Emma Levine

speaker

594 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 14 Sep

Emma Levine’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Hidden Brain · When It's Okay to Lie · 30 Mar 2026 podcast

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.

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.

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