the truth behind lying essay

Lying in Politics: Hannah Arendt on Deception, Self-Deception, and the Psychology of Defactualization

By maria popova.

“The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her beautiful 1975 speech on lying and what truth really means , “are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities.” Nowhere is this liar’s loss of perspective more damaging to public life, human possibility, and our collective progress than in politics, where complex social, cultural, economic, and psychological forces conspire to make the assault on truth traumatic on a towering scale.

Those forces are what Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975), one of the most incisive thinkers of the past century, explores in a superb 1971 essay titled “Lying in Politics,” written shortly after the release of the Pentagon Papers and later included in Crises of the Republic ( public library ) — a collection of Arendt’s timelessly insightful and increasingly timely essays on politics, violence, civil disobedience, and the pillars of a sane and stable society.

Out of the particular treachery the Pentagon Papers revealed, Arendt wrests a poignant meditation on the betrayal we feel at every revelation that our political leaders — those we have elected to be our civil servants — have deceived and disappointed us. With the release of the Pentagon Papers, Arendt argues, “the famous credibility gap … suddenly opened up into an abyss” — an abyss rife with the harrowing hollowness of every political disappointment that ever was and ever will be. In a quest to illuminate the various “aspects of deception, self-deception, image-making, ideologizing, and defactualization,” she writes:

Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings. Whoever reflects on these matters can only be surprised by how little attention has been paid, in our tradition of philosophical and political thought, to their significance, on the one hand for the nature of action and, on the other, for the nature of our ability to deny in thought and word whatever happens to be the case. This active, aggressive capability is clearly different from our passive susceptibility to falling prey to error, illusion, the distortions of memory, and to whatever else can be blamed on the failings of our sensual and mental apparatus.

A defender of the contradictory complexity of the human experience and its necessary nuance, Arendt reminds us that the human tendency toward deception isn’t so easily filed into a moral binary. Two millennia after Cicero argued that the human capacities for envy and compassion have a common root , Arendt argues that our moral flaws and our imaginative flair spring from the same source:

A characteristic of human action is that it always begins something new, and this does not mean that it is ever permitted to start ab ovo , to create ex nihilo . In order to make room for one’s own action, something that was there before must be removed or destroyed, and things as they were before are changed. Such change would be impossible if we could not mentally remove ourselves from where we physically are located and imagine that things might as well be different from what they actually are. In other words, the deliberate denial of factual truth — the ability to lie — and the capacity to change facts — the ability to act — are interconnected; they owe their existence to the same source: imagination. It is by no means a matter of course that we can say , “The sun shines,” when it actually is raining (the consequence of certain brain injuries is the loss of this capacity); rather, it indicates that while we are well equipped for the world, sensually as well as mentally, we are not fitted or embedded into it as one of its inalienable parts. We are free to change the world and to start something new in it. Without the mental freedom to deny or affirm existence, to say “yes” or “no” — not just to statements or propositions in order to express agreement or disagreement, but to things as they are given, beyond agreement or disagreement, to our organs of perception and cognition — no action would be possible; and action is of course the very stuff politics are made of. Hence, when we talk about lying … let us remember that the lie did not creep into politics by some accident of human sinfulness. Moral outrage, for this reason alone, is not likely to make it disappear.

Since history is a form of collective memory woven of truth-by-consensus, it is hardly surprising that our collective memory should be so imperfect and fallible given how error-prone our individual memory is . Arendt captures this elegantly:

The deliberate falsehood deals with contingent facts; that is, with matters that carry no inherent truth within themselves, no necessity to be as they are. Factual truths are never compellingly true. The historian knows how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life; it is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes, or denied and distorted, often carefully covered up by reams of falsehoods or simply allowed to fall into oblivion. Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs. From this, it follows that no factual statement can ever be beyond doubt.

In a sentiment that calls to mind Maria Konnikova’s fascinating inquiry into the psychology of why cons work on even the most rational of us , Arendt adds:

It is this fragility that makes deception so very easy up to a point, and so tempting. It never comes into a conflict with reason, because things could indeed have been as the liar maintains they were. Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear. He has prepared his story for public consumption with a careful eye to making it credible, whereas reality has the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected, for which we were not prepared. Under normal circumstances the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute; no matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough, even if he enlists the help of computers, to cover the immensity of factuality. The liar, who may get away with any number of single falsehoods, will find it impossible to get away with lying on principle.

Arendt considers one particularly pernicious breed of liars — “public-relations managers in government who learned their trade from the inventiveness of Madison Avenue.” In a sentiment arguably itself defeated by reality — a reality in which someone like Donald Trump sells enough of the public on enough falsehoods to get gobsmackingly close to the presidency — she writes:

The only limitation to what the public-relations man does comes when he discovers that the same people who perhaps can be “manipulated” to buy a certain kind of soap cannot be manipulated — though, of course, they can be forced by terror — to “buy” opinions and political views. Therefore the psychological premise of human manipulability has become one of the chief wares that are sold on the market of common and learned opinion.

In what is possibly the finest parenthetical paragraph ever written, and one of particularly cautionary splendor today, Arendt adds:

(Oddly enough, the only person likely to be an ideal victim of complete manipulation is the President of the United States. Because of the immensity of his job, he must surround himself with advisers … who “exercise their power chiefly by filtering the information that reaches the President and by interpreting the outside world for him.” The President, one is tempted to argue, allegedly the most powerful man of the most powerful country, is the only person in this country whose range of choices can be predetermined. This, of course, can happen only if the executive branch has cut itself off from contact with the legislative powers of Congress; it is the logical outcome in our system of government when the Senate is being deprived of, or is reluctant to exercise, its powers to participate and advise in the conduct of foreign affairs. One of the Senate’s functions, as we now know, is to shield the decision-making process against the transient moods and trends of society at large — in this case, the antics of our consumer society and the public-relations managers who cater to it.)

Arendt turns to the role of falsehood, be it deliberate or docile, in the craftsmanship of what we call history:

Unlike the natural scientist, who deals with matters that, whatever their origin, are not man-made or man-enacted, and that therefore can be observed, understood, and eventually even changed only through the most meticulous loyalty to factual, given reality, the historian, as well as the politician, deals with human affairs that owe their existence to man’s capacity for action, and that means to man’s relative freedom from things as they are. Men who act, to the extent that they feel themselves to be the masters of their own futures, will forever be tempted to make themselves masters of the past, too. Insofar as they have the appetite for action and are also in love with theories, they will hardly have the natural scientist’s patience to wait until theories and hypothetical explanations are verified or denied by facts. Instead, they will be tempted to fit their reality — which, after all, was man-made to begin with and thus could have been otherwise — into their theory, thereby mentally getting rid of its disconcerting contingency.

This squeezing of reality into theory, Arendt admonishes, is also a centerpiece of the political system, where the inherent complexity of reality is flattened into artificial oversimplification:

Much of the modern arsenal of political theory — the game theories and systems analyses, the scenarios written for imagined “audiences,” and the careful enumeration of, usually, three “options” — A, B, C — whereby A and C represent the opposite extremes and B the “logical” middle-of-the-road “solution” of the problem — has its source in this deep-seated aversion. The fallacy of such thinking begins with forcing the choices into mutually exclusive dilemmas; reality never presents us with anything so neat as premises for logical conclusions. The kind of thinking that presents both A and C as undesirable, therefore settles on B, hardly serves any other purpose than to divert the mind and blunt the judgment for the multitude of real possibilities.

But even more worrisome, Arendt cautions, is the way in which such flattening of reality blunts the judgment of government itself — nowhere more aggressively than in the overclassification of documents, which makes information available only to a handful of people in power and, paradoxically, not available to the representatives who most need that information in order to make decisions in the interest of the public who elected them. Arendt writes:

Not only are the people and their elected representatives denied access to what they must know to form an opinion and make decisions, but also the actors themselves, who receive top clearance to learn all the relevant facts, remain blissfully unaware of them. And this is so not because some invisible hand deliberately leads them astray, but because they work under circumstances, and with habits of mind, that allow them neither time nor inclination to go hunting for pertinent facts in mountains of documents, 99½ per cent of which should not be classified and most of which are irrelevant for all practical purposes. […] If the mysteries of government have so befogged the minds of the actors themselves that they no longer know or remember the truth behind their concealments and their lies, the whole operation of deception, no matter how well organized its “marathon information campaigns,” in Dean Rusk’s words, and how sophisticated its Madison Avenue gimmickry, will run aground or become counterproductive, that is, confuse people without convincing them. For the trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods.

