Why We Lie

Robin Lloyd in LiveScience.com:

We all lie, all the time. It causes problems, to say the least. So why do we do it?

It boils down to the shifting sands of the self and trying to look good both to ourselves and others, experts say.

"It's tied in with self-esteem," says University of Massachusetts psychologist Robert Feldman. "We find that as soon as people feel that their self-esteem is threatened, they immediately begin to lie at higher levels."

Not all lies are harmful. In fact, sometimes lying is the best approach for protecting privacy and ourselves and others from malice, some researchers say.  Some deception, such as boasting and lies in the name of tact and politeness, can be classified as less than serious. But bald-faced lies (whether they involve leaving out the truth or putting in something false), are harmful, as they corrode trust and intimacy—the glue of society.

Many animals engage in deception, or deliberately misleading another, but only humans are wired to deceive both themselves and others, researchers say.  People are so engaged in managing how others perceive them that they are often unable to separate truth from fiction in their own minds, Feldman's research shows.

More here.

Comments

[Winfield J. Abbe]

Institutions like the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute constantly seek to deceive the public that the multi billions of public and private dollars spent on cancer "research" have not been squandered and wasted, and continually lie and imply the "cure" is just around the next billion dollar corner, in the face of grim data that over a half million victims die every year notwithstanding all this propaganda. If you ever observe a bill board sign promoting mammograms by the American Cancer Society, call the bill board company and see if they would permit you to place an ad right next to their ad, contradicting and disputing their ad, and revealing the sordid truth about the profit driven nature of mammography and its many alternatives, and how they possibly spread cancer by pressing very hard on the breasts, an issue almost never disclosed by medical doctors administering this procedure and receiving money for doing so, let alone in an ad by the American Cancer Society, or how a mammogram could even cause breast cancer. All advertising is a form of lying, since only one side is always presented.
Police departments, operating in secret, routinely lie to the public that "unsolved" murders are still active cases, thereby usually preventing the gullible and unwitting public from successfully challenging their claims and hence have the records opened for public inspection. This leads to police corruption with virtually no citizen oversight or control of most police departments. Isn't it ironic that the two issues we thought were eradicated in World War II; secrecy and propaganda, are now basic forms of our democratic governments in most states and the U.S. as well?
In other words, our governments, local, state and federal are patterned after Nazi, Germany, and we can thank our "elected" "leaders" for providing this benefit to us.