Like it or not, we humans are born to lie. The desire to control information and how it is shared is part of who we are and how we live our lives. In fact, our brains are designed to lie—sort of.
Basically, we are born half-baked. We spend much of our youth learning about "reality," at least the way our family and friends see it.
Then as we grow up, we build a community with whom we share core values, beliefs and ways of doing things — also known as culture. Once we are comfortable living in that "reality," we believe it to be the true one. Our brains then sort everything from then on through a filter that only "sees" what fits that reality.
What is a lie, then?
An "official" lie misleads, deliberately conveying a false impression. There is intentionality to it. But for most of us, we typically see ourselves as the "truth" and the hero, so when we tell something that is not "exactly correct" to another, we are using our stories to build a reality that puts us in control, often without us even realizing we're doing it.
Leonard Saxe, Ph.D., a polygraph expert and professor of psychology at Brandeis University, has this to say on the subject: "Lying has long been a part of everyday life. We couldn't get through the day without being deceptive."
Research shows that we lie in everyday life — often.
Twenty years ago, in the midst of the Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton "lies," Bella DePaulo, Ph.D., a psychologist at the University of Virginia who has become world-renowned for her work on deception, conducted a famous study about deception and lying. She asked 147 people between the ages of 18 and 71 to keep diaries of all the falsehoods or lies they told over a week.
The results: Most people, she found, lie once or twice a day — almost as often as they snack from the refrigerator or brush their teeth.
Both men and women lie in approximately one-fifth of their social exchanges lasting 10 or more minutes, over the course of a week. In their conversations and communications, they deceive about 30% of those with whom they interact one-on-one.
Furthermore, some types of relationships, such as those between parents and teens, are virtual magnets for deception: “College students lie to their mothers in one out of two conversations,” DePaulo reports.
She found that all of us create a fictitious story about the life we are supposed to be living, whether it involves love, sex, cheating, shoplifting, family relationships, sickness, achievements or work.
Some of her research subjects actually admitted to living a lie. This, of course, raises the question: What is a "true" life versus a fictional one?
When you compliment your friend's awful outfit or tell your boss how great she is when you think her work stinks, you're not just "sucking up," you're lying. And as DePaulo's research proves, you're far from alone.
Our understanding of "reality" is to a large extent shaped by how our family and friends present it to us as we're growing up. And as we get older, we build a community around ourselves containing those with whom we share the same core values, beliefs and ways of doing things—also known as culture. Our brains then sort everything from then on through a filter that only "sees" what fits that reality.
If you think these "lying" statistics don't apply to you, think again.
Think you're above this habitual lying which DePaulo’s study revealed? Consider this: When you compliment your friend's awful outfit, or tell your boss how great he is when his work stinks, you're not just "sucking up," you're lying.
So what really is a lie?
The 5 most important rules of lying
Throughout your life as you interact with a multitude of people in companies, organizations, clubs and even your family, as we do as corporate anthropologists, you'll find that, no matter what group they're in, people tend to create a story that helps them keep their social network operating and their relationships intact.
To do that, they seem to follow these rules that Paul Grice developed which help people understand how to communicate and interrelate:
1. Rule of Quality: People are expected to speak the "truth" in order to be accurate and honest.
2. Rule of Quantity: They relay just enough information to communicate what's going on without extensive detail unless someone pushes them for more.
3. Rule of Relation: People are expected to talk about things that are related to each other (not go off on tangents about the weather, etc).
4. Rule of Manner: The conversation or story-sharing should be direct and to the point.
5. And the most important Rule of Lying: BREAK ALL OF THE ABOVE.
Ok, so we lie — a lot. But should we always be entirely truthful?
Is it really worth your while to tell a friend her new shoes are hideous? To tell your boyfriend exactly why you're breaking up? In essence, could any of our relationships survive if we were really, truly honest?
As an anthropologist, I realize that at their core, these relationships do have a foundation based on "truths," but more often than not, what holds them together is a bunch of lies.
And that's the truth.