She extrapolates the broader human vulnerability to falsehood:

The deceivers started with self-deception. […] The self-deceived deceiver loses all contact with not only his audience, but also the real world, which still will catch up with him, because he can remove his mind from it but not his body.

Crises of the Republic is a spectacular and spectacularly timely read in its totality. Complement it with Arendt on the crucial difference between truth and meaning , the power of outsiderdom , our impulse for self-display , what free will really means , and her beautiful love letters , then revisit Walt Whitman on how literature bolsters democracy and Carl Sagan on why science is a tool of political harmony .

— Published June 15, 2016 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/06/15/lying-in-politics-hannah-arendt/ —

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The Truth about Lying

You can’t spot a liar just by looking, but psychologists are zeroing in on methods that might actually work.

Police thought that 17-year-old Marty Tankleff seemed too calm after finding his mother stabbed to death and his father mortally bludgeoned in the family’s sprawling Long Island home. Authorities didn’t believe his claims of innocence, and he spent 17 years in prison for the murders.

Yet in another case, detectives thought that 16-year-old Jeffrey Deskovic seemed too distraught and too eager to help detectives after his high school classmate was found strangled. He, too, was judged to be lying and served nearly 16 years for the crime.

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One man was not upset enough. The other was too upset. How can such opposite feelings both be telltale clues of hidden guilt?

They’re not, says psychologist Maria Hartwig, a deception researcher at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York. The men, both later exonerated, were victims of a pervasive misconception: that you can spot a liar by the way they act. Across cultures, people believe that behaviors such as averted gaze, fidgeting and stuttering betray deceivers.

In fact, researchers have found little evidence to support this belief despite decades of searching. “One of the problems we face as scholars of lying is that everybody thinks they know how lying works,” says Hartwig, who coauthored a study of nonverbal cues to lying in the Annual Review of Psychology . Such overconfidence has led to serious miscarriages of justice, as Tankleff and Deskovic know all too well. “The mistakes of lie detection are costly to society and people victimized by misjudgments,” says Hartwig. “The stakes are really high.”

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Tough to tell

Psychologists have long known how hard it is to spot a liar. In 2003, psychologist Bella DePaulo, now affiliated with the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her colleagues combed through the scientific literature, gathering 116 experiments that compared people’s behavior when lying and when telling the truth. The studies assessed 102 possible nonverbal cues, including averted gaze, blinking, talking louder (a nonverbal cue because it does not depend on the words used), shrugging, shifting posture and movements of the head, hands, arms or legs. None proved reliable indicators of a liar , though a few were weakly correlated, such as dilated pupils and a tiny increase — undetectable to the human ear — in the pitch of the voice.

Three years later, DePaulo and psychologist Charles Bond of Texas Christian University reviewed 206 studies involving 24,483 observers judging the veracity of 6,651 communications by 4,435 individuals. Neither law enforcement experts nor student volunteers were able to pick true from false statements better than 54 percent of the time — just slightly above chance. In individual experiments, accuracy ranged from 31 to 73 percent, with the smaller studies varying more widely. “The impact of luck is apparent in small studies,” Bond says. “In studies of sufficient size, luck evens out.”

This size effect suggests that the greater accuracy reported in some of the experiments may just boil down to chance , says psychologist and applied data analyst Timothy Luke at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. “If we haven’t found large effects by now,” he says, “it’s probably because they don’t exist .”

Police experts, however, have frequently made a different argument: that the experiments weren’t realistic enough. After all, they say, volunteers — mostly students — instructed to lie or tell the truth in psychology labs do not face the same consequences as criminal suspects in the interrogation room or on the witness stand. “The ‘guilty’ people had nothing at stake,” says Joseph Buckley, president of John E. Reid and Associates, which trains thousands of law enforcement officers each year in behavior-based lie detection. “It wasn’t real, consequential motivation.”

Samantha Mann , a psychologist at the University of Portsmouth, UK, thought that such police criticism had a point when she was drawn to deception research 20 years ago. To delve into the issue, she and colleague Aldert Vrij first went through hours of videotaped police interviews of a convicted serial killer and picked out three known truths and three known lies. Then Mann asked 65 English police officers to view the six statements and judge which were true, and which false. Since the interviews were in Dutch, the officers judged entirely on the basis of nonverbal cues.

The officers were correct 64 percent of the time — better than chance, but still not very accurate, she says. And the officers who did worst were those who said they relied on nonverbal stereotypes like “liars look away” or “liars fidget.” In fact, the killer maintained eye contact and did not fidget while deceiving. “This guy was clearly very nervous, no doubt,” Mann says, but he controlled his behavior to strategically counter the stereotypes.

In a later study, also by Mann and Vrij, 52 Dutch police officers did no better than chance at distinguishing true and false statements given by family members who’d murdered their relatives but denied it in anguished displays during televised press conferences used in the study. Notably, officers who performed the worst were those who felt that the emotional displays were genuine. But what did that signify? “If a husband killed his wife, he could be upset for all kinds of reasons, like remorse or getting caught,” says Mann. “Nonverbal behavior is so idiosyncratic. If you focus on the nonverbal behavior like emotions, you will trip up.”

Confirming these results on a large scale years later, Hartwig and Bond reviewed the literature for studies comparing people’s abilities to detect high- and low-stakes lies. They found no evidence that people were any better at detecting lies told by criminals or wrongly accused suspects in police investigations than those told by laboratory volunteers.

Something to hide

From serial killers to students fibbing in laboratory experiments, the lies in all these experiments were spoken. In a study published in 2019, Mann examined nonverbal deceit, such as when someone is trying to conceal illicit activity — a type of deception relevant to detecting bombers or smugglers . She recruited 52 university student volunteers and asked half of them to transport a laptop said to contain sensitive photographs on a ferry ride between two cities. The volunteers were told to try to blend into the crowd and not look “suspicious,” because people would be trying to identify them. The other half of the group were given a regular cell phone to transport, with no instructions to conceal what they were doing.

When Mann showed videos of the ferry rides to 104 other volunteers and asked them to pick out the “smugglers,” the spotters did no better than chance. In interviews afterward, the “smugglers” said they were nervous, but they consciously tried to act normal and control their nerves with tactics such as listening to music or using their phones.

Next, Mann raised the stakes. Half of a new group of 60 volunteers were given an envelope of Russian, Egyptian and Korean currency to conceal, while the other half didn’t “smuggle” anything. But this time, Mann sent two researchers onto the ferry to pace around and scrutinize the passengers, appearing to compare their faces to photos on a cell phone.

This time, 120 observers trying to pick out the “smugglers” on video guessed correctly just 39.2 percent of the time — well below chance. The reason, Mann says, is that the “smugglers” consciously made an effort to look normal, while the “innocent” control volunteers just acted naturally. Their surprise at the unexpected scrutiny looked to the observers like a sign of guilt.

The finding that deceivers can successfully hide nervousness fills in a missing piece in deception research , says psychologist Ronald Fisher of Florida International University, who trains FBI agents. “Not too many studies compare people’s internal emotions with what others notice,” he says. “The whole point is, liars do feel more nervous, but that’s an internal feeling as opposed to how they behave as observed by others.”

Studies like these have led researchers to largely abandon the hunt for nonverbal cues to deception. But are there other ways to spot a liar? Today, psychologists investigating deception are more likely to focus on verbal cues, and particularly on ways to magnify the differences between what liars and truth-tellers say.

For example, interviewers can strategically withhold evidence longer, allowing a suspect to speak more freely, which can lead liars into contradictions. In one experiment, Hartwig taught this technique to 41 police trainees, who then correctly identified liars about 85 percent of the time, as compared to 55 percent for another 41 recruits who had not yet received the training. “We are talking significant improvements in accuracy rates,” says Hartwig.

