Pure Pedantry

My suspicion is that many of you went home for the holidays, and my suspicion is that many of you were not entirely honest with your relatives while you were there. While it is not my intention to encourage this behavior -- I, of course, am totally honest all of the time ;) -- you are not alone. Here is a great article from the NYTimes about the prevalence of lying:

Much evidence suggests that we humans, with our densely corrugated neocortex, lie to one another chronically and with aplomb. Investigating what they called "lying in day-to-day life," Bella DePaulo, now a visiting professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her colleagues asked 77 college students and 70 people from the community to keep anonymous diaries for a week and to note the hows and whys of every lie they told.

Tallying the results, the researchers found that the college students told an average of two lies a day, community members one a day, and that most of the lies fell into the minor fib category. "I told him I missed him and thought about him every day when I really don't think about him at all," wrote one participant. "Said I sent the check this morning," wrote another.

In a follow-up study, the researchers asked participants to describe the worst lies they'd ever told, and then out came confessions of adultery, of defrauding an employer, of lying on a witness stand to protect an employer. When asked how they felt about their lies, many described being haunted with guilt, but others confessed that once they realized they'd gotten away with a whopper, why, they did it again, and again.

In truth, it's all too easy to lie. In more than 100 studies, researchers have asked participants questions like, Is the person on the videotape lying or telling the truth? Subjects guess correctly about 54 percent of the time, which is barely better than they'd do by flipping a coin. Our lie blindness suggests to some researchers a human desire to be deceived, a preference for the stylishly accoutred fable over the naked truth.

"There's a counterintuitive motivation not to detect lies, or we would have become much better at it," said Angela Crossman, an assistant professor of psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "But you may not really want to know that the dinner you just cooked stinks, or even that your spouse is cheating on you."

Read the whole thing.

Turns out that lying is rife in the animal world as well. So you've no reason to feel guilty. (Unless you get caught of course...)