We all lie occasionally, and research says some people all the time, as often as every 10 minutes. And it causes far more problems than many people realise, it is not simply a little white lie, that covers up a small truth. So why do some people do it (everyone, according to most researchers)? It comes down our changing perceptions of the self and trying to feel good about ourselves, and to look good to others. “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.” Some deception, such as boasting and lies in the name of tact or politeness, can be classified as minor. But blatant lies, even tiny ones, whether they involve leaving out the truth or putting in something false, are harmful and hurtful to yourself and your loved ones (or colleagues), as they corrode trust and intimacy, the very glue of relationships. A person may lie to protect him or herself, or as a way to control something. Evidence suggests that most people learn to lie at a very early age. Starting at about three, children will lie to avoid getting into trouble. Four year olds can easily tell the difference between truth and lying, and disapprove of lying, even when it might be morally or ethically right to do so. By age five, when it comes to dodging punishment, most kids are expert liars. Teenagers indulge in lying as part of developing their self-esteem, and as they acquire a sense of self efficacy. It is when it continues on into adulthood that it can become destructive and habitual, or worse (pathological). Feldman’s research also shows, people are so engaged in managing how others perceive them that they are often unable to separate truth from fiction in their own minds.

Self-esteem and threats to our sense of self are also drivers when it comes to lying to co-workers, rather than strangers, says Jennifer Argo of the University of Alberta. She also said “I guess closely tied to this is that people appear to be short-term focused when they decide to deceive someone—save my self-image and self-worth now, but later on if the deceived individual finds out it can have long-term consequences,”. Feldman says people should become more aware of the extent to which we tend to lie and that honesty yields more genuine relationships and trust. “The default ought to be to be honest and accurate … We’re better off if honesty is the norm. It’s like the old saying: honesty is the best policy.” Interestingly, children must be taught to lie to protect another’s feelings, said Gail Saltz, a New York Presbyterian Hospital psychiatrist, in an MSNBC article. Parents teach children how to tell these white lies early in life. For example, “Tell Aunt Betty she looks great in those jeans.”For adults, lying serves purposes other than avoiding punishment, although most adults have tried lying to get out of a speeding or parking ticket. Robert Feldman said in a LiveScience article that adults want to control how others see them. And they want to control how they see themselves. According to Feldman, people will lie to appear more agreeable and to impress others in a social situation, to elevate their self-esteem. “Once self-esteem is threatened, people will lie – immediately.” They will lie about the kind of car they drive, where they live, and how much money they make. People also lie to themselves regularly. They lie about the amount of time they have to finish a project, how much they ate in a day, and numerous other seemingly pointless and incidental lies. Ultimately, lies only serve to undermine the person telling the lie, and the relationships around them.

For a compulsive liar, telling lies simply becomes a habit, a way of life; it becomes second nature. A compulsive liar will resort to telling lies, regardless of the situation. Unfortunately, compulsive lying is hard for the person involved to accept or even see, but it hurts those who are around them, and can easily ruin a relationship. Not only do compulsive liars bend the truth about issues large and small, they take comfort in it. Lying feels right to a compulsive liar. Telling the truth, on the other hand, is difficult and uncomfortable. And like any behaviour which provides comfort and an escape from discomfort (i.e., alcohol, drugs, petty crime), lying can become addictive and hard to stop. For the compulsive liar, lying feels safe and this fuels the desire to lie even more. Compulsive lying is not the same as pathological lying or narcissism. In dementia, people develop something called confabulation, which is a memory disorder that may occur in patients who have sustained damage to parts of their brain causing dementia, or after something like an aneurysm. Confabulation is defined as “the spontaneous production of false memories: either memories for events which never occurred, or memories of actual events which are displaced in space or time.” These memories may be elaborate and detailed, even bizarre, as a memory of a ride to the moon; or ordinary, as a memory of having eggs for breakfast, so that only a close family member can confirm that the memory is in fact false. It is important to stress that confabulators are not lying: they are not deliberately trying to mislead. In fact, the patients are generally quite unaware that their memories are inaccurate, and they may argue vigorously that they have been telling the truth. The idea of this happening to me is quite confronting, and as I write my blogs each day, I can only hope the memories that survive through my words will help me later on. The famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung said, ‘wholeness for humans depends on the ability to own their own shadow’ because he recognised that ONLY finding understanding of our dark side could end our underlying insecurity about our fundamental goodness and worth as humans and, in so doing, make us ‘whole’. Learn to love yourself, accept your dark side, get help to recover from a childhood of criticism or unrealistic expectations, and you might just kick the habit or the need to lie. 

Sources: Why do people lie?, Why we lie, Truth about deception Development through the lifespan, 4^th Ed., Memory Loss and the Brain.