The Excitement of Being Fake Happy: Research on Why We Lie.
Jordan (Harvard/APA/TEDx) Bridger
Founder @ Nudge Culture | Behavioral Scientist who is Skeptical of Behavioral Science — Coach, AI Training Expert & ADHD TRAINER
PREVIEW FROM THE FULL ARTICLE:
To put lying in an ethical category hides the reality that lying is inherent to how we all operate as human beings.
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Do you remember that moment when you were a young child and your mom or dad asked you if you had eaten that last cookie from the cookie jar — and you sheepishly looked up [with the crumbs still dropping off the front of your Izod t-shirt?] and emphatically said, “NO!”.
Both of you knew you were lying. It was simultaneously innocent, cute and also the moment you learned that lying has its benefits. It’s true — lying has value in different social settings.
[However, and its important to keep this in mind, lying only exists because we have socially agreed upon the idea that how we use our words are inherently true or false. ]
Depending on where we are or who we are with, telling a small lie might be worth saving a friendship or a marriage. It becomes problematic though, when we think the loss is greater than the lie itself. For example, telling someone they look good even when they don’t, is a more acceptable lie than someone who lies (or witholds) their taxes. Loads of other examples exist that assume loss aversion is guiding whether or not we tell the truth to others.
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Context is king — especially when it comes to telling the truth. It’s a purely subjective idea and yet we have universal rules; both unspoken & spoken.
We show that loss aversion predicts that the extent to which individuals behave dishonestly is sensitive to the probability of observed outcomes because this probability affects the payoff that is expected to be observed; the expected payoff in turn affects the loss-averse utility of honest and dishonest reports. If individuals suffer more from losses than they enjoy equivalent gains, as loss aversion contends (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979, Kahneman and Tversky, 1992), then they gain more utility from being dishonest the further the realized outcome is below the payoff that they expected to observe.
This is just a glorified way of saying that we are more willing to lie if there is a greater chance of getting what we want. So, its the achieved desire that drives us to increase a level of lying, as well as how much we will continue to lie. The frequency of lying is determined by how close we think we are to getting our achieved desire.?
What are YOUR thoughts? LEAVE them below.
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