New study finds that people tend to lie in order to appear more honest

So, you told your parents you’re going to a party that’ll run past 12 am, and you’ll let yourself in when you come home. The party wrapped up early and you got home by 10 pm, but your parents were already asleep and didn’t see you arrive. Next morning, when they ask you when you got home you end up saying it was about 11 pm because clearly, they won’t believe you if say that you reached home as early as the actual time. They’d find it ridiculous and think you’re being dishonest, so you lie. [caption id=“attachment_7979041” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representational image. Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay.[/caption] If you’ve encountered such a situation and lied to appear more honest, then you’re not alone. A new study published in the  Journal of Experimental Psychology: General  reveals that people do tend to lie to appear honest if the situation that worked in their favour is deemed too good to be true.

Lying to be liked more

The researchers, led by Dr Shoham Choshen-Hillel, that because people care about their reputation and how they will appear in front of others, their “concern about appearing honest may outweigh their desire to actually be honest”. “Our findings suggest that when people obtain extremely favourable outcomes, they anticipate other people’s suspicious reactions and prefer lying and appearing honest over telling the truth and appearing as selfish liars,” Dr Choshen-Hillel revealed in the study. The researchers conducted a number of experiments with lawyers and college students in Israel as well as online experiments with participants in the USA and UK. The results showed that an overwhelming number of participants chose to lie about favourable outcomes instead of being “judged” as dishonest people for telling the truth, even in situations where they received less remuneration than they deserved.

An experiment with truth

The experiment with lawyers is particularly telling because people, in general, assume lawyers to be dishonest. This assumption can inform the way lawyers approach the public, and this study proved just that. About 115 lawyers from Israel were told to imagine a scenario where their client would have to pay for 60-90 billable hours for a case. Of course, the client wouldn’t know how many hours the lawyer actually worked for, so the lawyer would be free to bill them for any number of hours. Half the lawyers were told they worked for 60 billable hours, and the other half was told they worked for 90. The lawyers from each group were then told to prepare the final bill for their client. While 17% of the lawyers in the 60-hour group lied to inflate their billable hours to 62.5, the lawyers in the 90-hour group reported an average of 88 billable hours.   When the lawyers in the 90-hour group were asked to explain why they billed for lesser hours, some lawyers in the group revealed that they were worried their client would assume they had been cheated and lied to by the lawyers about the actual billable hours. Similar results were observed in all the other experiments as well. “Some participants overcame their aversion toward lying and the monetary costs involved just to appear honest to a single person who was conducting the experiment,” Dr Choshen-Hillel explained. She believes that this research can have applications in the real world too, even though chances are that with high stakes involved, people would choose to tell the truth instead of being caught in a lie later. For more information, head to our page on   Health Tips_._ Health articles in Firstpost are written by myUpchar.com, India’s first and biggest resource for verified medical information. At myUpchar, researchers and journalists work with doctors to bring you information on all things health.