Recently, a reporter from the Daily Mail discovered my new book, Behind the Door of Deceit: Understanding the Biggest Liars in Our Lives, and got in touch about an interview. She had a hunch, she said, that relationships need a dash of deceit to survive. When she said relationships, she meant romantic ones. To me, "relationship" has a much bigger, broader meaning, as does "love."
So taking the bigger meaning first, let me answer the reporter's question with an anecdote. Because I studied deception for so long, and have found in my work that lying (or, at least the telling of little lies) is ordinary rather than extraordinary, occasionally I get challenged. A conversation partner or student or someone in an audience at one of my talks will claim that they never lie. Even more interestingly, some will vow to spend the next several weeks without telling any lies at all. I never suggest or encourage this, but I do ask them to tell me about their experiences.
Only a few people have actually followed through with their personal experiments in honesty, but the result has been the same each time. They have to call it off after a few days, and go back and apologize. They say they are sorry to the person whose party invitation they declined with the honest response that the person's parties are always boring - or that the host him or herself is boring. They ask for forgiveness for saying to the friend who asked that she really does look like she gained weight. They try to make it up to the coworker whose contributions they described, in all honesty, as not up to par.
I draw a big line between little lies and big ones. Serious lies - the big time betrayals of trust - are probably never good for relationships of any kind. Little lies are often a different matter entirely. Sometimes people tell these lies not because they don't value honesty, but because telling the truth conflicts with something else they value, such as being compassionate or loyal or reassuring.
As I've noted before, romantic relationships are hotbeds for serious lies. Serious lies are often told by and to other close relationship partners, too, such as parents. For example, when parents hide a grim diagnosis of a grandparent's illness from an adolescent, sometimes that grandchild will still feel badly about the deception many years later. There is an intriguing exception, though, to the rule that the most serious lies are told by and to the people who are closest to us: In the 238 stories of serious lies that we collected, only 6 of them involved a best friend.
The reporter wrote an interesting story on the questions she asked me; you can read it here. Because she sent me her questions in advance, I wrote out some answers, so I thought I'd share them with you. (Continue reading here.)
Ed and Deb Shapiro: When Telling a Lie Is the Right Thing to Do
