Hello, and welcome to a real conversation between two native English speakers.
I'm Liz Waid, and this is Adam Navis.
Hello, everyone.
Sorry, I guess I usually say, hi, Adam, but I just ... Anyway, this is how this morning is going.
We're just going with the flow, which I feel like is a very spotlight thing to do.
Yes.
But we are actually here to talk about the Spotlight English program, Why Do People Lie?
No, we're not.
And I am... See?
See what I just did there?
I told a lie.
So I told a lie.
Lie all around.
I told a lie to make a joke.
Yes, exactly.
So we're going to talk about why people lie.
And if you have not checked out that program yet, if you haven't listened to it or read through it, you can find it on our website at spotlightenglishcom.
And if you would prefer to go to YouTube, you can go to YouTube.
Our channel is Spotlight English.
You can find us there and you can listen to the program and read along as a video plays.
Or if you prefer podcasts and you just prefer to listen to it, check it out on a podcast, wherever you get podcasts.
And we would love to have you listen to that program.
And then come on over here with us in this discussion, this conversation where we talk about what is going on when people lie.
And so, Adam.
Yes.
How often do you lie?
Now, be honest.
Um.
Well, it's very rare that I lie to a high quality lie.
I try to be honest.
I try to- That is true.
I believe you to be a very honest person.
Thank you.
I know you to be a very honest person.
But if we have a wide view of lying, I probably do lie at least a couple times a day.
For instance, if you would say to me, hey, how does my hair look today?
Let's say we're getting ready for this.
And I would say, oh, it would look good.
And I wouldn't critically evaluate your hair to the level that if you were going to a fancy wedding or something like that,
So it's not really a lie.
Well, I hope you would tell me if my hair looked bad.
Well, I would if it looked bad.
But I'm trying to think of those things where you don't tell the full truth.
So maybe that's a bad example.
You know, if someone made a good meal and it was good but not great, I wouldn't be like no, this is bad.
I don't want you to ever make this again.
I would appreciate that they had put in the time and the effort to make something for me.
Yeah, that's true.
I think if you're thinking about, like you know, maybe little lies you tell during the day, maybe they don't matter or whatever.
And we'll talk about this a little bit later in the program, I think.
I think if you have kids, sometimes that impacts your lying.
And now I'm not saying that I lie to my kids.
I think that's exactly what you're saying.
No, it's not what I'm saying.
But like Um you know, I do know that like some parents, I'll say um, you know, maybe there's a noisy toy right?
That has a lot of, that has batteries in it and it makes a lot of very annoying noise.
And we have a nice program about how sometimes noise is too much in your life and you need to get rid of noise.
So maybe you took the batteries out of that toy and the kid um, you know, wants the, wants the noise from the toy and you say oh, that toy is broken.
Or it ran out of batteries.
Right.
Now that's a lie, but does it really matter?
That's a hard one.
I feel like you would be like, yeah, you should never say that.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
But sometimes I reach a limit and I'm like, no, that needs to stop.
OK, so I agree that like with children, you know, I think when there's power dynamics at play, that's interesting because, you know, we've also I've also had people in my life, relatives as they get very old and have kind of lost uh their ability to understand where they are in the world they they lose a sense of who's alive and who's dead and sometimes lying to them uh to say oh yeah that person wouldn't it be nice you know if they came over and you kind of i mean essentially you don't have to constantly remind them that they're that the people that they care about have already died um Do you remember that we have a program about this?
I don't I don't mean to always bring it back to spotlight programs, but we do have a great program about that exact thing about caring for people with dementia.
I think it's called dementia care.
So people who can't remember or whatever they can come live in this village where they essentially just live a safe and healthy life and they don't have to worry about the truth outside of that village but they can be happy inside it.
They don't have to constantly learn about something sad in their lives or that people they loved have died.
These days I feel like if that village were offered to me, I would take that village yeah um well, okay.
So yes, i think i think a lot of people do lie in their lives um, at least in a little bit um.
