national security expert Mark Fallon, a former special agent with the US Naval Criminal Investigative Service and former Homeland Security assistant director, to create a new training curriculum for investigators that is more firmly based in science. “Progress has been slow,” Fallon says. But he hopes that future reforms may save people from the sort of unjust convictions that marred the lives of Jeffrey Deskovic and Marty Tankleff.

For Tankleff, stereotypes about liars have proved tenacious. In his years-long campaign to win exoneration and recently to practice law, the reserved, bookish man had to learn to show more feeling “to create a new narrative” of wronged innocence, says Lonnie Soury, a crisis manager who coached him in the effort. It worked, and Tankleff finally won admittance to the New York bar in 2020. Why was showing emotion so critical? “People,” says Soury, “are very biased.”

Editor’s note: This article was updated on March 25, 2021, to correct the last name of a crisis manager quoted in the story. Their name is Lonnie Soury, not Lonnie Stouffer.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine , an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter .

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Lying in Politics: Hannah Arendt on Deception, Self-Deception, and the Psychology of Defactualization

By maria popova.

“The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her beautiful 1975 speech on lying and what truth really means , “are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities.” Nowhere is this liar’s loss of perspective more damaging to public life, human possibility, and our collective progress than in politics, where complex social, cultural, economic, and psychological forces conspire to make the assault on truth traumatic on a towering scale.

Those forces are what Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975), one of the most incisive thinkers of the past century, explores in a superb 1971 essay titled “Lying in Politics,” written shortly after the release of the Pentagon Papers and later included in Crises of the Republic ( public library ) — a collection of Arendt’s timelessly insightful and increasingly timely essays on politics, violence, civil disobedience, and the pillars of a sane and stable society.

Out of the particular treachery the Pentagon Papers revealed, Arendt wrests a poignant meditation on the betrayal we feel at every revelation that our political leaders — those we have elected to be our civil servants — have deceived and disappointed us. With the release of the Pentagon Papers, Arendt argues, “the famous credibility gap … suddenly opened up into an abyss” — an abyss rife with the harrowing hollowness of every political disappointment that ever was and ever will be. In a quest to illuminate the various “aspects of deception, self-deception, image-making, ideologizing, and defactualization,” she writes:

Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings. Whoever reflects on these matters can only be surprised by how little attention has been paid, in our tradition of philosophical and political thought, to their significance, on the one hand for the nature of action and, on the other, for the nature of our ability to deny in thought and word whatever happens to be the case. This active, aggressive capability is clearly different from our passive susceptibility to falling prey to error, illusion, the distortions of memory, and to whatever else can be blamed on the failings of our sensual and mental apparatus.

A defender of the contradictory complexity of the human experience and its necessary nuance, Arendt reminds us that the human tendency toward deception isn’t so easily filed into a moral binary. Two millennia after Cicero argued that the human capacities for envy and compassion have a common root , Arendt argues that our moral flaws and our imaginative flair spring from the same source:

A characteristic of human action is that it always begins something new, and this does not mean that it is ever permitted to start ab ovo , to create ex nihilo . In order to make room for one’s own action, something that was there before must be removed or destroyed, and things as they were before are changed. Such change would be impossible if we could not mentally remove ourselves from where we physically are located and imagine that things might as well be different from what they actually are. In other words, the deliberate denial of factual truth — the ability to lie — and the capacity to change facts — the ability to act — are interconnected; they owe their existence to the same source: imagination. It is by no means a matter of course that we can say , “The sun shines,” when it actually is raining (the consequence of certain brain injuries is the loss of this capacity); rather, it indicates that while we are well equipped for the world, sensually as well as mentally, we are not fitted or embedded into it as one of its inalienable parts. We are free to change the world and to start something new in it. Without the mental freedom to deny or affirm existence, to say “yes” or “no” — not just to statements or propositions in order to express agreement or disagreement, but to things as they are given, beyond agreement or disagreement, to our organs of perception and cognition — no action would be possible; and action is of course the very stuff politics are made of. Hence, when we talk about lying … let us remember that the lie did not creep into politics by some accident of human sinfulness. Moral outrage, for this reason alone, is not likely to make it disappear.

