Essay On Why We Lie

“A lie that is half-truth is the darkest of all lies” (Alfred Tennyson). Lying can be the most harmful and betraying action but sometimes it is a necessary evil. Everyone lies at least once in there life. But why do we lie? National Geographic goes into detail about lying with a lengthy article titled, “Why We Lie: The Science Behind Our Deceptive Ways”. We have become adept to deceiving, the act itself of lying is theorized to be as old as the beginning of language. It is a trait that as grown to become wired within humans, but researchers are still trying to answer questions yet to be solved; ‘How and when do we learn to lie?’ How often do we lie? A famous psychologist, by the name of Bella DePaulo at the University of Virginia, performed a study in 1996 to better understand truly how often we lie in our everyday lives. DePaulo gathered 147 people from the ages of 18-71 to account for all the times they have lied in one week. She found interesting patterns showing that most people are prone to lying at least twice a day, both men and women tend to mislead around 30% of people they interact with over the span of a week. Another pattern stuck out in the experiment; relationships, such as a parent and a child, bore more likelihood of deception of occurring. Without even realizing it we lie blindly in our everyday lives without a second thought.

DePaulo describes this as; “...kind of harmless social lubricant” This example of a “sugar coated” lie is expressed in Erin Murphy’s “White Lies”, where using a small lie is beneficial to at least one person in the story. Connie, an albino girl who is being bullied heavily, uses a small lie in order to improve her quality of treatment at her new school (Murphy 495). Using an advantage, in this case candy, proved to become beneficial on connie’s end of the spectrum even though she used a lie to get