So what makes that something that we do or not do, like what are those sort of things?
And that is what this program is really about.
I love that.
It um, it starts with an example from a study.
So somebody actually did a study um, where they dropped wallets, so something that people keep their money and maybe like a picture of their kids or their family or their loved one um, and it had some, it had a key in it and some of the wallets had a little bit amount of money and some of them had a lot of money and they basically brought these wallets.
I think there were 17 000 of them.
They brought them to Yeah, huge.
So they brought them to different countries all around the world and they brought them to hotels and police stations and there were other places that they brought them.
Anyway, places that people would turn in wallets and they would tell the people they're like here.
I found this on the sidewalk outside.
Can you please go find out whose it is and return it to them?
And then the the person running the study would leave or whoever was dropping it off.
And then there was a phone number inside the wallets, I think, or some way to contact the study.
And they studied how many of these wallets were returned and they found some really weird things.
So, for example, Adam, I know you would return a wallet.
I would.
I would.
I know, me too.
I've got a good story about something that happened to me, but I want to hear more about this.
Yes.
Oh, I can't wait to hear it.
Okay, so basically they found a couple things.
One if the wallet had more money in it.
If it had say, 100 US dollars versus 10 US dollars, they were more likely to return a wallet with more money.
Right. which seems counterintuitive.
You would think that maybe somebody would take the money and then return the wallet or whatever.
Yeah.
They also found that it was more likely it would be returned if it had a key in it.
Um yeah maybe yeah maybe, like somebody thought oh, they must need that key or whatever.
So some of these things um, we talk about in the program, and that was this is a great experiment, i think, to learn about.
Yeah anyway, but i would love to hear your story about oh.
What i was saying though, is and this is this is a nice way to segue into what you're saying is like so if you were that person who got that wallet, what would you do?
Would you be honest?
So here's the story.
That's great.
Yeah.
Okay.
So my story is a little different because it doesn't involve a wallet.
But this was many years ago when I was a college student.
I was going up to an automatic teller machine to withdraw some money.
This is just one of those machines.
And I can't remember if I was in a car and it was one that you drive up to or not.
Right.
But I walked up to the machine.
Nobody was around anywhere.
And it was, you know, in the evening, not too late.
I walked up to the machine and on the screen it said, would you like another transaction?
Yes.
Ooh.
So in that moment I realized that someone had left their card in the machine and the machine was active.
I could say, withdraw $200.
You could have cleaned them out.
Could have cleaned them out.
So in the comments below, I want everybody to put what you think I did.
Stop this video.
Type what you think I did.
Yeah.
Type it in.
Can I guess what you did?
And then come back and press play and now I'll tell you.
So what I did was I pressed... I can guess what you did.
No.
Okay, fine.
I pressed get the card back.
So I took the card.
So now I have someone's bank card.
Yeah.
And I will be honest.
It did occur to me that there is at those little places they do have cameras, so they would see my face.
So even if I took money out, I would get caught.
That's true.
That's true.
So that gets back into why people lie or maybe, you know, if they think they're going to get caught.
So I knew I would get caught.
So, I mean, I would like to have, you know, be a good person, but also I knew I didn't want to get.
So I found the card.
And I was able to find a name of somebody who lived nearby through.
I don't remember how I found this, but You didn't recognize this person.
I didn't know this person.
It was just, you know, any old name.
But...
So I went there and I called, I found a phone number.
They're like, oh yeah, could you drop it off?
And I thought, could I drop it off?
Why don't you come and get it?
I was a little like, they weren't thankful.
They were kind of grumpy.
And I thought well, this isn't fun.
So yeah, i wonder if that influences it as well, like maybe that experience would influence.
Yeah, if you found that again, i thought i'd get a little reward, you know, because i was like i could have taken all your money.
But yeah, so the end of the story is, though i i got to this house, and it wasn't easy.
I didn't have a car at the time, so it took a little.
You did drop it off, i did.
I knocked on the door wow, and he said come in.