Since history is a form of collective memory woven of truth-by-consensus, it is hardly surprising that our collective memory should be so imperfect and fallible given how error-prone our individual memory is . Arendt captures this elegantly:

The deliberate falsehood deals with contingent facts; that is, with matters that carry no inherent truth within themselves, no necessity to be as they are. Factual truths are never compellingly true. The historian knows how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life; it is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes, or denied and distorted, often carefully covered up by reams of falsehoods or simply allowed to fall into oblivion. Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs. From this, it follows that no factual statement can ever be beyond doubt.

In a sentiment that calls to mind Maria Konnikova’s fascinating inquiry into the psychology of why cons work on even the most rational of us , Arendt adds:

It is this fragility that makes deception so very easy up to a point, and so tempting. It never comes into a conflict with reason, because things could indeed have been as the liar maintains they were. Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear. He has prepared his story for public consumption with a careful eye to making it credible, whereas reality has the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected, for which we were not prepared. Under normal circumstances the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute; no matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough, even if he enlists the help of computers, to cover the immensity of factuality. The liar, who may get away with any number of single falsehoods, will find it impossible to get away with lying on principle.

Arendt considers one particularly pernicious breed of liars — “public-relations managers in government who learned their trade from the inventiveness of Madison Avenue.” In a sentiment arguably itself defeated by reality — a reality in which someone like Donald Trump sells enough of the public on enough falsehoods to get gobsmackingly close to the presidency — she writes:

The only limitation to what the public-relations man does comes when he discovers that the same people who perhaps can be “manipulated” to buy a certain kind of soap cannot be manipulated — though, of course, they can be forced by terror — to “buy” opinions and political views. Therefore the psychological premise of human manipulability has become one of the chief wares that are sold on the market of common and learned opinion.

In what is possibly the finest parenthetical paragraph ever written, and one of particularly cautionary splendor today, Arendt adds:

(Oddly enough, the only person likely to be an ideal victim of complete manipulation is the President of the United States. Because of the immensity of his job, he must surround himself with advisers … who “exercise their power chiefly by filtering the information that reaches the President and by interpreting the outside world for him.” The President, one is tempted to argue, allegedly the most powerful man of the most powerful country, is the only person in this country whose range of choices can be predetermined. This, of course, can happen only if the executive branch has cut itself off from contact with the legislative powers of Congress; it is the logical outcome in our system of government when the Senate is being deprived of, or is reluctant to exercise, its powers to participate and advise in the conduct of foreign affairs. One of the Senate’s functions, as we now know, is to shield the decision-making process against the transient moods and trends of society at large — in this case, the antics of our consumer society and the public-relations managers who cater to it.)

Arendt turns to the role of falsehood, be it deliberate or docile, in the craftsmanship of what we call history:

Unlike the natural scientist, who deals with matters that, whatever their origin, are not man-made or man-enacted, and that therefore can be observed, understood, and eventually even changed only through the most meticulous loyalty to factual, given reality, the historian, as well as the politician, deals with human affairs that owe their existence to man’s capacity for action, and that means to man’s relative freedom from things as they are. Men who act, to the extent that they feel themselves to be the masters of their own futures, will forever be tempted to make themselves masters of the past, too. Insofar as they have the appetite for action and are also in love with theories, they will hardly have the natural scientist’s patience to wait until theories and hypothetical explanations are verified or denied by facts. Instead, they will be tempted to fit their reality — which, after all, was man-made to begin with and thus could have been otherwise — into their theory, thereby mentally getting rid of its disconcerting contingency.

This squeezing of reality into theory, Arendt admonishes, is also a centerpiece of the political system, where the inherent complexity of reality is flattened into artificial oversimplification:

Much of the modern arsenal of political theory — the game theories and systems analyses, the scenarios written for imagined “audiences,” and the careful enumeration of, usually, three “options” — A, B, C — whereby A and C represent the opposite extremes and B the “logical” middle-of-the-road “solution” of the problem — has its source in this deep-seated aversion. The fallacy of such thinking begins with forcing the choices into mutually exclusive dilemmas; reality never presents us with anything so neat as premises for logical conclusions. The kind of thinking that presents both A and C as undesirable, therefore settles on B, hardly serves any other purpose than to divert the mind and blunt the judgment for the multitude of real possibilities.

