Shankar Vedantam

What if your partner is a year away from dying?

At what point is the line between fragility and non-fragility?

What do you make of the people who are basically sticking to the honesty is the best policy?

So in the many examples that you've given me, it's true and surprising that significant numbers of people endorse deception at some level.

And depending on how you tweak the scenarios, more people endorse deception.

But it's also the case clearly in your studies that even in situations where someone is very vulnerable or about to have a wedding or dealing with an important test,

There are some people who say, always tell the truth.

Your mandate is in fact to follow thou shalt not lie.

What you just said makes me think is the distinction between these two groups of people, how much they actually are embedded in their communities and how much they're actually connected to other people.

Because I think a very individualistic point of view would say, I always want to be told the truth and I always want to be telling other people the truth.

But the more

community-minded you are, the more you're embedded in social systems, the more you value those social systems, the more you try and take into account social harmony and how other people are feeling and not just, am I telling the truth or am I being lied to?

You had an experience of being lied to during the COVID pandemic.

Describe for me what happened, Emma.

So this is not actually unlike what she did during your wedding.

Was your reaction the same?

I'm wondering if you've had a conversation with your mom, Emma, laying out when and how she's allowed to tell you benevolent lies and when she's not.

In our companion story to this episode, exclusively on Hidden Brain Plus, we explore ways to bridge the gap between the many lies we condone in practice and the lying we claim to abhor.

Instead of exalting the truth while telling lies, what would happen if we told the truth about our lying ways?

Again, that's support.hiddenbrain.org.