True, it might cause you both discomfort in the moment if you tell your boss that you think the presentation is not in great shape. However, there is enough time before the meeting for you to save your boss from embarrassment if the presentation were to fall flat.
To your boss and perhaps the company , preventing this embarrassment later on could be more important than avoiding the discomfort of receiving criticism. In this case, falsely telling someone that they did a great job could be considered a paternalistic lie —that is, a lie that requires the deceiver to make assumptions about whether lying is in the best interest of the person being deceived.
In our recent article published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes , across seven studies with over 2, research participants, we find that paternalistic lies spark strong resentment from deceived parties.
For example, in one of the studies, communicators had to report the outcome of a coin flip, but could do so honestly or dishonestly. It models a number of real-world situations, such as when a financial adviser might lie to a client for the purpose of nudging them to save money for the future. We found that communicators who told lies in this context were viewed as less moral than communicators who told the truth.
Three specific inferences underlie this judgment. In particular, participants believed that paternalistic liars did not have good intentions, that paternalistic liars were violating their autonomy, and that paternalistic liars misunderstood their preferences. In another study, we also found that participants were actually less satisfied with the prize they received when it resulted from a paternalistic lie.
Importantly, not all lies bring about these negative judgments. When it comes to truth telling, deception and trust, real lies can be destructive. Let's look at what you might want to think about before you decide to tell a white lie or a real lie.
When someone lies out of altruism to protect others or ease their pain, these lies are considered acceptable white lies. White lies usually benefit the person listening. This is an example of prosocial lying and reflects empathy and compassion. It also takes into account what is age appropriate for your son. While white lies are often minor or inconsequential, real lies have far reaching effects.
Real lies tend to initially benefit the liar, too. For example, if Dan took the data his co-worker amassed and presented the project as his own, Dan blatantly lied and acted in a self-serving and clearly untruthful way.
When his supervisor learned the truth, Dan was sent to human resources as a consequence. Overall, it's important to look at the morality and societal acceptance of the type of life. White lies are acceptable and help our society function. Real lies are deemed to be universally wrong. There are many reasons why people lie. Some common motives for lying include:. A study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience showed that the brain adapts to dishonesty.
The more participants engaged in self-serving dishonesty, the more likely that behavior would increase with repetition. Small acts escalated into bigger transgressions. Even seemingly innocuous lies can become a habit, like second nature. In fact, it may become easier than being honest. That can be very enticing. The second danger of telling too many lies might result in not getting the help you need.
For example, saying "I'm fine," which seems like an innocuous fib, masks the fact that you are still struggling on many fronts. This may preclude others from suggesting you get mental health counseling or you yourself from realizing that you could benefit from therapy.
Then you must try to be as honest as you can be with loved ones. We are all human, but that should be the goal. We would then put forward all our arguments for telling a particular lie and then ask that 'jury' of relevant and reasonable persons if telling this lie was justified.
This sort of test is most useful when considering what we might call 'public' lying - when an institution is considering just how much truth to tell about a project - perhaps a medical experiment, or a proposed war, or an environmental development.
One executive observed to this writer that a useful test for the justifiability of an action that he was uncertain about was to imagine what the press would write afterwards if they discovered what he had done and compared it to what he had said in advance. In most cases of personal small scale lying there is no opportunity to do anything more than consult our own conscience - but we should remember that our conscience is usually rather biased in our favour.
A good way of helping our conscience is to ask how we would feel if we were on the receiving end of the lie. It's certainly not foolproof, but it may be helpful.
Different theories of ethics approach lying in different ways. In grossly over-simplified terms, those who follow consequentialist theories are concerned with the consequences of lying and if telling a lie would lead to a better result than telling the truth, they will argue that it is good to tell the lie. They would ask:.
In contrast, a dutybased ethicist would argue that, even if lying has the better consequences, it is still morally wrong to lie. Consequentialists assess the rightness or wrongness of doing something by looking at the consequences caused by that act. So if telling a particular lie produces a better result than not telling it, then telling it would be a good thing to do.
And if telling a particular lie produces a worse result than not telling it, telling it would be a bad thing to do. This has a certain commonsense appeal, but it's also quite impractical since it requires a person to work out in advance the likely good and bad consequences of the lie they are about to tell and balance the good against the bad.
This is hard to do, because:. So most Utilitarian thinkers don't apply it on a case by case basis but use the theory to come up with some general principles -- perhaps along the lines of:. This is an example of 'rule-utilitarianism'; considering every single action separately is 'act-Utilitarianism'. These two forms of Utilitarianism could lead to different results: An act-Utilitarian might say that telling a lie in a particular case did lead to the best results for everyone involved and for society as a whole, while a rule-Utilitarian might argue that since lying made society a less happy place, it was wrong to tell lies, even in this particular case.
Deontologists base their moral thinking on general universal laws, and not on the results of particular acts. The word comes from from the Greek word deon , meaning duty. An act is therefore either a right or a wrong act, regardless of whether it produces good or bad consequences.
Deontologists don't always agree on how we arrive at 'moral laws', or on what such laws are, but one generally accepted moral law is 'do not tell lies'. Most of us would accept that an unbreakable rule against lying would be unworkable, but a more sophisticated rule perhaps one with a list of exceptions might be something we could live with. Virtue ethics looks at what good virtuous people do.
If honesty is a virtue in the particular system involved, then lying is a bad thing. The difficulty with this approach comes when a virtuous person tells a lie as a result of another virtue compassion perhaps.
The solution might be to consider what an ideal person would have done in the particular circumstances. Some philosophers, most famously the German Immanuel Kant , believed that that lying was always wrong. He based this on his general principle that we should treat each human being as an end in itself, and never as a mere means.
Lying to someone is not treating them as an end in themselves, but merely as a means for the liar to get what they want. Kant also taught 'Act so that the maxim of thy will can always at the same time hold good as a principle of universal legislation. If there was a universal law that it was generally OK to tell lies then life would rapidly become very difficult as everyone would feel free to lie or tell the truth as they chose, it would be impossible to take any statement seriously without corroboration, and society would collapse.
Christian theologian St. Augustine taught that lying was always wrong, but accepted that this would be very difficult to live up to and that in real life people needed a get-out clause. Augustine believed that some lies could be pardoned, and that there were in fact occasions when lying would be the right thing to do.
He grouped lies into 8 classes, depending on how difficult it was to pardon them. Here's his list, with the least forgivable lies at the top:. I am negotiating for a car with a salesperson.
He asks me what the maximum I am prepared to pay is. We heap exaggerated praise on our children all the time about their earliest attempts to sing or dance or paint or write poems.
For some children this encouragement leads to future practice, which in turn promotes the development—in some — of genuine achievement. You can sign up for the Dinner Table email list here to be notified about the new topic each week, and remember to submit future topic suggestions to table waitbutwhy.
Which means this would happen: Obviously, lying is sometimes okay. To aid our discussion, here they are: 1. So what do you think? Where do you draw your line? Previous Post. Next Post.
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