But even more worrisome, Arendt cautions, is the way in which such flattening of reality blunts the judgment of government itself — nowhere more aggressively than in the overclassification of documents, which makes information available only to a handful of people in power and, paradoxically, not available to the representatives who most need that information in order to make decisions in the interest of the public who elected them. Arendt writes:

Not only are the people and their elected representatives denied access to what they must know to form an opinion and make decisions, but also the actors themselves, who receive top clearance to learn all the relevant facts, remain blissfully unaware of them. And this is so not because some invisible hand deliberately leads them astray, but because they work under circumstances, and with habits of mind, that allow them neither time nor inclination to go hunting for pertinent facts in mountains of documents, 99½ per cent of which should not be classified and most of which are irrelevant for all practical purposes. […] If the mysteries of government have so befogged the minds of the actors themselves that they no longer know or remember the truth behind their concealments and their lies, the whole operation of deception, no matter how well organized its “marathon information campaigns,” in Dean Rusk’s words, and how sophisticated its Madison Avenue gimmickry, will run aground or become counterproductive, that is, confuse people without convincing them. For the trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods.

She extrapolates the broader human vulnerability to falsehood:

The deceivers started with self-deception. […] The self-deceived deceiver loses all contact with not only his audience, but also the real world, which still will catch up with him, because he can remove his mind from it but not his body.

Crises of the Republic is a spectacular and spectacularly timely read in its totality. Complement it with Arendt on the crucial difference between truth and meaning , the power of outsiderdom , our impulse for self-display , what free will really means , and her beautiful love letters , then revisit Walt Whitman on how literature bolsters democracy and Carl Sagan on why science is a tool of political harmony .

— Published June 15, 2016 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/06/15/lying-in-politics-hannah-arendt/ —

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• Abortion , Lying

Why Lying is Always Wrong

• February 14, 2011

Christopher Kaczor and several others have been gracious enough to respond to my essay on the tactics of Live Action with a number of criticisms, many of which deserve a response. For convenience, we may divide the major objections into three sets.

The first set of criticisms calls into question whether the behaviors and utterances of the Live Action “actors” were really lies. First, some think a false assertion is a lie only when told to those with a right to the truth. Second, some think that the Live Action actors made, or perhaps could have made, no false assertions.

The second set of criticisms concerns whether it is always wrong to lie; many critics deny just this, for one or more of the following reasons.

• One view would have it that lying is not wrong in war. A presupposition of this view, which is defended by Joseph Bottum , is that the pro-life movement is at war with Planned Parenthood and other purveyors of abortion.
• A second view holds that sometimes lying is defensible by double-effect type reasoning: the harms of lying must, on this view, not be intended. With this objection we get to the heart of the ethical matter: what are the harms of lying, and are they essential to the intention of someone who deliberately lies or not?
• A third view is that lying is permissible in order to save a human life; on this view, the prohibition on lying is simply not absolute.
• A fourth criticism concerns my claim that to lie is to fail in love to those lied to; some misunderstand this as a claim that what I call for is “gentleness” towards wrongdoers, perhaps to the exclusion of punishment, but I trust my claim that truthful correction of wrongdoing is genuinely loving suffices to show that I do not hold that view. But others argue that to deceive is not as such unloving, and that the lies told to Planned Parenthood workers were in fact to their good.

The third set of criticisms, finally, concern the consequences of my view. Many critics have claimed that if it is always and everywhere wrong to lie, then such practices as undercover police (or journalistic) work, and some forms of espionage are also wrong.

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The Live Action “Actors” Lied

Let us begin, then, with the first set of objections. Was there really no lying done in the Live Action “stings”? Christopher Kaczor cites an early, and subsequently amended, version of the Catholic Catechism which defines lying as not telling the truth to “someone who has the right to know the truth” (CCC 2483). The quoted phrase is omitted in subsequent versions and for good reason. Consider the following scenario: I spend $500 of family money on gambling. My wife has a right to know what happened to this money; my ten-year old son does not. The “right to know” view would have it that I only lie to my wife when I assert to both that I gave the money away to charity. This seems clearly wrong, and points us towards the Catechism’s amended definition: “To lie is to speak or act against the truth in order to lead someone into error.” On this view, what is essential to a lie is that an agent assert, through speech or action, something he believes to be false; here is the nature of the lie, and thus here also is where the wrong must be found: not in a failure to respect an agent’s “right” to the truth.

