Hi NSQers, we're off this week, so we're sharing one of our favorite episodes from
the early days of the show.
We'll be back next week with a brand new episode.
In the meantime, enjoy this conversation from the NSQ Archive.
Wow, maybe she doesn't really have it together.
I'm Angela Duckworth.
I'm Steven Dubner.
And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.
Today on the show, when is it okay to tell a lie?
I feel that I get more honest the older I get, or maybe it's just cranky is the better word.
Hello Angela.
Steven.
I hope you don't mind me asking you a fairly personal question, but I want to know how many
times a day do you tell a lie? And when and why is it okay to lie? And maybe the answer to both
questions is never, but I think that would put you well outside the normal range of humans.
I would like to say that I go days, if not weeks or months without a single lie.
Wow.
I said I would like to say that.
Oh, you'd like to say that. I would like to be six five.
Right, okay. I do think though Steven, that if we define a lie as intentional deception,
then I definitely go days without lying. I'm not saying that every day go without lying.
I'm going to just ballpark this and say that my average lying rate is 0.5 lies per day.
Okay, so your ALR, average lying rate, is 0.5 daily. How do you think that compares
to the rest of humankind?
I would imagine, and I'm guessing this in part because I'm pretty familiar with Dan Ariely,
the psychologist, and his research on lying. And he says that most people lie a little. Not many
people lie a lot, but most people lie a little. And by the way, when I'm talking about a lie every
other day, that includes white lies.
So give me an example of your median lie.
For example, if somebody asked me to review an article for a scientific journal,
and I click no, I decline. And then the next screen says, why are you not able to review
this article? And the default response is, I don't have expertise. I usually just press next.
I don't think like, oh God, I should probably be honest, which is to say that
this journal is terrible. Are you kidding? I would never review for this journal, actually.
So this leads to the question of, I guess you'd call them prompted lies versus
unprompted lies perhaps, right?
Like as in, in response to this conversational cue or this request, I'm now lying versus like
just spontaneously telling an untruth.
Maybe not spontaneously, but maybe a little bit more driven by some internal
incentive. Like I want to get something or I want to avoid something,
and therefore I will proactively create a different version of the truth.
Let's call that first degree lying, right? Like I can't call to mind a single instance
of first degree lying, but that doesn't mean I haven't done it. I'm sure I have.
I'm just saying that, wow, that seems bad, Steven, and I hope I don't do it very often.
I wonder if it would be useful to create a lying matrix for ourselves. So here's my little attempt.
There'd be big lies and little lies, and then there'd be lies for self-gain and lies for,
let's say, the benefit of others.
So like pro social versus personally motivated.
Or at least neutral.
Okay.
So you'd have your big lies for self-gain, small lies for self-gain.
Big lies for the benefit of others or neutral and small lies for the benefit of others.
I think everybody could imagine what's most desirable and terrible about that matrix.
Telling a big lie for self-gain sounds pretty terrible. Yeah.
Oh, yes, absolutely. Like lying so that you can get the vaccine earlier than other people
or cheating on your taxes. I mean, these are all lies for personal gain.
Or like saying things on your resume that aren't true, which is apparently a very common lie.
Interesting. Yes. So we're all in consensus that lying in a big way for personal gain, bad.
Now, what about a big lie for the benefit of others?
Like Jean Valjean in Les Miserables.
Oh, isn't there something called the Valjean effect in the psych literature about lying?
I'm looking at this paper by Williams Pizarro, Dan Ariely, and J.D. Weinberg,
called the Valjean effect visceral states and cheating. This is from the journal Emotion.
That's a nice name for a journal. It's like Smokey Robinson.
It's a good journal.
Is it?
I would definitely do a review for Emotion.
They write that visceral states like thirst, hunger, and fatigue can alter our motivations,
predictions, and even memory. And they demonstrate that these so-called hot states can shift moral
standards and increase dishonest behavior. It's a form of behavior driven by incentives, right?
That's right.