I was like come in, you're not even going to come to the door.
Well, it turns out This person was in a wheelchair and had like two broken legs.
Oh my goodness.
So I felt really bad and I think was on some pain medication, had had some leg surgery.
So here's another element to... whether people lie.
And now I know this was stealing a little bit, like we're getting into stealing.
Right.
But who are you lying to?
Who are you stealing from?
Because once I saw that, my whole story I was telling myself changed.
And I thought oh, if they had been some like you know, I'm a millionaire, and oh, I would have been like oh, he could have given me a 20 reward or something like that.
But I was like oh, you know, it made me feel good that I hadn't, you know, stolen or lied or done anything like that.
Yeah, that's interesting.
Yeah, there's an example in the program as well of, like you know, your stereotypes influence whether you will be honest or not.
So if you think that all people are, the example in the program is you know, if you think all people from a country are not honest, you maybe won't be honest toward those people.
So, but you know, if you have stereotypes about anybody, you know, maybe you would have a stereotype about millionaires.
Right.
And is it better to lie to a millionaire than to, you know, somebody who's not rich?
Well, with money.
Yeah.
Or like to not lie at all.
I, you know, honestly.
OK, so part of the reason and I think I think most of the what I took from this program that most of the reason that people don't lie, that they are honest, is is because of empathy.
And they put themselves in the position of that person who lost that wallet, or lost that ATM card, or who they're about to take advantage of.
And they put themselves in the position of that person and they feel like what would I feel like if someone was dishonest to me?
Which also means that if they feel people are dishonest to them, they might be more likely to be dishonest.
So I think that's a big part of what I took away from this program is that when you put yourself in someone else's position, you really are more honest.
Yeah, I think that's I think not only are you more honest, but you are all all all good things.
You're more patient.
You are more kind.
You're more gracious.
All all the ways that you would like to be treated.
I think you start to have those characteristics in yourself.
And that's why, you know, empathy is so important in all things.
Yeah.
Yeah, so this.
So I would say this if you haven't, if you've gotten all the way through this and you have not listened to this program, it's a very interesting study that's talked about.
There are some interesting things that we haven't had a chance to get to about different countries' honesty level or about different.
There were two different studies and one was more honest in one way.
One and the other.
Yeah, that is strange, isn't it?
That a country that was more honest in one experiment was less honest in another experiment, depending on what you could do.
Right.
It is really interesting.
Well, studying people is interesting.
Yeah, and that's why we're so, I mean, this is just what we love to do is talk about.
I mean, Spotlight is a great way to practice your English, but it's a fascinating way to engage with the world.
And I think we're pretty proud of this particular program.
Yeah, so yeah, it is.
It's really cool and i think, like you touched on before you know with, maybe like older people or with with kids, when we were talking about that, like it really does impact so much of our lives and like how we interact with the world.
So i would love to hear like, what people would do in that experiment, like do you think of yourself as an honest person?
Have you ever been in that position?
Or have you ever been in that position and maybe made a choice that you were not proud of later?
Don't put anything in the comments that will get you arrested.
We don't want confessions.
Please don't.
But we do have some great concrete ideas at the end of the program for, if you want to be more honest,
There are some ways that you can stop lying in your life or be more honest going forward.
And so we really hope that you check this program out.
And while you're doing that, if you're on YouTube, if you could give this program a little like either on the original program or on this program, that would be really helpful to us.
I'll be real honest.
It will be really helpful.
And so you can also subscribe so that you never miss any Spotlight English content.
And we hope that you check out this program, the advanced version, and even the no music version.
Any of those versions that are good for you, on our website, on our podcast, on YouTube, Instagram or Twitter and anywhere else that you get your podcasts.
So, yeah, let us know what you think of this program and visit our website at spotlightenglish.com.
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Those are all of the ways that you can help support Spotlight but also grow in your English learning and practicing.
And so until next time, be honest, come back.
Yes.
And until next time, listen, watch, practice, and learn.
Spotlight out.