But perhaps the Live Action agents did not actually make false assertions? A perusal of the transcripts suggests the implausibility of this view. In the Bronx Planned Parenthood Transcript, for example, the “pimp” says, “Now, also, so we’re involved in sex work, so we have some other girls that we manage and work with that they’re going to need testing as well.” While these seem like straightforward lies, some have suggested that “sex work” here is ambiguous, and that the actors mean something like “work that will end the sex trade.” I can only say that this view strains credulity.

Others have claimed that Live Action did, or could, work only with “hypotheticals”: “what would you say if…” sorts of questions. But consider again the Catechism’s definition of a lie, which suggests that one can lie in action as well as in speech, by using one’s actions—including, presumably, one’s personal presentation—against the truth, in order to lead someone into error. And this too the Live Action “actors” surely did: they were dressed and acted as pimps and prostitutes, not because this was how they usually dressed or acted, but precisely to convey information to the Planned Parenthood workers about what they were , information that they also conveyed in speech: “we’re involved in sex work.” So, it is not the case that they worked only in hypothetical questions, and it is unclear whether, in practice, a hypotheticals-only approach would, in fact, serve their ends.

So I believe we should conclude without doubt that the “actors” in the Live Action videos did indeed lie. This obviously raises the next crucial question: were they wrong to do so?

Lying is Always Wrong

As a preliminary point, those who think, for intellectual or religious reasons, that the theological and philosophical tradition of Western Christianity has evidential value should be much more impressed with the agreement between Augustine, Aquinas, the Council of Trent, and the updated Catechism, all of whom hold that the norm against lying is absolute, than with the secondary tradition which admittedly also exists within Christianity that holds that lying is occasionally permitted. Catholics in particular have very good reason for taking the updated Catechism’s view to be normative for them: “By its very nature, lying is to be condemned” (CCC 2485). This judgment reaffirms a claim from the Catechism of the Council of Trent: “In a word, lies of every sort are prohibited.” But we seek here some further understanding of why this unequivocal condemnation might be entirely reasonable.

The first objection was, to recall, that lying is permissible in war. In fact, the authorities mentioned in the previous paragraph did not hold this: Aquinas, for example, condemned lying in war, but he allowed that military feints might be carried out. In a military context, it is assumed (as it is in poker, and in the theater) that what is done will not always have the significance it otherwise might, since soldiers have good reason for preventing the enemy from inferring from what they do what their true plans are. Thus no false assertion is made by the feint. But if lying is always and everywhere wrong, these possibilities do not serve as counterexamples: they are not themselves lies.

More importantly here, however, it is crucial to point out that the pro-life movement is not, in any but the most distantly metaphorical sense, “at war” with Planned Parenthood. To take such a claim strictly would raise unsolvable problems in terms of just war thought: who, for example, is the legitimate authority that has tasked Lila Rose with this work? And it would justify untenable conclusions, for if anything is justified in war, it is the use of arms. Yet the pro-life movement has, rightly in my view, converged on an understanding that the use of arms to stop abortion is not right: it provides a counter-witness to the value of life; it constitutes an unjustified attack on our nation’s overall legal structure; and it is unlikely either to bring peace or to result in a proportionate balance of benefits over harms. The appeal to war is thus a non-starter.

Perhaps, as some suggest, lying could be justified via double effect? As I noted, this question gets us to the heart of the matter, for double effect reasoning is appropriate when there is a moral principle forbidding the intentional bringing about of some harm. Some actions, which bring about that kind of harm nevertheless can be justified because the harm is not intended, but merely foreseen. Thus, assuming that the taking of human life is a harm, and that it is always wrong to intend that harm, nevertheless, many moralists defend some actions which result in death, because the death is not intended.

Now: what are the harms of lying? To answer this question we must understand something of the goodness of truthful communication, for it is that goodness that is, presumably, absent in lying. And that goodness is, I shall suggest, multiple.

