Emma Levine

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.

But 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?

Now...

Most people, 71 percent 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 it should be shared?

And that's what's going on here.

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 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.

It'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.