Another interviewing technique taps spatial memory by asking suspects and witnesses to sketch a scene related to a crime or alibi. Because this enhances recall, truth-tellers may report more detail. In a simulated spy mission study published by Mann and her colleagues last year, 122 participants met an “agent” in the school cafeteria, exchanged a code, then received a package. Afterward, participants instructed to tell the truth about what happened gave 76 percent more detail about experiences at the location during a sketching interview than those asked to cover up the code-package exchange . “When you sketch, you are reliving an event — so it aids memory,” says study coauthor Haneen Deeb, a psychologist at the University of Portsmouth.

The experiment was designed with input from UK police, who regularly use sketching interviews and work with psychology researchers as part of the nation’s switch to non-guilt-assumptive questioning, which officially replaced accusation-style interrogations in the 1980s and 1990s in that country after scandals involving wrongful conviction and abuse.

Slow to change

In the US, though, such science-based reforms have yet to make significant inroads among police and other security officials. The US Department of Homeland Security’s Transportation Security Administration, for example, still uses nonverbal deception clues to screen airport passengers for questioning. The agency’s secretive behavioral screening checklist instructs agents to look for supposed liars’ tells such as averted gaze — considered a sign of respect in some cultures — and prolonged stare, rapid blinking, complaining, whistling, exaggerated yawning, covering the mouth while speaking and excessive fidgeting or personal grooming. All have been thoroughly debunked by researchers.

With agents relying on such vague, contradictory grounds for suspicion, it’s perhaps not surprising that passengers lodged 2,251 formal complaints between 2015 and 2018 claiming that they’d been profiled based on nationality, race, ethnicity or other reasons. Congressional scrutiny of TSA airport screening methods goes back to 2013, when the US Government Accountability Office — an arm of Congress that audits, evaluates and advises on government programs — reviewed the scientific evidence for behavioral detection and found it lacking, recommending that the TSA limit funding and curtail its use. In response, the TSA eliminated the use of stand-alone behavior detection officers and reduced the checklist from 94 to 36 indicators, but retained many scientifically unsupported elements like heavy sweating.

In response to renewed Congressional scrutiny, the TSA in 2019 promised to improve staff supervision to reduce profiling. Still, the agency continues to see the value of behavioral screening. As a Homeland Security official told congressional investigators, “common sense” behavioral indicators are worth including in a “rational and defensible security program” even if they do not meet academic standards of scientific evidence. In a statement to Knowable , TSA media relations manager R. Carter Langston said that “TSA believes behavioral detection provides a critical and effective layer of security within the nation’s transportation system.” The TSA points to two separate behavioral detection successes in the last 11 years that prevented three passengers from boarding airplanes with explosive or incendiary devices.

But, says Mann, without knowing how many would-be terrorists slipped through security undetected, the success of such a program cannot be measured. And, in fact, in 2015 the acting head of the TSA was reassigned after Homeland Security undercover agents in an internal investigation successfully smuggled fake explosive devices and real weapons through airport security 95 percent of the time.

In 2019, Mann, Hartwig and 49 other university researchers published a review evaluating the evidence for behavioral analysis screening, concluding that law enforcement professionals should abandon this “fundamentally misguided” pseudoscience, which may “harm the life and liberty of individuals.”

Hartwig, meanwhile, has teamed with national security expert Mark Fallon, a former special agent with the US Naval Criminal Investigative Service and former Homeland Security assistant director, to create a new training curriculum for investigators that is more firmly based in science. “Progress has been slow,” Fallon says. But he hopes that future reforms may save people from the sort of unjust convictions that marred the lives of Jeffrey Deskovic and Marty Tankleff.

For Tankleff, stereotypes about liars have proved tenacious. In his years-long campaign to win exoneration and recently to practice law, the reserved, bookish man had to learn to show more feeling “to create a new narrative” of wronged innocence, says Lonnie Soury, a crisis manager who coached him in the effort. It worked, and Tankleff finally won admittance to the New York bar in 2020. Why was showing emotion so critical? “People,” says Soury, “are very biased.”

Editor’s note: This article was updated on March 25, 2021, to correct the last name of a crisis manager quoted in the story. Their name is Lonnie Soury, not Lonnie Stouffer.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine , an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter .

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The Definition of Lying and Deception

Questions central to the philosophical discussion of lying to others and other-deception (interpersonal deceiving) may be divided into two kinds. Questions of the first kind are definitional or conceptual. They include the questions of how lying is to be defined, how deceiving is to be defined, and whether lying is always a form of deceiving. Questions of the second kind are normative — more particularly, moral. They include the questions of whether lying and deceiving are either defeasibly or non-defeasibly morally wrong, whether lying is morally worse than deceiving, and whether, if lying and deception are defeasibly morally wrong, they are merely morally optional on certain occasions, or are sometimes morally obligatory. In this entry, we only consider questions of the first kind.

1.1 Statement Condition

1.2 untruthfulness condition, 1.3 addressee condition, 1.4 intention to deceive the addressee condition, 1.5 objections to the traditional definition of lying, 2.1 simple deceptionism, 2.2 complex deceptionism, 2.3 moral deceptionism, 2.4 non-deceptionism, 3.1 objections to the traditional definition of deception, other internet resources, related entries, 1. traditional definition of lying.

There is no universally accepted definition of lying to others. The dictionary definition of lying is “to make a false statement with the intention to deceive” ( OED 1989) but there are numerous problems with this definition. It is both too narrow, since it requires falsity, and too broad, since it allows for lying about something other than what is being stated, and lying to someone who is believed to be listening in but who is not being addressed.

The most widely accepted definition of lying is the following: “A lie is a statement made by one who does not believe it with the intention that someone else shall be led to believe it” (Isenberg 1973, 248) (cf. “[lying is] making a statement believed to be false, with the intention of getting another to accept it as true” (Primoratz 1984, 54n2)). This definition does not specify the addressee, however. It may be restated as follows:

• (L1) To lie = df to make a believed-false statement to another person with the intention that the other person believe that statement to be true.

L1 is the traditional definition of lying. According to L1, there are at least four necessary conditions for lying. First, lying requires that a person make a statement (statement condition). Second, lying requires that the person believe the statement to be false; that is, lying requires that the statement be untruthful (untruthfulness condition). Third, lying requires that the untruthful statement be made to another person (addressee condition). Fourth, lying requires that the person intend that that other person believe the untruthful statement to be true (intention to deceive the addressee condition).

These four necessary conditions need to be explained before objections to L1 can be entertained and alternative definitions can be considered.

According to the statement condition, lying requires that a person make a statement. Making a statement requires the use of conventional signs, or symbols . Conventional signs, such as “WOMEN” on the door to a restroom, are opposed to natural or causal signs, or indices , such as women coming in and out of a restroom, as well as signs that signify by resemblance, or icons , such as a figure with a triangular dress on the door to a restroom (cf. Grotius 2005, 2001; Pierce 1955; Grice 1989). Making a statement, therefore, requires the use of language. A commonly accepted definition of making a statement is the following: “ x states that p to y = df (1) x believes that there is an expression E and a language L such that one of the standard uses of E in L is that of expressing the proposition p ; (2) x utters E with the intention of causing y to believe that he, x , intended to utter E in that standard use” (Chisholm and Feehan 1977, 150).

It is possible for a person to make a statement using American Sign Language, smoke signals, Morse code, semaphore flags, and so forth, as well as by making specific bodily gestures whose meanings have been established by convention (e.g., nodding one's head in response to a question). Hence, it is possible to lie by these means. If it is granted that a person is not making a statement when he wears a wig, gives a fake smile, affects a limp, and so forth, it follows that a person cannot be lying by doing these things (Siegler 1966, 128). If it is granted that a person is not making a statement when, for example, she wears a wedding ring when she is not married, or wears a police uniform when she is not a police officer, it follows that she cannot be lying by doing these things.

In the case of a person who does not utter a declarative sentence, but who curses, or makes an interjection or an exclamation, or issues a command or an exhortation, or asks a question, or says “Hello,” then, if it is granted that she is not making a statement when she does any of these things, it follows that she cannot be lying by doing these things (Green 2001, 163–164; but see Leonard 1959).

An ironic statement, or a statement made as part of a joke, or a statement made by an actor while acting, or a statement made in a novel, is still a statement. More formally, the statement condition of L1 obeys the following three constraints (Stokke 2013a, 41):

• If x makes a statement, this does not entail that x believes the statement to be true;
• If x makes a statement, this does not entail that x intends her audience to believe the statement to be true;
• If x makes a statement, this does not entail that x intends her audience to believe that x believes the statement to be true.

