Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. It's a story that is familiar to every American. A young George Washington chops down his father's prized cherry tree. When his father confronts him about the deed, young George doesn't hide. He doesn't deflect. He doesn't minimize.
Chapter 2: How does the story of George Washington illustrate the complexities of honesty?
I cannot tell a lie, he says. I did cut it. Instead of scolding him, George's father embraces him. He declares that his son's honesty is worth more than a thousand trees.
This tale, first popularized in the early 19th century, is one of America's most cherished moral parables.
It celebrates honesty and the courage that often accompanies it. Yet the story's enduring power rests on a deep irony. The parable is almost certainly a fabrication, a lie invented to teach the importance of telling the truth.
The myth-makers behind the story believe that fiction could serve a higher truth, that people might be inspired to be truthful by the story of a hero who could not tell a lie. The story of George Washington and the cherry tree reminds us that the motivations behind honesty and deception are rarely straightforward.
Lies can sometimes uphold moral ideals, and truths can sometimes be wielded to wound. Today on the show, and in a companion episode on Hidden Brain Plus, can engaging in deception ever be the right thing to do? The psychology of good lies continues. This week on Hidden Brain. We grew up learning that honesty is a virtue, that good people tell the truth, and that liars are bad people.
But life has a way of complicating simple lessons. A husband hides his elderly wife's dementia diagnosis in order to spare her needless worry. A friend says, you look great, knowing it isn't true. A parent tells her child that everything will be okay when it might not be. These moments leave us wondering, when is telling the truth cruel? And when do lies become an act of love?
At the University of Chicago, Emma Levine studies the psychology of truth-telling and deception. Emma Levine, welcome to Hidden Brain.
Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.
Emma, a few years ago, you were planning your wedding, and you faced a dilemma regarding the guest list. I understand it involved your grandfather and his friends? Yes.
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Chapter 3: When is telling the truth considered cruel?
In October 1962, the United States discovered that the Soviet Union was building nuclear military installations in Cuba, just 90 miles from Florida. Once completed, Soviet warheads could hit the continental United States within minutes. The John F. Kennedy administration faced a choice. They could tell the American public what was going on, or they could lie. What did they do, Emma?
They certainly didn't tell the public everything. For about a week after this discovery, the White House kept the information secret. And Kennedy, meanwhile, assembled a group of top advisers to deliberate about this and what to do in private.
And so then they secretly also back-channeled with the Soviet Union through trusted intermediaries and then eventually announced to the nation that there would be this U.S. response of a quarantine.
I'm imagining that if they had come clean on day one before they even knew what was going on, before they had a plan, it could have triggered mass panic.
Right. And that was part of the tradeoff. Right. Do we inform the public fully and risk a panic and a premature military response and escalation? Or do we engage in some form of deception for at least some time?
Hmm.
Now, is this also a case in which deception had both costs and benefits? So the lies that were told by the Kennedy administration might have helped avert panic. It might have even helped avert a potential war between nuclear powers. But it might have also contributed to the long-term and very consequential undermining of the American public's trust in what their leaders were telling them.
Absolutely. And I think this is the tension that comes with lying. We could argue that this was the right lie to tell, that it successfully promoted the U.S. interests and avoided a lot of harm, but it's never without some long-term cost. And in this case, the cost is trust, trust in what your leaders are telling you.
We've been told that we should always tell the truth, and we tell others, like our employees and our students and our kids, that they ought to do the same. But do we really live by this rule? Should we? When we come back, the unwritten rules that govern when it's okay to lie. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
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Chapter 4: What dilemmas arise when planning a wedding guest list?
It is a paradox, and it's very confusing. And this is kind of the nuance that we have to figure out every day of our lives from a very young age, right? You tell your children, never lie, and then they hear you telling their sibling to tell their grandmother they love this gift that they hate.
And we're just puzzling and fumbling our way through when, in reality, there are very clear situations underlying the exceptions. We just don't say them out loud that much.
So your research has identified these situations in which people generally agree that it's morally acceptable to lie. You've identified a number of these situations in which dishonesty is seen as acceptable and perhaps even preferable to honesty. One of these is when the target of the lie is incapacitated in some way.
So in one study, you presented volunteers with a scenario in which an employee has just turned in a report to a manager, even as the employee struggles with a difficult personal situation.
We've run a lot of these studies in which we're trying to manipulate and think about what changes our fundamental judgment of lying. And so in this particular situation, we're trying to play with the fragility of the target. So as you stated, right, the employee has turned in a report. The manager doesn't think it has been done well. If you just ask, right, should Hmm.
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.
The state of being vulnerable includes people who might be distracted from an important goal if they were told the truth. One student described a scenario that played out in her own life involving a friend who was about to take a difficult exam. What happened and how did this young woman handle the situation?
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.
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Chapter 5: How do cultural differences impact perceptions of lying?
So this is not actually unlike what she did during your wedding. Was your reaction the same?
No, it was different. And this, again, points to some of the risks of trying to get this trade-off right. So here, I was very upset. I actually didn't let them come. I made them wait a whole week and get tested. I was... Yes, very, very concerned about all of this. But I was I was upset. And it's not because her motivations were different. I think the motivations were the same.
They were benevolent. She didn't want to stress me out in a situation that she didn't think provided necessary information right along the logic that I've outlined before. But in this situation, I did feel the information was necessary. We had different beliefs. And so the lie felt very paternalistic and unfair, not pro-social as it had before.
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.
I probably should. I haven't done it, which is, now that you ask, a bit strange because I do give the advice to other people and in my papers that one way to avoid this risk is to have conversations about this, right? To have explicit kind of social contracts. What type of feedback do you like in what situations? Doctors can do this with patients.
How much do you want to know everything and every risk? Or do you want to just focus... on each next step in the plan moving forward. So there are ways to have these conversations so that you can be sure you're erring on the side of benevolence when it's really benevolent, when it aligns with the listener's interests. We haven't had that conversation and perhaps we should.
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.
If you're using an Apple device, go to apple.co slash hiddenbrain. Emma Levine is a psychologist at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. Emma, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.
Thanks for having me. It's been a blast.
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