In truthful communication, persons disclose, or reveal, reality in two dimensions. Consider the common case of being asked by a stranger for directions. He does not know how to get to a theater, and you provide him directions: you tell him where to go. In this example, your honest communication reveals to him the way the world is, to his benefit. Without such revelation, the truth would be unavailable to our stranger, as would all the other goods that would be available by means of the truth, such as the stranger’s getting to the theater in time to meet his friends and enjoy the show.

But truthful communication also discloses something personal: in affirming that things are this way, not that , not only do you reveal the world to the stranger, but you reveal yourself as well: this , not that , is how you take things to be. When the stranger hears the directions, he does not just hear words; because of the personal dimension of communication, he hears you . And this disclosure’s personal nature is responsible for a well-known aspect of such small gestures of kindness to a stranger as providing accurate directions: to disclose oneself to another through honest communication is a primordial act of the creation of a community, a community which, in this case, is short-lived, but no less real for that.

It is this disclosing aspect of language that has made speech such a natural analogue, in the work of John Paul II, to the self-giving by which spouses enter into marital communion with one another—hence his image of the “language of the body.” And perhaps we can even work backwards from the mutual giving of selves in the body, which characterizes marital union, to the wrong of lying, by way of the following analogy.

Imagine the sexual receptivity of a wife towards her husband that conceals an attitude that is other than one of self-donation; such a concealment would be both a mutilation of the relationship as physically embodied in the union, and of the spouse whose actions are at odds with her inner thoughts and attitudes. More concretely, consider a spouse who fantasizes during marital intercourse about another, or thinks only of his or her own pleasure in the act, or who wishes he was unmarried. Such a spouse is damaging the relationship, but also damaging him or herself by dividing his or her self into the physical (but only illusory) giver of self, and the inner lover of self.

This is indeed quite similar to the wrong of lying. In a lie, a person divides his or her self, making her outer person to say one thing, while her “inner” self believes something else. “Inner” and “outer” are somewhat, but only somewhat, metaphorical here. One’s full self is not, in fact, disclosed just by one’s physical being in the world; it remains for one to communicate much of who and what one is to others in acts and words. When that disclosure is truthful, inner and outer are brought into harmony; when dishonest, inner and outer are sundered.

Could this division be anything but a harm to a person? We show in many ways the value of being able to present a “true face” to the world, as when we rebel at restrictions on freedom of expression, or resent an ideological pressure that prevents us from speaking freely, or when, because of our desire not to harm, we succumb to pressure and say what someone else wants to hear. We respect those who are what they seem, and who speak straightforwardly and with candor: we admire their integrity , precisely that which we see damaged in one who cannot, or will not, speak his mind.

So here is the initial harm of the lie: it divides the inner and outer self, damaging the agent’s integrity; and integrity is a great good. (I expand on this argument in my article in the American Journal of Jurisprudence “ Lying: The Integrity Approach .”)

But, as the example of the stranger in need of directions indicated, truth in self-disclosure just is the primordial means by which we establish community with another; and the forming of community—the entering into communion—with others just is what it means to love another (thus, naturally enough, as there are many forms of communion, there are many forms of love, and not all are equally appropriate to each person). But this too is damaged in the lie. The essential disclosure of persons to other persons that brings them into a unity is impossible on the foundation of dishonest communication. That communication does not disclose; it seeks to conceal.

There is thus a very strong connection between the virtue of honesty and both the integrity of the self and the unity of persons in love, and a very strong connection between dishonesty—lies—and disharmony of the self and disharmony with others. Of course, the specific truths that are communicated often can play a further role in the building up of community with others, because those truths are, as again the example of the lost stranger showed, essential to the pursuit of many other goods. Yet some truths are not essential in these ways, and yet others could be harmful, so there is no obligation to say all that one knows to be true. Such a duty is not implied by an obligation never to lie.

We now have the resources to make quick work of the central objections to the claim that it is always wrong to lie. Against the claim that double effect reasoning could play a role, for example, we see the following difference between lying and using lethal force: intending death is not intrinsic to the use of force and thus can be accepted as a side effect, but the division of the self that just is the destruction of one’s integrity is intrinsic to the telling of a lie. This harm just is part of what anyone who sets himself to assert what he does not believe to be true intends.

