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

And one of the employees drops by on a Friday afternoon, says, hey, what's going on?

I'm about to head out for the weekend.

And this is the opportunity for the manager to tell the employee about the layoffs.

So in the control condition, that's about all the information that we give participants.

And in that case, most people think you should tell the truth.

And only about 22, 23 percent of participants think the right thing to do is to lie.

Now, in another condition, participants learn that the employee swings by on a Friday before leaving for their wedding, which is on Saturday.

Right.

That changes how we think about this.

Now, 52% of participants think that you should lie.

So a significant amount more because why would you spoil this person's wedding?

You could just tell them right the next week.

And this is actually, you know, something that comes up in different religions and different texts that you really shouldn't spoil sacred events in any

In Judaism, a book called the Talmud, they debate kind of some of these situations.

They say you should always tell a bride she's beautiful on her wedding day because why would you spoil that special time no matter what you really think?

So all of these situations, what they're doing is they're mapping this logic of unnecessary harm.

You tell the lie and we think that lying is the right thing to do because it's sparing the listener from unnecessary harm.

It's protecting their feelings when there's nothing they could learn or do with this information.

And that's what we think is benevolent.

That really promotes or people believe that it promotes the target's best interests to protect them from that unnecessary harm.

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