Well, Jean Valjean, as many of us may remember from reading or seeing some version of Les Miserables,
he stole a loaf of bread because he was starving and had no money and then spent,
I think, 19 years in prison, was released, but was then given a kind of scarlet letter
for being a forever criminal. And so I guess the Valjean effect is about the fact that he
was in a state, a hot state, a hungry state where he needed to do something dishonest,
which was taking bread that did not belong to him. It would seem to make sense, I think,
to just about every human that cheating or stealing or lying, when under, if not duress,
and under some, you know, pretty strong emotional motivation, we'd be more likely to do it. But you
and I aren't really talking about lying in a hot state. We're talking about lying in a neutral
state.
At least that's what I'm thinking about when you say, Angela, about how many times a day
do you tell a lie? You know, not under duress, not starving, not dying of thirst.
Let me ask you this, my dear friend. Do you think you would be interested in, let's say,
an app or some kind of tracking paraphernalia, where you'd be able to learn exactly how often
you tell a lie?
If I had, like, the equivalent of pedometer.
Yeah, a built-in lie detector. But you're the only one with the data. Do you think you might,
perhaps, lie more or less than you think? Because part of it is the lies we tell other people,
and then there are the lies we tell ourselves.
I would love to have an app if I believed that, what's that word for a lie detector,
poly something? Isn't it like a polygraph?
I think polygraph is the right word.
Okay. Anyway, if there were a reliable polygraph, and I don't know whether the science says that
those polygraphs are reliable or not, right? I think they're based on skin conductance and,
like, sweating associated with lying. And then, if it were really possible, yeah, I'd go for it,
totally. I'm all into this kind of, like, self-improvement in all possible ways.
And what would happen if this polygraph app told you that you were lying a lot more than
one half a day?
If I believed it, if I thought, oh, yeah, there you go. That wasn't exactly true. I hadn't thought
about all this motivated reasoning that's happening in the moment. I think I would begin
to lie less, because I do think lying erodes the trust we have in other people.
So that's the external cost of lying. But what about the internal? How does lying
change one's self-perception as a person of integrity? That's important to most of us.
It's interesting to think about what it means to lie to yourself and why that's bad, if it's bad.
And by the way, many psychologists, and I think neuroscience would be in rough consensus with this,
that in a real sense, there are multiple selves. There's, like, tired Angela and energetic Angela,
and there's Angela with a lot of other people around. There's Angela all by herself and
future Angela and present Angela and past Angela. And I think the idea that one of the Angelas could
be lying to the other Angelas would probably cause some kind of distress to have that
inner dissonance.
Of all those Angelas that you just named, and there were many,
and I'm sure there are many more. I'm sure there's pizza Angela, sushi Angela,
and chopped liver Angela. Which one lies the most or maybe the least?
Well, if you believe the Dan Ariely study that you were just talking about,
then I think it would be some kind of distressed Angela, desperate Angela,
instrumentally lying to get her way. And maybe that's why, if I am roughly accurate in my
belief that I'm not inclined much to lying, maybe it's because I'm privileged and maybe it's
because I have not a lot of need. I'm like the opposite of Jean Valjean, right? I don't need to
steal a loaf of bread to feed my family. I don't need to lie about my credentials.
There's not a lot of duress, honestly, in my life.
Still to come on No Stupid Questions,
Stephen and Angela discuss how our propensity to lie changes with age.
Is there a period where a child is capable of talking and doesn't lie or does the lying
start as soon as they can talk? Now back to Stephen and Angela's conversation about the
psychology of lying. So I am looking here at some research by Ipsos, the market research firm
surveyed about a thousand Americans about their views online. 64% said that lying was sometimes
justified. 36% said never justified. Now we don't know how many of them are lying about that
answer. Does that result strike you as believable, useful?
