When and why do people lie? A basic question but I would like to take it seriously as opposed to take the answer for granted. People lie because it does something for them, which is by and large a helpful way of looking at behaviors: instead of labeling them as "bad" and trying to stop doing them, it is helpful to understand why someone would engage in them repeatedly.
Clearly, lying helps people get out of trouble. As mentioned in the previous post, I had many situations as a child where lying allowed me to not fall under the scrutiny of my parents, whereas being honest would lead me to getting scolded about things I already knew were bad.
This situation highlights the fact that liers often know, at least in my experience, that what they did, both the act being concealed and the act of lying, are bad, but they come to the conclusion that it's better for them to lie, for one reason or another, usually their personal safety.
I can't say I ever learned anything important from getting scolded. Have you? All I remember is the humiliation of having to listen to a parent or teacher's speech while they didn't care whatsoever about my motivations or my side of the story. The whole thing also felt utterly scripted, like they were taking on the role of the "responsible" adult, with the typical denigrating tone that adults use to talk to children.
Scolding doesn't work because it punishes behavior and doesn't invite reflection, especially as to what causes the behavior to happen in the first place. As a child, you are mainly scolded because you cannot tolerate the insane prison that is school, and you are told of the importance of obeying rules. But then you see the faces and lives of those who are good at obeying rules, and you think to yourself: "Well, if that's what being a 'proper citizen' is like, then why should I not break some rules and reap the rewards?" I never had this explicit thought, but it certainly felt like the whole game of school was just a farce, a theatre of power dynamics.
So my rather cynical take is that lying happens because environments unconsciously reward the act of lying. If there was an incentive towards honestly bringing up problems before they show up, and some types of space where we could talk about the shitty feelings we had, those would dissolve most of the tension and power dynamics that lead to lying.
We clearly do not live in such an open world however. Power structures rule everything around us, something that people in power are very keen on not focusing on, which inevitably distorts the type of conversations we can have. Within a company, there can never be such a thing as honest communication between an employee and his/her manager. Never. The clueless managers are not aware of this, and think that if a problem is not reported then there is no problem, which is why they consistently run into issues which show up all at once, something which they rarely learn from.
So people lie because they know, or they get a sense, that they will not be heard, and therefore telling the other side what it wants to hear is more beneficial. Power structures are of course the main example of how this happens, but sometimes we have to deal with people who simply cannot handle ideas and realities outside of a very narrow window, like people who would break under this or that bad news and so we prefer to keep them in denial. We could argue whether this is a good thing to do or not, but nonetheless, that is another major situation where people lie.
But ultimately I think that people lie because they do not have access to a sense of belonging. If you spent a lot of time with people you cared about, you would not settle for lying, even for fairly innocent matters. Lying erodes trust, which is difficult to build back, which is why long-term relationships demand a lot more from us than the transactional "relationships" at work.
Grifters, scammers, con artists and other frauds can get away with their activities by taking advantage of the low interconnectivity of the modern world. They know that whatever knowledge you have of them being a scammer will not spread much through the other people they will reach out for, which means they can keep doing their thing over and over. No one would try to run the same scheme in a smaller village where people basically know everyone else, that would be utterly stupid.
So what I see again and again is how many social problems we have around us which are downstream of living in a low-trust society, which is inevitable when the scale we live at is far larger than the usual communal settings that people used to have.
When you spend most of your time at school or work, where you are under the command of someone who fundamentally does not care about you as a human being, but merely as a productive unit, then of course people will be inclined to hide their intentions, lie, and bullshit their way through that environment. Open and friendly environments promote healthy interactions, but closed and utilitarian ones promote bullshitting, grifting and all sorts of anti-social behaviors.
I am not saying we are pre-determined to act in awful manners in modern environments, but we certainly aren't steered towards being very virtuous. Some people can remain "nice" in all their interactions because they have enough wealth to not work for an overbearing boss—often those "nice" people are managers—and to not depend on too many people who would have the incentives to rip them off, but most people unfortunately have to slog through structures of power which treat them like automatons, and environments where the people ripping them off get away scot-free.
I myself partake in lying on a day-to-day basis. I lie about the fact that I am "working" at my job, in reality I spend most of my time reading things or writing those pieces. I mention this because so many people are utterly desensitized to how much bullshit they engage in and are surrounded by, that it didn't even occur to them that they are constantly lying about their intentions, what they genuinely enjoy or dislike, and so on. 1
I sometimes have to pretend that I enjoy this job, when I do not, or to pretend that it does anything important in the world, when it doesn't.
I also have to lie, or at least hide, about how I feel about the future of our society, to my parents and others. I do not believe that the nice convenience we have through technology will last forever, there is simply nothing that can replace fossil fuels for instance, and those resources are non-renewable. We can mitigate problems, but not fundamentally solve that in a sustainable way.
And I also lie to myself, about how I feel in general, how I feel about the things I do, sometimes about what I want. I'm working on that, because of course, if you can't be honest with yourself, then who can you be honest with?
1 Other questions which people typically lie about:
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Schooling Curiosity Growth Power
2025-08-26