When It's Okay to Lie

25:56And that's, you know, something you hear that Wang's father is proud of, proud of honoring that value. And in the U.S., we don't really hear that, right? In the U.S., there's much greater moral emphasis on autonomy, the duty to inform others above the duty to provide hope. And so I think you just see this come out in different ways where we have different moral attitudes towards honesty, particularly at this end of life situation. I can imagine in an individualistic country like the United States, people might say, you know, if someone has three months left to live, you absolutely should tell them because that allows them to get their affairs in order.

26:37It allows them to say goodbye. It allows them to leave on their own terms. And there's just as much an argument to be made for that as to say they're going to die anyway in three months time. Why burden them with this knowledge in addition to whatever else they're going through? Right. I think either argument and either set of values is totally reasonable. I think part of what's interesting is that they're culturally defined. And so it's recognizing the value of prioritizing the moral imperative that matches the context in the person.

27:18I can imagine then that in cross-cultural contexts, where people from different cultures are coming into contact with each other, this can create problems. Because of course, someone from, let's say, China might say, it is a humane and kind and generous thing to do to lie. And somebody from the United States might say, no, it's the most cruel thing you can do to lie. That must happen all the time. Yeah, I think it's incredibly complicated. I actually recently ran a set of studies looking at physicians' predictions of patient preferences in the U.S. and in China, and in the U.S. also looking at their prediction of white patients' preferences versus Chinese-American patient preferences.

28:00And it's quite interesting in that in China, the patients do prefer more false hope than in the U.S., and Chinese doctors get that somewhat accurate. But in the U.S., the U.S. doctors think that Chinese-American patients also prefer false hope similar to the native Chinese patients, and they don't. They look a lot more like white American preferences, closer to preferring honesty. And so there's just a lot of room for complicated misunderstandings when we try to accommodate these differences.

28:44So far, we've been talking about situations in which the person to whom we might lie is vulnerable or incapacitated. When we come back, we look at another category of lies that most people feel are acceptable, lies that are shaped by the nature of the information itself. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

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31:22This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. Have you had situations in your life where you feel you had to lie? Or situations where you had to shade the truth? If you'd be willing to share your story with the Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at feedback at hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line lies. That email address again is feedback at hiddenbrain.org. Psychologist Emma Levine studies truth-telling and deception. Her research suggests that the clear and simple line we often seek to draw, always tell the truth, is more complicated in practice.

32:05There are harmful truths and there are selfless lies. Emma, you find that many people think it's okay to lie about things that involve subjective judgment. You once came up with a vignette involving a silk scarf worn by a co-worker. Describe that story. Describe that scenario for me. Sure. So imagine you have a co-worker who is wearing a scarf that they love, but you think is quite hideous. Should you tell them your opinion about the scarf? This is the basic scenario. And if you just set it up like that, then about 40 % of participants think you should lie and pretend you like the scarf. So already a substantial amount.

32:50But now imagine you know for sure that you're the only one who thinks this and everyone else really likes the scarf. Then should you tell them? And now most people, 71 % of people say, no, now you should definitely lie. And so this is hitting this idea of subjectivity. If everyone thinks your scarf is ugly, or it might be the case that everyone thinks your scarf is ugly, then perhaps someone should tell you because you could change and not offend everyone in your office. But if you know, right, this is just your idiosyncratic preference, it's a totally subjective judgment, then why do you think, right, it should be shared?

33:32And that's what's going on here.

33:43A similar situation when people agree it's okay to lie is when the information involved is trivial. you ran an experiment where you described a dinner party where people didn't like the food? Yeah. So in that scenario, and I run a lot of scenarios in which people have negative opinions of someone else. In this particular scenario, you are asked to imagine that you go to a dinner party and the soup is salty. So the soup is salty. And what we vary across conditions with our participants is whether the host of this dinner party is a professional chef or, right, just a novice cooking for fun. So if the host is a professional chef, the information about the quality of their soup is not trivial.

34:28It's kind of important because this is what they do for a living. So in that situation, only about 20 % of participants, actually only 18 to be exact, think that the right thing to do is to lie. But if you know that the person is a novice chef just having fun in their kitchen, now a lot more people think you should lie, 37.8%. And this is because the information about the quality of their soup becomes trivial. It's not important or material for any reason.

35:09So it's interesting. It's the same information in both cases. But in one situation, the information carries weight. It matters to a professional chef to know that something is wrong with his or her cooking. But the same information to a novice chef, you're just hurting the person's feelings. Exactly. And of course, it carries some information either way. And that's why there's not a huge agreement that you should lie, even for the novice chef. But we're varying the degree to which that information is meaningful and valuable.