We thus see also why the prohibition on lying is absolute: the goods of integrity and community are fundamental goods, and in themselves, they are nothing but goods, for human persons. In themselves, they thus give us only reason to pursue and promote them for ourselves and others. Things would be different if integrity or community were good only in some respects, but not in others; we would then have reason to seek them, and reason to avoid or prevent them; but just in themselves, they are goods. Action directed at the destruction of one of these goods would thus be, as such, nothing but harmful to persons, and thus wrong. And the prohibition against lying gives witness to this. In speech and action, these goods are never to be intentionally damaged , and as we have seen, a lie always involves such intentional damage.

Of course, most lies are not just intentional damagings of the liar’s integrity, but damagings for the sake of some further good. Yet, since the damage just as such gives no reason to carry out the lie, such a choice could only be justified if the good sought were a greater good than the harm caused by the lie. Such an idea is at the heart of the reasoning of those who believe it permissible to lie to save a life. The good of life must be greater than the good of personal integrity on such an account.

Yet we have no reason to think such weighing is possible; by what measure is there more good in life than integrity? And if that is how the scales come down, than ought not a man to foreswear his faith, or abandon the truth, to save his life? Yet if the weighing is not possible, then the conclusion is clear: there can be no “exceptions” to the norm against intentionally lying, even for serious reasons.

Finally, I believe I have shown why all lies are unloving. It is not because they are not sufficiently gentle, or because they cause hurt feelings, or lose jobs. It is because they are incompatible in the deepest way with a will towards communion with others, which must always be founded on truth, both generally speaking (for falsehood does indeed bring with it many pernicious consequences for a community), and, more specifically, the truth of persons. I have no doubt that the actions of Lila Rose and her Live Action colleagues are ultimately motivated by love; but in utilizing lies and deceit, they have built on a treacherous foundation, thus threatening the entire construction.

Many of our Current Practices are Wrong, Too

The truth that all lies are wrong and that they must all be avoided is hard, no less for polities than for individuals. And this brings us to the final set of objections, which I will here address only briefly. Those objections concerned the practices of undercover work, espionage work, and other forms of journalistic, police, and governmental work that might require lying. Some have expressed surprise that these practices should be called into question; yet Augustine felt it necessary to address the morality of lying precisely in order to stop the practice of Christians infiltrating heretical sects for the defense of the faith; so questioning the legitimacy of undercover work is a very old part of the Christian tradition (I have argued against such work in a philosophical vein in my book Biomedical Research and Beyond: Expanding the Ethics of Inquiry ).

The position I have argued for here could not easily be adhered to. And a firm commitment, by any person, or any group, to avoid all lies would inevitably have radical consequences. For there is no doubt that we are surrounded by lies, by deceit, by dishonesty and that each one of us drinks of this cup too often, even in a day’s work. We would lose what we might take to be essential tools of daily life, both personally and politically, were lies taken away from us.

Yet these are only consequences of my view, they are not themselves arguments, and anyone who believes, as members of the great Abrahamic religions do, that the Father of Lies is at the root of much evil, must make a constant struggle not to let their commitment to truth become obscured by the demands of the fallen world. That we have become conformed in our social practice to lies as an essential part of the defense of the realm, and for the protection of citizens, just as in our personal lives, is a fact; indeed, this conformity is, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, the very demand which evil and violence make upon us: “obedience to lies and daily participation in lies.” But this participation is neither an inevitability, nor, in my view, a reflection of what is genuinely demanded by truth and love.

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Do You Believe In White Lies?

Undefined Undefined / Getty Images 

White Lies vs. Real Lies

• Things to Consider

Why Do People Lie?

• Risks of Lies

Benefits of Honesty

When it’s necessary to lie.

Is it okay to lie? Or do you believe in white lies? A white lie is a lie that is considered harmless or trivial. Such lies are often told to spare hurting someone's feelings.

The term dates back to the 14th century and is linked to historical color associations that suggest that white symbolizes "morally pure" and that black symbolizes "sinister intent."