The statement condition is to be distinguished from a different putative necessary condition for lying, namely, the condition that an assertion be made. The assertion condition is not a necessary condition for lying, according to L1. For example, if Yin, who does not have a girlfriend, but who wants people to believe that he has a girlfriend, makes the ironic statement “Yeah, right, I have a girlfriend” in response to a question from his friend, Bolin, who believes that Yin is secretly dating someone, with the intention that Bolin believe that he actually does have a girlfriend, then this ‘irony lie’ is a lie according to L1, although it is not an assertion.

According to the statement condition, it is not possible to lie by omitting to make a statement (Mahon 2003; Griffiths 2004, 33). So-called ‘lies of omission’ (or ‘passive lying’ (Opie 1825)) are not lies (Douglas 1976, 59; Dynel 2011, 154). All lies are lies of commission. It is possible for a person to lie by remaining ‘silent,’ if the ‘silence’ is a previously agreed upon signal with others that is equivalent to making a statement (Fried 1978, 57). However, such a lie would not be a ‘lie of omission’ (see People v. Meza (1987) in which, on the basis of Californian Evidence Code that “‘Statement’” included “nonverbal conduct of a person intended by him as a substitute for oral or written verbal expression,” prospective juror’s Eric Luis Meza’s silence and failure to raise his hand in response to questions was “taken for a negative answer, i.e., a negative statement” ( People v. Meza 1987, 1647) and he was found guilty of perjury).

Note that the statement condition, all by itself, does not require that the statement be made to another person, or even that it be expressed aloud or in writing. One’s inner statements to oneself are statements, and, if other conditions are also met, can be “internal lies” (Kant 1996, 553–554).

According to the untruthfulness condition, lying requires that a person make an untruthful statement, that is, make a statement that she believes to be false. Note that this condition is to be distinguished from the putative necessary condition for lying that the statement that the person makes be false (Grotius 2005, 1209; Krishna 1961, 146). The falsity condition is not a necessary condition for lying according to L1.

Statements that are truthful may be false. If George makes the statement to Hillary (with the intention that Hillary believe that statement to be true), “The enemy has weapons of mass destruction,” and that statement is false, he is not lying if he does not believe that statement to be false.

Statements that are untruthful may be true. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s short-story, The Wall , set during the Spanish Civil War, Pablo Ibbieta, a prisoner sentenced to be executed by the Fascists, is interrogated by his guards as to the whereabouts of his comrade Ramon Gris. Mistakenly believing Gris to be hiding with his cousins, he makes the untruthful statement to them that “Gris is hiding in the cemetery” (with the intention that they believe this statement to be true). As it happens, Gris is hiding in the cemetery, and the statement is true. Gris is arrested at the cemetery, and Ibbieta is released (Sartre 1937; cf. Siegler 1966: 130). According to L1, Ibbieta lied to his interrogators, although the untruthful statement he made to them was true, and he did not deceive them about the whereabouts of Gris (Isenberg 1973, 248; Mannison 1969, 138; Lindley, 1971; Kupfer 1982, 104; Faulkner 2013).

If a person makes a truthful statement with the intention to deceive another person, then she is not lying, according to the untruthfulness condition. For example, if John and Mary are dating, and Valentino is Mary’s ex-boyfriend, and one evening “John asks Mary, ‘Have you seen Valentino this week?,’” and “Mary answers: ‘Valentino’s been sick with mononucleosis for the past two weeks,’” and “Valentino has in fact been sick with mononucleosis for the past two weeks, but it is also the case that Mary had a date with Valentino the night before” (Coleman and Kany 1981, 31), then Mary is not lying to John, even if she is attempting to deceive John. This is what is called a palter (see Schauer and Zeckhauser 2009; they illegitimately add that a palter must succeed in deceiving), or a false implicature (Adler 1997), or an attempt to mislead (Saul 2012b; Webber 2013).

In addition to palters not being lies, a double bluff is not a lie either according to the untruthfulness condition. If one makes a truthful statement, intending one’s addressee to believe that the statement is false, then one is not lying. Consider the following joke about two travelers on a train from Moscow (reputed to be Sigmund Freud's favorite joke) (Cohen 2002, 328):

Trofim: Where are you going? Pavel: To Pinsk. Trofim: Liar! You say you are going to Pinsk in order to make me believe you are going to Minsk. But I know you are going to Pinsk.

Pavel does not lie to Trofim, since his statement to Trofim is truthful, even if he intends that Trofim be deceived by this double bluff.

One implication of the untruthfulness condition is that if a person makes a statement that she believes to be neither true nor false, then she cannot be lying (Siegler 1966, 133; cf. Strawson 1952, 173). For example, if a person begging for money says “All my children need medical attention,” but believes that this proposition is neither true nor false, because he has no children, then he is not lying, even if he is attempting to deceive (Chisholm and Feehan 1977, 155–6; but see Siegler 1966, 135).

It is a matter of debate as to whether it is possible to lie using metaphors. For example, if a gardener who has had a very bad crop of tomatoes says “We’ve got tomatoes coming out of our ears,” intending to deceive about his having a bumper crop, then this untruthful statement made with an intention to deceive is typically not considered a lie, because the untruthful statement is metaphorical (Saul 2012, 16). Nevertheless, some argue that it is possible to lie using metaphors (Adler 1997, 444 n. 27; Griffiths 2004, 36; Dynel 2011, 149). If literally false metaphorical statements can be truthful statements, according to the beliefs of the speaker, and hence, can be untruthful statements, according to the beliefs of the speaker, then the deceptive gardener is lying in this example according to L1.

According to the addressee condition, lying requires that a person make an untruthful statement to another person (or, strictly speaking, to a believed other person, since one might, e.g., mistake a waxed dummy for another person, and lie to it). That is, lying requires that a person address another person (Simpson 1992, 626). According to L1, it is not possible for me to lie to no one whatsoever (i.e., not even myself), and it is not possible to lie to someone whom one is not addressing but whom one believes is listening in on a conversation. For example, if Mickey and Danny both believe that the F.B.I. is monitoring their telephone conversation, and Mickey says to Danny, “The pick-up is at midnight tomorrow,” with the intention of deceiving the FBI agents listening in, then Mickey is not lying to the F.B.I. agents (this is a “bogus disclosure” (Newey 1997, 115)).

According to L1, it is possible to lie to a general audience. It is possible for a person to lie by publishing an untruthful report about an event (Kant 1997, 203), or by making an untruthful statement on a tax return, or by sending an untruthful e-mail to everyone on a mailing list, or by making an untruthful statement in a magazine advertisement or a television commercial. In these cases, the readers, hearers, watchers, etc., are the addressees.

According to the addressee condition, lying necessarily involves addressing someone whom you believe to be a person capable of understanding your statement and forming beliefs on that basis. It is not possible to lie to those whom you believe to be non-persons (goldfish, dogs, robots, etc.) or persons whom you believe cannot understand the statements that are made to them (infants, the insane, etc., as well as those whom you believe cannot understand the language you are speaking in). It is possible to lie to other persons via intermediaries which are not persons, however (e.g., entering false answers to questions asked by a bank’s ATM).

According to the intention to deceive the addressee condition, lying requires that a person make an untruthful statement to another person with the intention that that other person believe that untruthful statement to be true. Making ironic statements, telling jokes, writing fiction, acting in a play, and so forth, without the intention that the addressee believe these untruthful statements to be true, is not lying (Morris 1976, 391).

If x makes an untruthful statement to y , without the intention that y believe that untruthful statement to be true, but with the intention that y believe something else to be true that x believes to be true, then x is not lying to y , according to L1. Examples of such non-deceptive untruthful statements include polite untruths (Kant 1997, 27; Mahon 2003, 109). For example, if servant Igor makes the untruthful statement to unwelcome visitor Damian, “Madam is not at home,” without the intention that Damian believe it to be true that she is not home (that would be lying on Igor’s part), but with the intention that Damian believe it to be true that it is inconvenient for Madam to see Damian now, something that Igor believes to be true, then according to L1, Igor is not lying to Damian (Isenberg 1973, 256). However, for Igor to intend that Damian believe this, it must be the case that Igor believes that this is how Damian understands “Madam is not at home.” Polite untruths may be said to be examples of “falsifications but not lies,” since the person “says just what etiquette demands” (Shiffrin 2014, 19). As it has been said about untruthful statements situations “in which politeness requires some sort of remark” and the other person “knows quite well that the statement is false,” such statements “are not really lies” (Coleman and Kay 1981, 29). They are better considered as cases of speaking in code . Another example of a non-deceptive untruthful statement is what has been called an “ altruistic lie ” (Fallis 2009, 50; cf. Augustine 1952, 57), such as when a speaker makes an untruthful statement to a hearer whom he believes distrusts him, in order that the hearer will believe something that the speaker believes to be true. This is not a lie according to L1.

