Emma Levine

So that's selfish.

It might be based on some stereotype.

So it's inaccurate, despite not necessarily being selfish.

And it opens us up to all of these mistakes, selfish and otherwise.

Right.

It's almost impossible to know without asking someone their preferences directly and having their insight into what they want.

Otherwise, we're just making this subjective judgment about where the line is.

The line exists, but whether we can predict it a priori is unclear.

Yeah, I think there are individual differences on this.

I mean, so far we've tapped into the cross-cultural difference, U.S.

versus China, but there's also individual differences.

Some people want to know the truth at all times and tell the truth at all times, and some people are more comfortable with these tradeoffs or actually believe that comfort and social harmony sometimes reign supreme.

I think that's partly right.

It's an intuition I certainly had before heading into some cross-cultural research on this topic, which actually proved a bit more complicated than the story you've laid out.

So it's easy to make a prediction that in China, where there's more collectivism versus the U.S., that they'll value social harmony and be more accepting of deception.

And now we see that in the medical context, but that seems to be a function of the belief and importance of hope and things we think about at the end of life and the role of luck.

Right.

So knowing that you have cancer saying out loud can create bad luck.

Right.

But this actually doesn't carry over into a lot of other situations.