35:44So sometimes we encounter situations in which another person cannot do anything to control or change what has happened. You came up with one scenario involving the case of an intern who stuttered. What was this example and how did the experiment unfold, Emma? In this experiment, participants are imagining that summer intern gives an end of summer presentation, something I had to do in my life as an intern way back when. So they're giving a presentation and they stutter during it, making the presentation a bit hard to listen to. And you learn that either the stutter was driven by nerves, that this intern was nervous, but they can likely overcome the stutter with more practice.

36:30or you learn that this person has a stutter that they cannot control. In this study, that influences the endorsement of deception. So 18.8 % of participants say you should lie when the person can improve their ability to speak without a stutter, when it was just nerves. But now the majority start thinking it's ethical to lie, 64.4 % when the person cannot control their stutter. So the degree to which the information is something you can learn from and that can lead to change seems to be what's driving that difference. What's so interesting is as you're painting these scenarios, I can see my own feelings and opinions change.

37:17I mean, if you tell me that the intern cannot control their stutter, of course it changes whether you tell them the truth or not. Right. And I think that's what's so interesting. And one thing I love about this body of research, it's that none of these are actually all that surprising. You tell them to people and everyone's like, yeah, duh. But then why don't we say this out loud? Why don't we teach our children? Why don't we talk about these rules? They're actually quite obvious upon reflection.

37:55Another situation involves a manager who has to give some bad news to his employees and has to decide whether to share this bad news with one employee who is about to have a very special weekend. Paint a picture of this scenario for me. Sure. So this is a scenario about layoffs. The manager knows layoffs are coming. We have to tell the employees. And one of the employees drops by on a Friday afternoon and says, hey, what's going on? I'm about to head out for the weekend. And this is the opportunity for the manager to tell the employee about the layoffs. So in the control condition, that's about all the information that we give participants.

38:32And in that case, most people think you should tell the truth. And only about 22, 23 percent of participants think the right thing to do is to lie. Now, in another condition, participants learn that the employee swings by on a Friday before leaving for their wedding, which is on Saturday. Oh, wow. Right. That changes how we think about this. Now, 52 % of participants think that you should lie. So a significant amount more, because why would you spoil this person's wedding? You could just tell them right the next week. And this is actually, you know, something that comes up in different religions and different texts that you really shouldn't spoil sacred events.

39:14In Judaism, a book called the Talmud, they debate kind of some of these situations. They say you should always tell a bride she's beautiful on her wedding day because why would you spoil that special time no matter what you really think?

39:33so when we look at all these varied reasons that people say that lying is okay there is at least one powerful through line um is the lie the product of selfish intentions or benevolent intentions explain this difference emma so all of these situations what they're doing is they're mapping this logic of unnecessary harm. You tell the lie, and we think that lying is the right thing to do because it's sparing the listener from unnecessary harm. It's protecting their feelings when there's nothing they could learn or do with this information. And that's what we think is benevolent. That really promotes, or people believe that it promotes, the target's best interest to protect them from that unnecessary harm.

40:22So in other words, instead of saying don't tell lies, is what we really mean to say don't tell selfish lies? We certainly mean don't tell selfish lies. I think it's still quite complicated. In some ways, we really do mean don't tell lies because we're afraid of the risk of allowing people to tell some lies. So these situations are really robust. We reflect on them. We think in this given situation, when a person can't change or the information is trivial, we should lie. At the same time, we think if we tell people they can lie sometimes, they're also going to get it wrong sometimes and they're going to end up telling selfish lies or telling well-meaning lies that actually do harm.

41:12And we're very, very worried about that error. And so we'd rather live in a world where people tell truths in the wrong circumstances instead of lies in the wrong circumstances. So it's complicated. So you found that when people tell these selfless falsehoods, these pro-social lies, that actually these pro-social lies increase trust in the liar? They can. They can increase trust. So in these types of situations, when both parties recognize that telling the lie prevents unnecessary harm, the listener will increase in their belief that the communicator has their best interest in mind. And so that's a certain form of trust.

42:03I'm now willing to be emotionally vulnerable to you, to seek you out for support. I trust you as someone who is benevolent towards me. And that's really important in some relationships, like going back to the opening example, the relationship I have with my mother. But the double-edged short is it still does reduce integrity-based trust in that despite believing this is someone who I can count on to protect me and care for me and be compassionate, I also recognize that I can't always count on the veracity of their words. And so it increases one type of trust, benevolence-based trust, while still undermining integrity-based trust.