Such non-deceptive untruths are not to be confused with white lies , i.e., harmless lies (Bok 1978, 58; Sweetser 1987, 54; 52 n. 73) or prosocial lies (also called social lies ), i.e., lies that do not harm social life but protect it (Meibauer 2014, 152; Sweetser 1987, 54), or fibs , i.e., inconsequential lies told for selfish reasons (Sweetser 1987, 54). White lies, prosocial lies, and fibs are all intentionally deceptive, and are all lies according to L1 (Green 2001, 169). For example, “both American and Ecuadorian cultures would probably consider Jacobo’s reply to be a white lie,” and hence deceptive, in the following case presented to Ecuadorians by linguists: “Teresa just bought a new dress. Upon trying it on for the first time, she asks her husband Jacobo, ‘Does it look good on me?’ Jacobo responds, ‘Yes’ even though he really thinks that the dress is ugly and too tight” (Hardin 2010, 3207; cf. Dynel 2011, 160). Or, to take another example, “Some people would call it a white lie to tell a dying person whatever he or she needs to hear to die in peace” (Sweetser 1987, 54). Note that both white lies and prosocial lies are to be distinguished from “lies which most people would think justified by some higher good achieved but which would not be called white lies [or prosocial lies], since their informational consequences are too major (however moral),” such as “to lie to the Gestapo about the location of a Jew” (Sweetser 1987, 54).

According to the untruthfulness condition, it is not merely the case that the person who makes the untruthful statement intends that some other person believe the untruthful statement to be true; the person intends that the addressee believe the untruthful statement to be true. Also, according to this condition, it is not merely the case that the person intends that the addressee believe some statement to be true that the person believes to be false; the person intends that the addressee believe to be true the untruthful statement that is made to the addressee . If Maximilian is a crime boss, and Alessandro is one of his henchmen, whom he secretly believes is a police informant, and Maximilian makes the untruthful statement to Alessandro “There are no informants in my organization,” without the intention that Alessandro believe that statement to be true, but with the intention that Alessandro believe that Maximilian believes that statement to be true, then Maximilian is not lying according to L1 (Mahon 2008, 220). (Maximilian has, of course, attempted to deceive Alessandro). This conclusion has prompted some to revise L1 to include more than one intention to deceive.

According to the untruthfulness condition, it is sufficient for lying that the person who makes the untruthful statement intends that the addressee believe the untruthful statement to be true; it is not necessary that the addressee believe the untruthful statement to be true. That is, a lie remains a lie if it is disbelieved . If Sophie makes the untruthful statement to Nicole “I didn’t get any homework today,” with the intention that Nicole believe that statement to be true, and if Nicole does not believe that statement to be true, then Sophie is still lying. This is because ‘lie’ is not an achievement or success verb, and an act of lying is not a perlocutionary act. The existence of an act of lying does not depend upon the production of a particular response or state in the addressee (Mannison 1969, 135; Wood 1973: 199; MacCormick 1983, 9 n. 23; but see Reboul 1994). As it has been said, “It is very odd to think that whether a speaker lies hinges upon the persuasiveness of the speaker or the credulity of the listener” (Shiffrin 2014, 13).

Because L1 does not have an assertion condition, however, according to L1 it is possible to lie by making ironic statements, telling jokes, writing fiction, acting in a play, and so forth, if the person making the untruthful statement (somehow) intends that it be believed to be true, as in the case of the ‘irony lie’ above. Similarly, if someone intends to deceive using a joke—for example, if con artist David says “Yeah, I am a billionaire. That's why I am in this dive” to his mark, Greg, at a bar, intending that Greg believe that David is a billionaire who is attempting to to pass incognito in a bar—then this ‘joke lie’ is a lie according to L1. If a novelist were to write a novel with the intention that her audience believe that this was a true story disguised as a novel—a pretend roman à clef —then this ‘fiction lie’ would be a lie according to L1. If an actor in a play were to deliver an untruthful statement with the intention that his audience believe the statement to be true—say, if an an actor delivered a line about his life being too short with the intention that the audience believed that the actor was actually dying from some disease (“it is possible that the performance is part of an elaborate deception aimed at getting members of the audience to believe that the particular line from the play is actually true” (Fallis 2009, 56))—then this ‘acting lie’ would be a lie according to L1.

Two kinds of objections have been made to L1. First, objections have been made to each necessary condition, on the basis that it is not necessary for lying. According to these objections, L1 is too narrow. Second, objections have been made to the four necessary conditions being jointly sufficient for lying, on the basis that some further condition is necessary for lying. According to these objections, L1 is too broad.

1.5.1 Conditions Are Not Necessary

Against the statement condition of L1 it has been objected that the making of a statement is not necessary for lying. Lying to others may be defined as “ any form of behavior the function of which is to provide others with false information or to deprive them of true information” (Smith 2004, 14), or as “ a successful or unsuccessful deliberate attempt, without forewarning, to create in another a belief which the communicator considers to be untrue ” (Vrij 2000, 6). Importantly, this entails that lying can consist of simply withholding information with the intent to deceive, without making any statement at all (Ekman 1985, 28; Scott 2006, 4). Those who make this objection would make lying the same as intentionally deceiving (Ekman 1985, 26).

Against the untruthfulness condition of L1 it has been objected that an untruthful statement is not necessary for lying. This objection comes in a variety of forms. There are those who argue any statement made with an intention to deceive is a lie, including a truthful statement that is made with an intention to deceive (Barnes 1994, 11; Davidson 1980, 88). Lying may thus be defined as “any intentionally deceptive message that is stated ” (Bok 1978, 13). There are also those who, relying upon a Gricean account of conversational implicature (Grice 1989, 39)), argue that someone who makes a truthful statement but who thereby conversationally implicates a believed-false statement is lying (Meibauer 2011, 285; 2014a). Importantly, such an “untruthful implicature” (Dynel 2011, 159–160) is “directly intended” (Adler 1997, 446). Thirdly, there are those who argue for the possibility of “lying ironically” (Simpson 1992, 631), or indirect lying. If a speaker makes an ironic untruthful statement, then “Through this presentation of himself as insincerely asserting he presents himself as believing” the opposite of what he says, which is “capacity to… assert in-effect” (Simpson 1992, 630). If the person is “insincere in this” and actually does believe in the truth of what he states, despite invoking trust in his believing its opposite, then “this is a lie (an indirect lie, we might say)” (Simpson 1992, 630). For example, if a person who is listening to a sappy pop song at a party is asked if she likes this kind of music and replies, ironically, “Yeah, right, I love this kind of music,” then she is lying if she actually does love this kind of music (cf. Dynel 2011, 148–149).

Against the untruthfulness condition it has also been objected that it is not necessary for lying that the statement that is made is believed to be false; it is sufficient that the statement is not believed to be true , or is believed to be probably false (Carson 2006, 298; 2010, 18). As it has been claimed, “Agnostics about the truth of their assertions who nonetheless assert them without qualification tell lies” (Shiffrin 2014, 13).