While most people agree that lies are damaging, destructive, and downright wrong, there are times when people tell what they think are harmless lies as a way to prevent further harm. If you’ve ever told a child that Santa Claus was on his way in his sleigh or that you loved the weird socks that your aunt sent as a gift, you lied. But you can let yourself off the hook.

These were more like white lies. With a real lie, the intent is malicious and the consequence is serious. While with a white lie, often more like a harmless bending of the truth, the intent is benign and positive, and usually, the consequence isn’t major.

The adage that you always should tell the truth is mostly right, but in some situations fibs or white lies have a purpose.

The question of whether it is okay to lie often comes down to whether you are telling a white lie or a real lie. White lies are often innocuous. We tell them to create a magical world for our children, or, more often, as a way to be polite and demonstrate social manners. Some examples of white lies include:

• Telling someone they look great in an outfit
• Saying that you are on your way to meet someone so you can't stay and chat
• Laughing at a joke that wasn't really funny
• Telling someone that you'll call them later
• Saying that you didn't see a text that someone sent you

Overall, white lies are for beneficial purposes. Being totally honest in some cases would create unpleasantness or be offensive. Some view white lies as a sign of civility.

Real lies tend to be more self-serving. They may result in negative consequences for yourself and others.

Told to protect others

Self-protective

Avoid awkward situations

Told to benefit the self

Self-serving

Create pain and discomfort for others

How White Lies Can Be Good for Us

If you believe in white lies, then you probably feel that such fibs serve an important purpose such as protecting someone's feelings. If we lie to benefit other people, these are considered white lies. Here’s a good illustration: A student had a hard time his first week at college and told his parents he was doing well so they wouldn’t worry.

In this situation, he was thinking about other people’s feelings and was guided by empathy and kindness. The second week he adjusted and was glad he didn’t upset his parents prematurely.

Scientists call these well-intended falsehoods prosocial lies . These differ from antisocial lies, which are told for personal gain. According to research, prosocial lies can actually build trust and a sense of benevolence between people.

How Real Lies Can Be Bad for Us

With real lies, the intent is often selfish. These are the most damaging kinds of lies. To find evidence of them, look for falsehoods that promote a person’s self-interests obviously at the expense of others.

To make it clearer, if your best girlfriend asks how she looks in her new dress and you think it’s too tight, but you say she looks great to boost her self-esteem, that’s a white lie. But complimenting her because you want to look better than her at the party, which is competitive and more indicative of selfish intent is a real lie.

When it comes to truth telling, deception and trust, real lies can be destructive. If things don’t add up or if you suspect someone of lying , there are ways to find out.

Before You Decide If It's Okay to Lie

Let's look at what you might want to think about before you decide to tell a white lie or a real lie.

Evaluate the Intention

When someone lies out of altruism to protect others or ease their pain, these lies are considered acceptable white lies. White lies usually benefit the person listening.

For example, if your neighbor is dying of cancer, rather than frighten your young son with his impending death, it’s okay to say he’s not feeling well right now.

This is an example of prosocial lying and reflects empathy and compassion . It also takes into account what is age appropriate for your son.

Consider the Long-Term Consequences

While white lies are often minor or inconsequential, real lies have far reaching effects. Real lies tend to initially benefit the liar, too.

For example, if Dan took the data his co-worker amassed and presented the project as his own, Dan blatantly lied and acted in a self-serving and clearly untruthful way. When his supervisor learned the truth, Dan was sent to human resources as a consequence.

Overall, it's important to look at the morality and societal acceptance of the type of life. White lies are acceptable and help our society function. Real lies are deemed to be universally wrong.

There are many reasons why people lie. Some common motives for lying include:

To Be Considerate

Lying out of consideration can mean protecting someone else’s feelings, for the sake of diplomacy, or to keep stability in our relationships. These are the common white lies that help us maintain harmony with our spouses, family, friends, and neighbors.

For example, if your child just began studying violin and is making a horrible racket, you might tell him he sounds fantastic to encourage him.

To Protect Our Ego and Self-Image

Another reason why we don’t tell the truth is based on psychological compensation: to protect how we're perceived by others. Rather than admit you lost your job, for example, you might tell your sibling that you quit because it was no longer challenging enough.