42:54You know, in some ways, I think many of us simultaneously want two things that are at odds with one another. We admire people who spare others from needless pain, but we also admire people who say what they think no matter what. You know, I had a friend in college who always said whatever he thought, and he was like a bull in a china shop, and he caused a lot of hurt. where over time people also came to trust when he told them anything positive because they knew that he was telling the truth. Right. And I think this again speaks to the tension and what errors we're comfortable with. So people who are brutal truth tellers have a hard time making friends, but they come to be trusted for their words.

43:35And often we'd rather be that person than the person whose words erode in value over time. But these are two very different types of trust nonetheless.

43:56Can you also talk about the idea that benevolent lies sound benevolent, but I'm wondering if there is a thin line sometimes between benevolent lies and selfish lies. Can't we tell lies for selfish reasons and convince ourselves that we have in fact done so for benevolent reasons? Absolutely. And this, again, is another danger in accepting that some lies are good, is that we can convince ourselves that we're in these situations of unnecessary harm when we're really not. So going back to the idea of fragility, in some cases, both parties, communicators and listeners, will recognize that the listener is temporarily fragile.

44:36They're going through something. Therefore, temporary deception is appropriate, acceptable. And then telling them the truth at a later time is what a communicator should do. But once we know that it's easy to see others as fragile, right? I could believe that women in the workplace are fragile. I shouldn't tell them negative feedback. And that might be really to avoid conflict. So that's selfish. It might be based on some stereotype. So it's inaccurate, despite not necessarily being selfish. And it opens us up to all of these mistakes, selfish and otherwise. I mean, I'm thinking about the cheating spouse who is not telling her partner that she had the affair.

45:21And she says, OK, the partner is 24 hours away from dying. And so I don't want to burden him with this information. But what if your partner is now a week away from dying? What if your partner is a month away from dying? What if your partner is a year away from dying? At what point is the line between fragility and non-fragility? Right. It's almost impossible to know without asking someone their preferences directly and having their insight into what they want. Otherwise, we're just making this subjective judgment about where the line is. The line exists, but whether we can predict it, a priori is unclear.

46:02What do you make of the people who are basically sticking to the honesty is the best policy? So in the many examples that you've given me, it's true and surprising that significant numbers of people endorse deception at some level. And depending on how you tweak the scenarios, more people endorse deception. But it's also the case clearly in your studies that even in situations where someone is very vulnerable or about to have a wedding or dealing with an important test, there are some people who say always tell the truth. Your mandate is in fact to follow thou shalt not lie. Yeah, I think there are individual differences on this.

46:40I mean, so far we've tapped into the cross-cultural difference, U.S. versus China, but there's also individual differences. Some people want to know the truth at all times and tell the truth at all times, and some people are more comfortable with these trade-offs or actually believe that comfort and social harmony sometimes reign supreme.

47:08What you just said makes me think is the distinction between these two groups of people, how much they actually are embedded in their communities and how much they're actually connected to other people. Because I think a very individualistic point of view would say, I always want to be told the truth and I always want to be telling other people the truth. But the more community minded you are, the more you're embedded in social systems, the more you value those social systems, the more you try and take into account social harmony and how other people are feeling and not just am I telling the truth or am I being lied to?

47:45I think that's partly right. It's an intuition I certainly had before heading into some cross-cultural research on this topic, which actually proved a bit more complicated than the story you've laid out. So it's easy to make a prediction that in China, where there's more collectivism versus the U.S., that they'll value social harmony and be more accepting of deception than in the U.S. And now we see that in the medical context, but that seems to be a function of the belief and importance of hope and things we think about at the end of life and the role of luck, right? So knowing that you have cancer saying out loud kind of creates bad luck.

48:29But this actually doesn't carry over into a lot of other situations. So we ran studies looking at beliefs about and preferences for just critical feedback in the U.S. and China. And actually, we see a greater preference for critical feedback in China than in the U.S. And that's for a different reason also related to communities, which is people feel more responsible for each other and their development and their adherence to norms, right? So if I think we're all part of a community that values working hard, I'm going to tell you when I think you're not working hard. That's part of being a good community member is valuing your growth.

49:11Whereas in the U.S., it's like you do you, you know, you don't want to work hard, but I do. I'm not responsible for your individual choices. And so you see that playing out quite differently.