Against the addressee condition of L1 it has been objected that it is sufficient for lying that the untruthful statement is made, even if it is made to no one — not even to oneself (Griffiths 2004, 31). Lying may thus be defined as “conscious expression of other than what we believe” (Shibles 1985, 33). It has also been objected that it is possible to lie to third parties who are not addressees. In general, it is possible to distinguish between cases where “the hearer eavesdrops , unbeknown to the first and second parties” ( eavesdropping ), cases where “the speaker utters p to the interlocutor while the hearer, with the awareness of both other parties, listens in and knows that the first- and second-party know he is listening in… although it is for the interlocutor that the utterance is intended” ( kibbitzing ), as well as cases similar to kibbitzing except that “the utterance is also intended for the hearer [who knows that they know that he is listening in]” ( disclosure ), and cases similar to disclosure “except that although the first and second parties know that the hearer is listening in, the hearer does not know that they are listening in” ( bogus disclosure ) (Newey 1997, 115). Even if it is not possible to lie to eavesdroppers, or to those merely listening in, as in the case of kibbitzing, it may be possible to lie in the cases of bogus disclosure, as in the example above of Mickey saying to Danny, “The pick-up is at midnight tomorrow,” with the intention of deceiving the F.B.I. agents listening in. It may even be possible to lie in the case of disclosure. In the 1978 thriller Capricorn One about a Mars landing hoax, during a nationally televised transmission between the astronauts ‘in space’ and their wives at the control center, which is being monitored closely by NASA handlers, Colonel Charles Brubaker tells his wife Kay to tell his son that “When I get back, I’m gonna take him to Yosemite again, like last summer.” In fact he brought his son to a different place the previous summer (Flatbush, where a movie was being shot), something that his wife knows. According to this objection, Brubaker is lying to his NASA handlers about what he did last summer, even if they are not his addressees.

Against the addressee condition it has also been objected that it is possible to lie to an animal, a robot, etc., as well as to what might be another person—for example, if a home owner, woken up in the middle of the night and wondering if there are burglars below the stairs, shouts down, “I’m bringing my rifle down there,” although he has no rifle (Chisholm and Feehan 1977, 157).

Against the intention to deceive the addressee condition of L1 it has been objected that, even if an intention to deceive the addressee is required for lying, it is not necessary that it be an intention to deceive the addressee about the content of the untruthful statement; it may be an intention to deceive the addressee about the beliefs of the speaker abut the statement—specifically, the belief that the untruthful statement is true (Chisholm and Feehan 1977, 152; Williams 2002, 74; Reboul 1994, 294; Mahon 2008, 220; Tollefsen 2014, 24).

There are at least two ways in which L1 could be modified in response to this objection. First, it could be held that what is essential to lying is the intention to deceive the hearer about the speaker’s belief that the untruthful statement is true: “ x utters a sentence, ‘ S ,’ where ‘ S ’ means that p , in doing which either x expresses his belief that p , or x intends the person addressed to take it that x believes that p ” (Williams 2002, 74) and “the speaker believes [ p ] to be false” (Williams 2002, 96–97). L1 could therefore be modified as follows:

• (L2) To lie = df to make a statement that p , where p is believed to be false, to another person, with the intention that the other person believe that p is believed to be true. (cf. Williams 2002, 74, 96–97)

Alternatively, L1 could be modified to incorporate either intention, as follows:

• (L3) To lie = df to make a believed-false statement (to another person), either with the intention that that statement be believed to be true (by the other person), or with the intention that it be believed (by the other person) that that statement is believed to be true (by the person making the statement), or with both intentions. (Mahon 2008, 227–228)

Against this condition it has also been argued that it is not necessary that it be an intention to deceive the addressee about either the content of the untruthful statement or about the beliefs of the speaker about the untruthful statement. It is sufficient that there is an intention to deceive about some matter—that is, it is sufficient that the speaker intend that the hearer believe to be true something that the speaker believes to be false. Note that those who make this objection would turn lying into any deception involving untruthful statements. If this objection were combined with the objection that lying could be directed to third parties (as in bogus disclosure, or disclosure), L1 could be modified, as follows:

• (L4) To lie = df to make a believed-false statement, to another person or in the believed hearing of another person, with the intention that some other person—the person addressed or the other person in the believed hearing—believe some believed-false statement to be true. (Newey 1997, 100)

Against this condition it has also been objected that although there is “a necessary relationship between lying and deception,” nevertheless this intention should be understood merely as the intention to be deceptive to another person, which is the intention “to conceal information ” from the other person (Lackey 2013, 5–7). According to this objection, concealing evidence, understood as hiding evidence or keeping evidence secret, counts as being deceptive to another person. L1 could be modified, as follows:

• (L5) x lies to y if and only if (i) x states that p to y , (ii) x believes that p is false and (iii) x intends to be deceptive to y in stating that p . (Lackey 2013, 237)

Finally, against this intention to deceive the addressee condition it has been objected that no intention to deceive is required for lying (Shibles 1985, 33; Kemp and Sullivan 1993, 153; Griffiths 2004, 31; Carson et al. 1982; Carson 1988; 2006; 2010; Sorensen 2007; 2010; 2011; Fallis, 2009; 2010; 2012; 2015; Saul, 2012a; 2012b; Stokke 2013a, 2013b; 2014; Shiffrin 2014). If the sworn-in witness in the trial of a violent criminal goes on the record and gives untruthful testimony—in order, for example, to avoid being killed by the defendant or any of his criminal associates—without any intention that that testimony be believed to be true by any person (not the jury, the judge, the lawyers, the journalists covering the trial, the people in the gallery, the readers of the newspaper reports, etc.), then the witness is still lying (but see Jones 1986). Such non-deceptive lies are lies according to this objection (but see Lackey 2013 for the argument that these lies are intentionally deceptive, and Fallis 2015 for the argument that they are not intentionally deceptive).

1.5.2 Conditions Are Not Jointly Sufficient

It has been objected that L1 is not sufficient for lying because it is also necessary that the untruthful statement be false (Coleman and Kay 1981, 28; OED , 1989; Moore 2000). This is the falsity condition for lying (Grimaltos and Rosell forthcoming, see Other Internet Resources). For most objectors the falsity condition supplements L1 and makes this definition of lying even narrower (e.g., Coleman and Kay 1981). For other objectors the falsity condition is part of a different definition of lying, and makes that definition narrower (Carson 2006, 284; 2010, 17; Saul 2012b, 6).

It has been objected that L1 is not sufficient for lying because it is also necessary to intend that that other person believe that that statement is believed to be true (Frankfurt 1999, 96; Simpson 1992, 625; Faulkner 2007, 527). If Harry makes the untruthful statement “I have no change in my pocket” to Michael, but Harry does not intend that Michael believe that Harry believes it to be true, then Harry is not lying to Michael, even if Harry intends that Michael believe it to be true (Frankfurt 1986, 85; 1999, 96). This additional condition would make L1 even narrower, since it would have the result that Maximilian is not lying to Alessandro in the example above.

Finally, it has been objected that L1 is insufficient because lying requires that an untruthful assertion be made, and not merely that an untruthful statement be made. This is the assertion condition for lying. According to this objection, one is not lying when one makes a deceptive untruthful ironic statement (‘irony lie’), or a deceptive untruthful joke (‘joke lie’), or a deceptive untruthful fiction (‘fiction lie’), or deceptive untruthful acting (‘acting life’), since in none of these cases is one making an assertion. For most objectors the assertion condition supplements L1 and makes L1 even narrower (Chisholm and Feehan 1977; Fried 1978; Simpson 1992; Williams 2002; Faulkner 2007). For others the assertion condition is part of a different definition of lying, and makes that definition narrower (Sorensen 2007; Fallis 2009; Stokke 2013a).

The most important objection to L1 is that lying does not require an intention to deceive. This has led to a division amongst those writing on the definition of lying.

2. Deceptionism vs. Non-Deceptionism About Lying

There are two positions held by those who write on the definition of lying: Deceptionism and Non-Deceptionism (Mahon 2014). The first group, Deceptionists, hold that an intention to deceive is necessary for lying. Deceptionists may be divided further in turn into Simple Deceptionists, who hold that lying requires the making of an untruthful statement with an intention to deceive; Complex Deceptionists, who hold that lying requires the making of an untruthful assertion with the intention to deceive by means of a breach of trust or faith; and Moral Deceptionists, who hold that lying requires the making of an untruthful statement with the intention to deceive, as well as the violation of a moral right of another or the moral wronging of another. The second group, Non-Deceptionists, hold that an intention to deceive is not necessary for lying. They see the traditional definition as both incorrect and insufficient. Non-Deceptionists may be further divided into Simple Non-Deceptionists, who hold that the making of an untruthful statement is sufficient for lying, and Complex Non-Deceptionists, who hold that a further condition, in addition to making an untruthful statement, is required for lying. Some Complex Non-Deceptionists hold that lying requires warranting the truth of what is stated, and other Complex Non-Deceptionists hold that lying requires the making of an untruthful assertion.

