Happier, Healthier, More Dishonest
Statistically speaking, you have most likely lied or been lied to today. In 2002, Robert Feldman, a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, conducted a study to investigate lying. After secretly videotaping students’ conversations with strangers, he asked the students to examine their videotapes and identify the untruths they had told. On average, the students admitted to telling three lies for every ten minutes of conversation. A lie is a form of deception. A lie communicates some information that the liar believes to be untrue for the intent to deceive or mislead.
Therefore, given how readily everyone lies, we should re-examine our prejudice against it and consider the possibility that lying is not always wrong. Certain types of lies are not only harmless, but are actually beneficial. Although the distinction between destructive and favorable lies can be a fine one, there are two circumstances in which lying can be positive: when one embellishes the truth and when one tells a white lie.
Feldman’s study indicates that we lie constantly, which is supposedly immoral. However, the frequent and casual lies that the students told harmed nobody because they were simple embellishments of a day-to-day conversation. The strangers who were lied to weren’t damaged nor were the lying students themselves. Offhand lies, or embellishments, are the first instance in which lying can be harmless. Moreover, lying in the form of small enrichments can have positive psychological effects, experts say. In a study released last year, researchers found that college students who exaggerated their GPA in interviews later showed improvement in their grades. Their "enhancements," in other words, became self-fulfilling. "Exaggerators tend to be more confident and have higher goals for achievement," explains Richard Gramzow, a psychologist at the University of Southampton in England and one of the study’s co-authors. "Positive biases about the self can be beneficial."
A senior I know rocks back and forth testing the security of the cheap, itchy red chair provided in all the single dormitory rooms. It is eleven thirty at night but, unlike some of her fellow Exonians, she sits cross-legged, careless and relaxed: she has had a place at an Ivy League school since the autumn. "I wrote about my role in yoga club at Exeter," she declares in a serious manner, recounting the contents of her application essay. "I focused on how I incorporated my leadership skills and innovative personality," she begins to grin, "In particular I pointed out that I invited a yoga guru to Exeter to teach one of our sessions, which shows that I am independent and interesting, right?" She leans back in the chair and chuckles. "Yoga club only ever had two sessions, but of course," she quickly adds, "I didn’t put that part down." This student not only represents thousands of seniors who embellish their applications each year when applying for college, but millions of people who stretch the truth to make themselves better candidates.
Another type of lie, known as the "white lie," is a morally trivial untruth that is not intended to harm the person being lied to, nor anyone else. In fact white lies often aim to benefit the person being lied to by making him or her feel good, or preventing his or her feelings from being hurt. "In certain situations, such as when someone asks you if you like the awful meal they just served you or the hideous outfit they are wearing, it probably takes less thinking to tell the expected polite lie than the more difficult truth," explains University of California-Santa Barbara psychologist Bella DePaulo.
Such equivocation might be a necessary social evil, say researchers who have recently discovered that some fibbing might actually be good for you. "We use lies to grease the wheels of social discourse," says University of Massachusetts psychologist Robert Feldman. "It’s socially useful to tell lies." The distinction between white lies and harmful lies, however, is a subtle one. Mavis Cheek, author of ‘"Truth to Tell," wrote an entire book inspired from witnessing a situation of the juxtaposition of two types of lies:
"I began thinking about truth and lies while staying with friends some time ago. One evening, the husband, my host, was watching yet another politician on the news denying he had been deceitful about some scandal or other. Suddenly he was on his feet, yelling at the television in absolute fury. "Liar, Liar!," he shouted, apoplectic with rage, his ear tips a colour I’d never seen on skin before. I was tremendously impressed with his integrity. But, an hour or so later, there came a phone-call from a mutual friend who lives nearby. This person was not someone we greatly liked, but she invited us to dinner the following evening. Smooth as silk, my friend’s husband said: ‘Oh, we’d love to, but we’ve got tickets to go to the theatre.’ I was amazed. We hadn’t. He was lying. One minute he was leaping up and down in a fury at someone else apparently telling lies, and the next he was doing it himself."
In Cheek’s instantaneous response to the situation, she unwittingly grouped both types of lies together. They are different, however. A politician lying on television is an immoral lie. Cheek’s friend lying about tickets to the theatre in order to avoid hurting a mutual friend’s feelings is a harmless white lie.
White lies are also an integral part of medicine in the form of "placebos." Placebos can be sugar pills, salt-water injections or any medical procedure which has no specific effect on a patient’s condition, but which have powerful psychological effects leading to relief from symptoms. Placebos are white lies in a tangible, edible, injectable form. Sissela Bok asserted in her book on lying that: "many doctors would contend that placebos are both far less dangerous than some genuine drugs and, more likely to produce a cure than if nothing at all is prescribed." She supports her argument with a section of a letter written to the Lancet: "whenever pain can be relieved with a ml of saline, why should we inject an opiate? Do anxieties or discomforts that are allayed with starch capsules require administrations of a barbiturate, diazepam, or propoxyphene?"
Oscar Wilde once said, "lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art." Therefore, just as Van Gogh infused yellow spirals into the dark and light blues across the night’s sky in "Starry Night," just as Picasso composed his "Weeping Women" of different colored geometric shapes, with eyes that, without pupils or corneas, look like smashed circular mirrors, humans use lying to innocently enhance life. Perhaps the student did not practice yoga every week, perhaps the patient did not receive "official" treatment and perhaps Picasso’s ‘Weeping Women’s’ hands were not green; nevertheless, Lisa is going to an Ivy League college, the patient was cured of a malignant disease without poisonous treatment and Picasso’s painting is revered as a masterpiece. All of these people were liars or were lied to. So, statistically speaking, because you have most likely lied or been lied to today, you are one advantageous lie closer to a better life.