To Compensate for Our Sensitivity to Power

For example, rather than question your boss’s new plan which you find shaky, you feel compelled to support it. You respond by saying that you love the plan to protect your job.

People tell white lies to protect others, protect the self, and defer to those in power.

The Danger of Telling Too Many Lies

A 2016 study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience showed that the brain adapts to dishonesty. The more participants engaged in self-serving dishonesty, the more likely that behavior would increase with repetition. Small acts escalated into bigger transgressions.

That’s as good a reason as ever to stop lying. Even seemingly innocuous lies can become a habit, like second nature. In fact, it may become easier than being honest. You get to spare people’s feelings and pretend you are less flawed than you are. That can be very enticing.

The second danger of telling too many lies might result in not getting the help you need. For example, saying "I'm fine," which seems like an innocuous fib, masks the fact that you are still struggling on many fronts. This may preclude others from suggesting you get mental health counseling or you yourself from realizing that you could benefit from therapy.

You must always be honest with yourself about what you’re doing and why. Then you must try to be as honest as you can be with loved ones. We are all human, but that should be the goal.

So is it ever okay to lie to your significant other? There are times when you might tell a white lie to protect your partner, but as in other cases, telling the truth is generally the best policy . Telling lies, particularly those that involve serious deception, can erode the trust and intimacy in your relationship.

After all, if your partner doesn’t know the truth and how you are evolving as a person, that person doesn’t know the real you. You are not experiencing real intimacy then.

Intimacy demands vulnerability and honesty. You might also be depriving your family of the chance to show you that they see you for all your foibles and accept and love you as you are.

Less Lying Has Been Linked to Better Health

Evidence shows that Americans average about 11 lies per week. Another reason to strive to tell the truth and reduce lies? Anita E. Kelly, PhD, professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame discovered during her research that participants who reduced lies and tried to live more honestly actually reported improved relationships and better mental and physical health.

Participants stopped making excuses for being late or not completing tasks. They also figured out other ways to avoid lying and the results were significant.

So what is a good reason to lie? Sometimes the stakes are high and lies are necessary to safeguard someone’s well-being. In these types of situations, lying for the sake of protecting yourself or loved ones is deemed acceptable:

• Lying to an abuser to escape from or protect someone from domestic abuse.
• Lying to an abuser to protect children from child abuse.
• Lying to someone who is playing with weapons.
• Lying to someone who seems intoxicated or on drugs.
• Lying to someone who seems to be experiencing a mental health issue.

Is it OK to lie to protect yourself?

While honesty is usually the best policy, it is okay to lie to protect yourself or someone else. Such lies can help ensure your safety in the moment until you are in a safer situation.

Lying to Our Loved Ones

What if our relatives are grappling with mental health problems or impairment? And it’s not an emergency situation, but it’s clear there is an ongoing problem. Sometimes lies are necessary to help them.

Meredith Gordon Resnick , LCSW, says, “Studies show that for people with severe dementia, sometimes telling an untruth, and doing it carefully and mindfully so as not to undermine trust, may be appropriate."

"Challenging someone with severe memory impairment to 'face the truth' of certain situations—even those that seem benign to someone else—can cause agitation and fear, and can break trust, too. It’s a delicate, individual balance," she also notes.

A Word From Verywell

So while honesty is usually the best policy, there are exceptions. Just about all religions and belief systems, however, extol the virtue of honesty. So while it’s okay to lie, in most cases, it’s better to strive not to.

Columbia Journalism Review. The true origins of 'white lies .'

Levine E, Schweitzer M. Prosocial lies: When deception breeds trust . Org Behav Hum Decis Process . 2015;126:88-106. doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2014.10.007

Garrett N, Lazzaro SC, Ariely D, Sharot T. The brain adapts to dishonesty .  Nat Neurosci . 2016;19(12):1727-1732. doi:10.1038/nn.4426

American Psychological Association. Lying less linked to better health, new research finds .

By Barbara Field Barbara is a writer and speaker who is passionate about mental health, overall wellness, and women's issues.

Home / Essay Samples / Literature / Lying / The Reasons Of Lying, And How It Impacts Us

The Reasons Of Lying, And How It Impacts Us

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