Emma Levine

Now, suddenly, a lot more people think you should lie.

So almost 20 percent of participants think you should lie and only 80 percent say you should tell the truth.

And we find the same results when you actually ask people what they would want to be told as the employee.

People want to be lied to in this moment of fragility.

And so that's doing a lot of work here.

Yeah, people think about fragility and distraction as kind of these temporary states that merit deception.

So in this one particular instance, a participant writes about this time that she withheld the truth from her friend, the truth being that a boy wasn't interested in her, and she didn't tell her friend because the friend was studying for an exam.

She didn't want to throw her off her study patterns and risk

undermining her exam performance, so she withheld the truth and told her later.

And that's not all that different from what my mother did when I was studying for my qualifying exams.

She waited.

Participants imagine being the caregiver for an elderly man named Jeff, and they learn that Jeff's estranged daughter has passed away.

So that's the setup that everybody learns.

And then we randomly assign participants to a condition in which Jeff is...

either not cognitively compromised or is cognitively compromised.

So in the control condition, you know that Jeff is in good physical and mental health despite being quite elderly.

And in that situation, almost everyone believes that you should tell the truth.

Only about 7% of participants, 7.7%, believe it is ethical to lie to Jeff about the death of his daughter.

But in another condition, we tell participants that although Jeff is in good physical health, he suffers from severe dementia, implying that he cannot necessarily make sense of reality and he's easily confused.

And now almost a third of participants believe the right thing to do is to lie.