Almost Everyone Lies

From an article of the same title in today's Washington Post:

Experiments have found that ordinary people tell about two lies every 10 minutes, with some people getting in as many as a dozen falsehoods in that period. More interestingly...Feldman also found that liars tend to be more popular than honest people. "It is not that lying makes you popular, but knowing when to say something and not be completely blunt is in fact a social skill," Feldman said. "We don't want to hear hurtful things, so a person who is totally honest may not be as popular as someone who lies. This is not to say lying is a good thing, but it is the way the social world operates."

Everyone would agree that telling a Nazi knocking at your door that you are not harboring Jews is a lie worth telling -- a heroic, necessary lie. What is harder to understand is that many people who lie for what we feel are contemptible reasons see themselves in the same heroic light.

"We want everyone to be honest, but it is not clear what to do when honesty bumps up against other values -- caring about another person, their feelings," said Bella DePaulo, a social psychologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara. "People say they want to hear the truth, but that is in the abstract. Would you tell someone, 'Tell me all the things about me you don't like, all the things that annoy you'?"

It's supposed to be simple, right? Honesty is the best policy. It's wrong to lie. But then there's those little white lies and the classic Nazi knocking on the door dilemma. Honesty is sometimes called brutal for a reason. I don't know what I think about rationalization of dishonesty.