Simple Deceptionists include those who defend L1 (Isenberg 1973; Primoratz 1984) as well as those who defend the modified versions of this definition: L2 (Williams 2002), L3 (Mahon 2008), L4 (Newey 1997), and L5 (Lackey 2013). For Simple Deceptionists, lying requires the making of an untruthful statement with an intention to deceive, but it does not require the making of an assertion or a breach of trust or faith.

Complex Deceptionists hold that, in addition to requiring an intention to deceive, lying requires the making of an untruthful assertion , as well as (or which therefore entails) a breach of trust or faith . Roderick Chisholm and Thomas Feehan hold that one is only making an assertion to another person if one makes a statement to another person and one believes that the conditions are such that the other person is justified in believing both that one believes one’s statement to be true and that one intends that the other person believe that one believes one’s statement to be true: “ x asserts p to y = df x states p to y and does so under conditions which, he believes, justify y in believing that he, x , not only accepts p , but also intends to contribute causally to y ’s believing that he, x , accepts p ” (Chisholm and Feehan 1977, 152).

A lie is an untruthful assertion, that is, the speaker believes the statement that is made is not true , or is false :

x lies to y = df There is a proposition p such that (i) either x believes that p is not true or x believes that p is false and (ii) x asserts p to y . (Chisholm and Feehan 1977, 152)

In the case of a lie, the speaker is attempting to get the hearer to believe a falsehood. Note, however, that this falsehood is not (normally) what the speaker is stating. Rather, the falsehood that the speaker is attempting to get the hearer to believe is that the speaker believes the statement to be true . This is the intention to deceive in lying (although, strictly speaking, deception is foreseen and not intended (“Essentially, under this definition, you are only lying if you expect that you will be successful in deceiving someone about what you believe” (Fallis 2009, 45)).

The speaker is also attempting to get the hearer to have this false belief about what the speaker believes “in a special way—by getting his victim to place his faith in him” (Chisholm and Feehan 1977, 149). This is the breach of trust or breach of faith in lying: “Lying, unlike the other types of deception, is essentially a breach of faith” (Chisholm and Feehan 1977, 153). Their complete definition of a lie may be stated as follows:

• (L6) To lie = df to (i) make a believed-false or believed-not-true statement to another person; (ii) believe that the conditions are such that the other person is justified in believing that the statement is believed to be true by the person making the statement; (iii) believe that the conditions are such that the other person is justified in believing that the person making the statement intends to contribute causally to the other person believing that the statement is believed to be true by the person making the statement. (Chisholm and Feehan 1977; cf. Guenin 2005)

According to L6 it not possible to lie if the speaker believes that the conditions are such that the hearer is not justified in believing that the speaker is making a truthful statement. Kant provides an example in which a thief grabs a victim by the throat and asks him where he keeps his money. If the victim were to make the untruthful statement, “I have no money,” Kant says that this is not a lie, “for the other knows that… he also has no right whatever to demand the truth from me” (Kant 1997, 203; but see Mahon 2009). Chisholm and Feehan hold that the victim is not making an assertion, and hence, is not lying, given that the victim believes that the thief is not justified in believing that the victim is being truthful (Chisholm and Feehan 1977, 154–155; but see Strudler 2009 (cf. Strudler 2005; 2010), for the argument that the thief can believe that the victim is credible, even if not trustworthy, because he is motivated by the threat of violence).

Charles Fried also holds that lying requires an assertion and a breach of faith, but he rejects L6, arguing that it is possible for the victim to lie to the thief in Kant’s example (Fried 1978, 55 n1). According to him, making an assertion involves making a statement and intending to cause belief in the truth of that statement by giving an implicit “warranty”or an implicit “ promise or assurance that the statement is true” (Fried 1978, 57). When one asserts, one intends to “invite belief, and not belief based on the evidence of the statement so much as on the faith of the statement” (Fried 1978, 56). A lie is an untruthful assertion. The speaker intends to cause belief in the truth of a statement that the speaker believes to be false. Hence, a lie involves an intention to deceive. The speaker also implicitly assures or promises the hearer that the statement that is made is true. Hence, the speaker is giving an insincere assurance, or breaking a promise— “in lying the promise is made and broken at the same moment”— and every lie involves a “breach of trust” (Fried 1978, 67).

Fried’s definition of lying may be stated as follows (modified to include cases in which speakers only intend to deceive about their beliefs):

• (L7) To lie = df to (i) make a believed-false statement to another person; (ii) intend that that other person believe that the statement is true [and that the statement is believed to be true] [or intend that the other person believe that the statement is believed to be true]; (iii) implicitly assure the other person that the statement is true; (iv) intend that that other person believe that the statement is true [and that the statement is believed to be true] [or intend that the other person believe that the statement is believed to be true] on the basis of this implicit assurance. (Fried 1978)

David Simpson also holds that lying requires an assertion and a breach of faith. In asserting “we present ourselves as believing something while and through invoking (although not necessarily gaining) the trust of the one” to whom we assert (Simpson 1992, 625). This “invocation of trust occurs through an act of ‘open sincerity’” according to which “we attempt to establish… both that we believe some proposition and that we intend them to realize that we believe it” (Simpson 1992, 625). Lying is “insincere assertion” in the sense that “the asserter’s requisite belief is missing” (Simpson 1992, 625). This entails that someone who lies aims to deceive in three ways. First, “we have the intention that someone be in error regarding some matter, as we see the fact of the matter” (Simpson 1992, 624). This is the “primary deceptive intention” (Simpson 1992, 624). Second, we intend to deceive the other person “regarding our belief regarding that matter… We don’t lie about this belief, but we intend to deceive regarding it” (Simpson 1992, 624). We intend that they be deceived, about whatever matter it is, on the basis of their being deceived about our belief in this matter. Finally, someone who lies “insincerely invokes trust” (Simpson 1992, 625). We intend that they be deceived about our belief in this matter on the basis of this insincere invocation of trust. Other forms of intended deception that are not lies do not attempt to deceive “by way of a trust invoked through an open sincerity” (Simpson 1992, 626). This is what makes lies special: “it involves a certain sort of betrayal” (Simpson 1992, 626).

Since it is possible to lie without having the primary deceptive intention, Simpson’s definition needs to be modified accordingly:

• (L8) To lie = df to: (i) make a statement to another person; (ii) lack belief in the truth of the statement; (iii) intend that the other person believe: (a) that the statement is true and that the statement is believed to be true [or (b) that the statement is believed to be true]; (iv) intend that the other person believe: (c) that it is intended that the other person believe that the statement is true; (d) that it is intended that the other person believe that the statement is believed to be true; (v) invoke trust in the other person that the statement is believed to be true by means of an act of ‘open sincerity’; (vi) intend that the other person believe (a), or (b), on the basis of (v). (Simpson 1992)

Paul Faulkner holds that lying necessarily involves telling someone something, which necessarily involves invoking trust. He distinguishes between telling and making an assertion, and argues that in certain cases the implication of my assertion “is sufficiently clear that I can be said to have told you this” (Faulkner 2013, 3102) even if I did not assert this. He defines telling as follows: “ x tells y that p if and only if (i) x intends that y believe that p , and (ii) x intends that y believe that p because y recognizes that (i)” (Faulkner 2013, 3103). In telling another person something, the speaker intends that the hearer believe what she is stating or implying, but she intends that the hearer believe what she is stating or implying for the reason that “ y [the hearer] believes x [the speaker]” (Faulkner 2013, 3102). It follows that tellings “operate by invoking an audience’s trust” (Faulkner 2013, 3103). In lying, the speaker intends that the hearer believe what she is stating or implying on the basis of trust: “In lying, a speaker does not intend his audience accept his lie because of independent evidence but intends his audience accept his lie because of his telling it . The motivation for presenting his assertion as sincere is to thereby ensure that an audience treats his intention that the audience believe that p as a reason for believing that p ” (Faulkner, 2007, 527) A lie is an untruthful telling. The speaker believes that what she asserts or implies is false, she intends that the hearer believe that what she states or implies is true, she intends that the hearer believe that she intends this, and she intends that this be the reason that the hearer believes that what she states or implies is true: “ x ’s utterance U to y is a lie if and only if (i) in uttering U , x tells y that p , and (ii) x believes that p is false” (Faulkner 2013, 3103).