49:28You had an experience of being lied to during the COVID pandemic. Describe for me what happened, Emma. So I was pregnant during the beginning of the pandemic. So I was very, very focused on knowing all of the risks and what was going on and protecting me and my now born child. So one thing that happened was my parents were supposed to come to town to help me prepare and set up as I was awaiting the birth of my daughter. And they were under strict instruction that they were not to socialize. They should not socialize with anyone. They should not see anyone. There was no way I was going to let even single germ into my household, right, in the days before my daughter was born.

50:15And we had a Zoom call shortly before they were supposed to come, and they're talking to my aunt kind of casually, but I'm there, and they're mentioning that they had their friends over for pizza. And I had been assured that there was no socializing. And it turns out, well, there had been socializing. There was a bit of a deception. And, you know, I talked to my mother about this and she said, I didn't want to burden you. I didn't want to worry you. We were outside. We didn't even come in contact with each other. We were on the deck. We stayed socially distanced. I'm confident there's absolutely no risk to you.

50:55So I just didn't think it was necessary to know.

51:07So this is not actually unlike what she did during your wedding. Was your reaction the same? No, it was different. And this, again, points to some of the risks of trying to get this trade-off right. So here, I was very upset. I actually didn't let them come. I made them wait a whole week and get tested. I was, yes, very, very concerned about all of this. But I was upset. And it's not because her motivations were different. I think the motivations were the same. They were benevolent. She didn't want to stress me out in a situation that she didn't think provided necessary information, right, along the logic that I've outlined before.

51:51But in this situation, I did feel the information was necessary. We had different beliefs. And so the lie felt very paternalistic and unfair, not pro-social as it had before.

52:12I'm wondering if you've had a conversation with your mom, Emma, laying out when and how she's allowed to tell you benevolent lies and when she's not. I probably should. I haven't done it, which is, now that you ask, a bit strange because I do give the advice to other people and in my papers that one way to avoid this risk is to have conversations about this, right? To have explicit kind of social contracts. What type of feedback do you like in what situations? Doctors can do this with patients. How much do you want to know everything and every risk? Or do you want to just focus on each next step and the plan moving forward?

52:52So there are ways to have these conversations so that you can be sure you're erring on the side of benevolence when it's really benevolent, when it aligns with the listener's interests. We haven't had that conversation, and perhaps we should.

53:16In our companion story to this episode, exclusively on Hidden Brain Plus, we explore ways to bridge the gap between the many lies we condone in practice and the lying we claim to abhor. Instead of exalting the truth while telling lies, what would happen if we told the truth about our lying ways? If you're a subscriber to Hidden Brain Plus, that episode is available in your podcast feed right now. It's titled, Telling the Truth About Lies. If you're not yet a subscriber, please visit support.hiddenbrain.org or apple.co slash hiddenbrain. Again, that's support.hiddenbrain.org. If you're using an Apple device, go to apple.co slash hiddenbrain.

54:05Emma Levine is a psychologist at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. Emma, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thanks for having me. It's been a blast.

54:22Have you had situations in your life where you feel you had to tell a benevolent lie, but later came to regret it? If you have a personal story you'd be willing to share with the Hidden Brain audience, or a question or comment about this episode, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone. Two or three minutes is plenty. Email the file to us at feedback at hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line lies. Again, that email address is feedback at hiddenbrain.org. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury.

55:10Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Thank you to Loom by Atlassian for sponsoring the Hidden Brain Perceptions Tour. While on tour, audience members shared the best piece of advice they've ever received. Here's a piece of advice that a listener named Suzanne shared at our tour stop in Baltimore. I'm Suzanne from D.C. and my best advice came from my Pyongyang-born mother who loved to speak in Confucian proverbs. She often said to us, never spit in the well because you never know when you have to drink the water. And she told this so many times as children and I was like, what is she talking about?

55:53But I really understood it as an adult, and I realized it really meant how important to maintain relationships with people. So thank you. Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you. Thanks to Suzanne for sharing this bit of advice, and thanks again to Loom for sponsoring the Perception Store. Loom is AI-first-powered video communication that moves teams forward, whether you're sharing feedback, obtaining approvals, or setting context. Reduce unnecessary meetings and make the ones that matter more effective. Unstuck your teams today at loom.com. That's L-O-O-M dot com. It's a team changer. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

56:38See you soon.

56:47You never forget your first fan. So how was practice, kiddo? My mom inspired me to dream big and ask myself, what would you like the power to do? My answers helped me become the soccer player I am today, trusting my instincts and stepping onto the pitch without fear. Bank of America champions U.S. men's national team member Tyler Adams and everyone who dares to ask, what would you like the power to do? Bank of America, proud to be the official bank of U.S. soccer and FIFA World Cup 2026. Bank of America and a member FDSP.