Not Telling the Truth

I HAVE BEEN TOLD by many people that I am an extremely honest person. I can assure you that that they are quite wrong about my honesty. They are mistaking bluntness for honesty. I do not shy away from telling the truth about controversial, awkward situations. If I think someone is full of it, I am likely to say so. I am not reluctant to make highly critical comments about myself. If I am afraid of something, I usually admit it. If I happen to believe that masturbation is an excellent alternative to sexual promiscuity or sexual frustration, I say so. Because of my willingness to make blunt statements about controversial topics, people think me honest. I am actually, however, quite the little liar. The very fact that I confess this so openly is one example of my forthrightness, but do not mistake it for honesty. I am just as likely to tell you that I have an important meeting to go to as to tell you that you bore me, and I am desperate to get away from you. That's my brand of dishonesty. Its a common brand. Sociologist at Duke U. Dan Ariely recently published a fascinating study of human behavior and dishonesty: "The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone, Especially Ourselves." And the answer is, yes, we all are liars, as I am sure any honest person could agree. Ariely and his coresearchers conducted many simple, revealing experiments to make their determinations. Much research has been done on human dishonesty; it all tends to conform Ariely's work, but he takes it a step further, and includes amusing anecdotes from his personal life to substantiate his findings. He tells an hilarious story of pretending to have a disability making it difficult for him to stand for long periods of time, in order to be moved ahead in a long line at an airport, then boarding an airplane in a wheel chair, and becoming so convinced of his own lie that he later formally complained to the airline about his shabby treatment on board the plane, in his wheelchair. We lie to ourselves as much as we lie to others. To an extent, we are likely to lie to others the more we think we can get away with it, the less likely it seems that negative consequences or punishment will result if caught, and the less severe the punishment is likely to be if we are caught. Highly imaginative, creative people are more likely to lie than dull, uncreative people, which is perhaps a surprising result. But merely calculating the odds of personal gain and weighing the gain against the likelihood of negative consequences if or lies are detected is not the actual reasons why people lie. A complicated combination if factors enters into it, and those factors produce a pattern of dishonesty from which nobody can completely escape. Nobody makes it through life by never telling a lie, but only by telling many of them. As Goethe said: 'we resist the truth only because we think we would perish if we accepted it." We lie because we are, in a sense hard wired to lie; millions of years of deceptive behavior, hiding form larger, predatory animals, engaging in warfare with enemies, and using deception as a strategy to win wars, surviving in complex societies, makes liars out of all of us. Although we all lie, we all greatly prefer to think of ourselves as honest, as having the highest integrity. For that reason, almost every human on the planet describes himself or herself as a basically honest person, and nearly everyone on the planet, by saying and believing this, is lying to the world, and to him or her self.