It does strike me that there are occasions on which the lie is a price that you're willing to
pay for some greater good. And Barry Schwartz, our common friend and a psychologist now at Berkeley,
Barry would very often bring out the example of your wife wants to show you her new dress and
she says, how does it look? And you're thinking it makes your ass look a mile wide. And the question
is, do you tell the truth? Barry probably wouldn't have been so crass in his description. But Barry
would say that's an example where honesty, which is obviously a virtue, should be trumped by
something else like empathy. And that's also a virtue. So I think those Americans who say,
hey, there are occasions on which lying is a good thing are probably thinking
about the white lies that we tell each other and maybe even ourselves in moments where there's a
greater virtue. We have that scenario exactly in my house all the time, not is my ass a mile wide
scenario, but my wife will put on something. It might be an outfit or shoes or maybe a piece of
jewelry and say this one or that one, or do you like this? And I have learned to be very honest
with her because my wife is very honest in those kinds of things. And she wants that. But what's
interesting is that she will often, in fact, I would say almost always disagree or overrule me.
She'll come out with like black shoe on one, brown shoe on the other, say which of these do you think
goes with this outfit? And I look at it and I'll say the black. She's like, okay, yeah, I'm wearing
the brown. Now, what's interesting is I was so conditioned when we first got married years and
years ago to do the opposite, to do the, the berry shorts, you know, just, yeah, you look great. Yeah.
Fish around for what she wanted to hear and then go with that. Or they both look fantastic. I couldn't
imagine any third shoe in the world looking better. So maybe I've been informed by marriage in that
way. But I really do. I mean, what I'm about to say is so self-serving. I can't believe I'm about
to say, because I'm sure everyone would say this, but I really do try to not lie. And I think about
why. And I think there are at least two reasons. One is it feels terrible. It just feels like a
small but significant emotional trauma every time you tell a lie. It doesn't feel good. The other
part is that it becomes costly to lie in that you have to keep track of your lies or otherwise
you'll be caught. And then the coverup is worse than the crime. Right. This gets me back to the
question of why we lied. So I read a really interesting piece of research. It was from
almost 20 years ago by a psychologist at UMass Amherst named Robert Feldman that was looking at
lying among undergrads. He had 120 some pairs of undergraduate students and he told them the study
was about how people interact when they meet someone new. And these participants would have
a 10 minute recorded conversation with a hidden camera. And in one condition, the students were
told to try to make themselves seem likable. Another, they were told to try to seem competent.
And a third was a control group. They didn't get any direction like this afterward. He told the
participants that they had been videotaped. Then he got consent from them. And then he had them
watch the videos after and identify where they had told an untruth and the results I'm reading
here, 60 percent of the people in that 10 minute conversation lied at least once and told an average
of two to three lies. But here's what I'm getting to. This is a side result, but I find really
interesting. Women were more likely to lie to make the person they were talking to feel good.
While men lie most often to make themselves look better. That resonates so deeply, by the way.
I wondered whether in addition to lying to make the other person feel better,
there was going to be a gender difference on claiming or owning up to lies. Because by the
way, what one person defines as a lie and what another person defines it like can be very
different things. Good point. Let me ask you this. You know a little something about children and
their brains. At what age does lying start? I know from Jerry Kagan's research that these
moral emotions like to even feel a sense of what it means to do the right thing and to
also feel guilt and shame when you tell a lie or when you do a wrong thing in any other way,
like hurt somebody. I think he would argue that that starts around the age of two or three.
And so I'm assuming that if you need some self-awareness about a lie to be a lie,
then it would be around then. But as we all know, young children do say things that are untrue.
And I don't even think they know that it's bad when they're really little.
Wait, I'm a little confused. Is there a period where a child is capable of talking
and doesn't lie or does the lying start as soon as they can talk?
Well, let's talk about like a very young toddler. If they are saying something that's not true,
but they don't have like a metacognitive sense that like, hahaha, I'm telling this untruth
because I want to get something. I think Jerry Kagan might have argued that to tell a lie,
you have to know at some level that you're telling a lie. And I think very young children
would not have that capacity.
