Overcoming Bias

Share this post

Today Is Honesty Day

www.overcomingbias.com

Today Is Honesty Day

Robin Hanson
Apr 30, 2007
Share this post

Today Is Honesty Day

www.overcomingbias.com

Today is Honesty Day.   I challenge you to engage in some self-experimentation and see how long you can go without lying today.   From a February Washington Post article:

Ordinary people tell about two lies every 10 minutes, with some people getting in as many as a dozen falsehoods in that period. … liars tend to be more popular than honest people. … A lot of research shows that serious lies are almost always told with the best of intentions. …  Saxe found in one experiment that nearly 85 percent of college students had lied in the course of a romantic relationship, most often about another relationship. (These were lies that people voluntarily admitted to Saxe, which means the actual number of lies and liars was probably higher.) Nearly to a person, the liars said they were trying to protect the feelings of someone they cared about. …

DePaulo once conducted a study in which she asked people to recall the worst lie they had ever told and the worst lie ever told to them. … many young people reported that the worst lie ever told to them was by a parent who concealed news that someone they loved was sick or dying. By contrast, DePaulo found, parents never thought of such deceptions as particularly serious ethical breaches — in fact, they saw them as acts of love.

We lie to ourselves, telling ourselves that we lie to protect others, but those others are not nearly as grateful as we think. 

Share this post

Today Is Honesty Day

www.overcomingbias.com
Comments
TopNewCommunity

No posts

Ready for more?

© 2023 Robin Hanson
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start WritingGet the app
Substack is the home for great writing