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.

Appearances

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Hidden Brain · Why Conversations Go Wrong · 14 Sep 2026 podcast

Well, in some of my own studies, what we had people do is take three days and spend three days being completely truthful in every conversation they had, in every interaction with every person in their life.

And it was hard.

It was harder, certainly, than, you know, the control condition where we just had people be conscious of their communication.

We also had a kindness condition in which people were focused on kindness, which often does enable lies.

But more than finding, you know, it

reduced line per se.

What we find, this is work from me and Taya Cohen at Carnegie Mellon, we find that people find this experience of full honesty surprisingly enjoyable and more socially connecting than they expect.

Absolutely.

Certainly people avoid sharing information and just avoid conversations, avoid people all the time, and they don't necessarily construe that as lying, although they're doing it with the purpose of avoiding the truth.

But this question is so interesting because I get it a lot, and I think people—

are really kind of off the mark in terms of how they think about omission.

And some of my studies show

So from the communicator side, similar to what John was saying, it feels like a moral compromise.

I don't want to say this hurtful truth that your baby's ugly.

I don't want to lie because lying is morally costly and reputationally costly.

So it feels like the right compromise is to say nothing at all.

And a lot of communicators, when you're in the perspective of the speaker, the communicator, people think that, that it's kind of a moral compromise.

It's judged more moral than lying and less moral than telling the truth.

So communicators see omission as this compromise.

But listeners don't see it the same way.

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