Emma Levine

Exactly.

And of course, it carries some information either way.

And that's why there's not a huge agreement that you should lie, even for the novice chef.

But we're varying the degree to which that information is meaningful and valuable.

In this experiment, participants are imagining that summer intern gives an end of summer presentation, something I had to do in my life as an intern way back when.

So they're giving a presentation and they stutter during it, making the presentation a bit hard to listen to.

And you learn that either this stutter was driven by nerves, that this intern was nervous, but they can likely overcome this stutter with more practice, or you learn that this person has a stutter that they cannot control.

In this study, that influences the endorsement of deception.

So 18.8% of participants say you should lie when the person can improve their ability to speak without a stutter, when it was just nerves.

But now the majority start thinking it's ethical to lie, 64.4%, when the person cannot control their stutter.

So the degree to which the information

is something you can learn from and that can lead to change seems to be what's driving that difference.

Right.

And I think that's what's so interesting.

And one thing I love about this body of research, it's that none of these are actually all that surprising.

You tell them to people and everyone's like, yeah, duh.

But then why don't we say this out loud?

Why don't we teach our children?

Why don't we talk about these rules?

They're actually quite obvious upon reflection.