Does it diminish over time as we get older? Because I'll be honest, I feel that I get more
honest the older I get, or maybe it's just cranky is the better word. I don't like to mince words.
So our prefrontal cortex, the stuff behind the forehead, the stuff that
is the reason why human beings have foreheads.
Really?
That's the reason I have a forehead?
Pretty much. I mean, if you look at other primates, of course they have foreheads,
but they're not as big as the human forehead. And that accommodates the prefrontal cortex.
And the prefrontal cortex is the seat of executive function in the brain. And executive
function is many things, but one of them is to inhibit impulses. And so there's an impulse to
lie, and then there's the inhibition of the impulse to lie. And prefrontal function does
follow a sort of inverse you, where it's terrible when you're really, really little.
And then it gets better. There's a little blip in adolescence, by the way,
but that's a slightly more complicated story. But then your 70s and 80s,
for sure, prefrontal function is declining over those later years. And just the other day,
Stephen, Jason and I are at the top of a church steeple. We're on vacation.
Wait, you're at the top of a church steeple?
Well, yeah, it was one of those scenic lookouts that you could pay five bucks and like climb the
church stairs, 96 stairs. And at the very top, there's a 90 year old.
90, nine zero?
90, nine zero.
Wow. Did they get her up there with a crane?
She goes up and down these really steep ladder-like stairs every day.
Ooh, cause or effect?
I will say this, probably selection bias. Certainly not the reason why she's 90,
but for sure she's doing well. And, you know, if anybody's got a good prefrontal cortex,
it's got to be this 90 or at least compared to other 90 year olds. However, she's 90.
So we're leaving and we're there with our 18 year old, Lucy. So we thank her. We've had a lovely
conversation. She's made all these jokes about how, you know, as long as she doesn't do the
knitting while she's walking down the steps, she's fine. And she said, oh, are you guys together?
And she points to Lucy and my husband and says, like, are you married?
And we laugh and we think, wow, maybe she doesn't really have it together.
We, you know, explain that I'm married to Jason and not our daughter, Lucy. And then
she just looks at me, said, well, you're really robbing the cradle.
And the idea was basically that I look really old relative to my beautiful, handsome husband.
And when we got to the bottom of the stairs, I was like, oh, 90 year olds,
they have no ability to inhibit themselves. She has lost the capacity to tell a white lie.
That was a thought that was probably to protect my ego. The other thought I had is,
do I really look that old? Now, if we could take a chainsaw and cut off one leg of you
and Jason, how many rings would we see on you? In other words, is he younger than you?
That's a lovely image. Thank you. Yeah, sorry. That's not the easiest way to tell age, I guess.
But next time I want to know somebody's age, I'm just going to say, if I could take a chainsaw
and chop off one of your legs. If that seems too violent, you could use a hand saw of some kind,
but is Jason significantly younger than you, however?
He's two years younger than me. He's 49 and I'm 51. And I don't know, maybe I was having a bad day,
but I really couldn't believe it. This woman thought that I looked old enough to be my
husband's mother. She felt no desire to lie. Okay, question. How did that incident change
your view of 90 year old women generally? I hate them. Yeah, that sounds about right.
Damn you all. No, I thought it was actually kind of charming. And honestly, if it's true at all,
that the older you get, the less you lie, whether it's because your prefrontal cortex isn't what it
used to be, or you have like learned that honesty is the best policy. I kind of like it, honestly.
Well, I'm not going to lie. I enjoyed this conversation every word of it.
Yeah. How do you like this dress?
No Stupid Questions is produced by me, Rebecca Lee Douglas. And now here's a fact check of today's
conversation. Steven and Angela discuss the work of Israeli-American psychologist and Duke
University professor, Dan Ariely. After this recording, the blog Data Colada published
research revealing that a 2012 Ariely field study about dishonesty was based on fabricated data.
Ariely denies making up the figures. And it is possible that the fabricated data
came from the company where the study took place. So while no