Faulkner’s definition of lying also needs to be modified to include cases in which speakers only intend to deceive about their beliefs:

• (L9) To lie = df to (i) utter some proposition to another person; (ii) believe that the proposition is false; (iii) intend that the other person believe that the proposition is true and is believed to be true [or intend that the other person believe that the proposition is believed to be true]; (iv) intend that the other person believe that it is intended that the other person believe that the proposition is true; (v) intend that the other person believe that the proposition is true and is believed to be true [or intend that the other person believe that the proposition is believed to be true] for the reason that it is intended that the other person believe that the proposition is true. (Faulkner 2007; 2013)

It is an implication of Complex Deceptionist definitions of lying that certain cases of putative lies are not lies because no assertion is made. Consider the following case of an (attempted) confidence trick double bluff (Newey 1997, 98). Sarah, with collaborator Charlie, wants to play a confidence trick on Andrew. She wants Andrew to buy shares in Cadbury. She decides to deceive Andrew into thinking that Kraft is planning a takeover bid for Cadbury. Sarah knows that Andrew distrusts her. If she tells him that Kraft is planning a takeover bid for Cadbury, he will not believe her. If she tells him that there is no takeover bid, in an (attempted) double bluff, he might believe the opposite of what she says, and so be deceived. But this simple double bluff is too risky on its own. So Sarah gets Charlie, whom Andrew trusts, to lie to him that Kraft is about to launch a takeover bid for Cadbury. She also gets Charlie to tell Andrew that she believes that it is false that Kraft is about to launch a takeover bid for Cadbury. Sarah then goes to Andrew, and tells him, “Kraft is about to launch a takeover bid for Cadbury.” She does not intend that Andrew believe that she believes that Kraft is about to launch a takeover bid for Cadbury. However, she intends that he believe that she is mistaken, and that in fact Kraft is about to launch a takeover bid for Cadbury. As a result, he will be deceived.

According to L6, L7, L8, and L9, Sarah is not lying, because she is not asserting anything. According to Simpson, for example, Sarah would only be “ pretending to invoke trust” (Simpson 1992, 628), and would not be invoking trust. In such a case, the speaker intends to represent himself as “ intending to represent himself as believing what he does not” (Simpson 1992, 628). In order to lie, “one must pretend sincerity, but also act on an intention that this sincerity be accepted—otherwise one is pretending to lie, and not lying” (Simpson 1992, 629). Sarah would be merely pretending to lie to Andrew, in order to deceive him.

Another case of a putative lie that is not a lie according to Complex Deceptionist definitions of lying is a triple bluff (cf. Faulkner 2007, 527). Imagine an even more devious Pavel, from the example above, telling an openly distrustful Trofim, in response to Trofim's question, that he is going to “Pinsk.” He is actually going to Minsk, but he answers“Pinsk” in order to have Trofim believe that he is attempting a double bluff. If it works, Trofim will respond by telling him “Liar! You say you are going to Pinsk in order to make me believe you are going to Minsk. But I know you are going to Pinsk.” According to L6, L7, L8, and L9, Pavel is not lying to Trofim. He is pretending to attempt to deceive him with a double bluff, in order to actually attempt to deceive him with a triple bluff. At no point is he invoking trust, and breaching that trust.

Moral Deceptionists hold that in addition to making an untruthful statement with an intention to deceive, lying requires the violation of a moral right of another, or the moral wronging of another.

According to Chisholm and Feehan, every lie is a violation of the right of a hearer, since “It is assumed that, if a person x asserts a proposition p to another person y , then y has the right to expect that x himself believes p . And it is assumed that x knows, or at least that he ought to know, that, if he asserts p to y , while believing himself that p is not true, then he violates this right of y ’s” (Chisholm and Feehan 1977, 153, [variables have been changed for uniformity]). Nevertheless, it is not part of their definition of lying that lying involves the violation of the right of another person. According to most philosophers, the claim that lying is (either defeasibly or non-defeasibly) morally wrong is “a synthetic judgment and not an analytic one” (Kemp and Sullivan 1993, 153). However, ‘lie’ is considered by some philosophers to be a thick ethical term that it both describes a type of action and morally evaluates that type of action negatively (Williams 1985, 140). For some philosophers, “the wrongfulness of lying is… built into the definition of the term” (Kemp and Sullivan 1993, 153). For these philosophers, the claim that lying is (either defeasibly or non-defeasibly) morally wrong is a tautology (Margolis 1962).

According to Hugo Grotius, it is part of the meaning of ‘lie’ when it is “strictly taken” that it involves “the Violation of a Real right” of the person lied to, namely, “the Freedom of him… to judge” (Grotius 2005, 1212). One can only lie to someone who possesses this right to exercise liberty of judgment. Grotius’s definition of lying is therefore as follows (modified accordingly):

• (L10) To lie = df to make a believed-false statement to another person, with the intention that that other person believe that statement to be true (or believe that the statement is believed to be true, or both), violating that person’s right to exercise liberty of judgment. (Grotius 2005)

According to L10, one cannot lie to “Children or Madmen,” for example, since they lack the right of liberty of judgment (Grotius 2005, 1212). One cannot lie to someone who has given “express Consent” to be told untruths, since he has given up the right to exercise his liberty of judgment about these matters (Grotius 2005, 1214). One cannot lie to someone who by “tacit Consent” or presumed consent “founded upon just Reason” has given up the right to exercise his liberty of judgment about some matter, “on account of the Advantage, that he shall get by it,” such as when “a Person… comforts his sick Friend, by making him believe what is false,” since “ no Wrong is done to him that is willing ” (Grotius 2005, 1215–1217). Furthermore, “he who has an absolute Right over all the Rights of another,” is not lying when he “makes use of that Right, in telling something false, either for his particular Advantage, or for the publick Good” (Grotius 2005, 1216–1218). The right to exercise one’s liberty of judgment can also be taken away in cases “When the life of an innocent Person, or something equal to it,” is at stake, or when “the Execution of a dishonest Act be otherwise prevented” (Grotius 2005, 1221). In such a case, the person has forfeited his right, and “speaking falsely to those—like thieves—to whom truthfulness is not owed cannot be called lying” (Bok 1978, 14).

Alan Donagan also incorporates moral conditions into his definition of lying (modified to include cases in which speakers only intend to deceive about their beliefs):

• (L11) To lie = df to freely make a believed-false statement to another fully responsible and rational person, with the intention that that other person believe that statement to be true [or the intention that that other person believe that that statement is believed to be true, or both]. (Donagan 1977)

According to L11, it is not possible to lie to “children, madmen, or those whose minds have been impaired by age or illness” (Donagan 1977, 89), since they are not fully responsible and rational persons. It is also not possible to lie to “a would-be murderer who threatens your life if you will not tell him where his quarry has gone” (Donagan 1977, 89), and in general when you are acting under duress in any way (such as a witness in fear of his life on the witness stand, or a victim being robbed by a thief), since statements made in such circumstances are not freely made.

It has been objected that these moral deceptionist definitions are unduly narrow and restrictive (Bok 1978). Surely, for example, it is possible to lie to a would-be murderer, whether it is impermissible, as some absolutist deontologists maintain (Augustine 1952; Aquinas 1972 (cf. MacIntyre 1995b); Kant 1996 (cf. Mahon 2006); Newman 1880; Geach 1977; Betz 1985; Pruss 1999; Tollefsen 2014), or permissible (i.e., either optional or obligatory), as consequentialists and moderate deontologists maintain (Constant 1964; Mill 1863; Sidgwick 1981; Bok 1978; MacIntyre 1995a; cf. Kagan 1998).

It has also been objected that these moral deceptionist definitions are morally lax (Kemp and Sullivan 1993, 158–9). By rendering certain deceptive untruthful statements to others as non- lies, they make it permissible to act in a way that would otherwise be open to moral censure. In general, even those philosophers who hold that all lies have an inherent negative weight, albeit such that it can be overridden, and hence, who hold that lying is defeasibly morally wrong, do not incorporate moral necessary conditions into their definitions of lying (Bok 1978; Kupfer 1982; cf. Wiles 1988).

Non-Deceptionists hold that an intention to deceive is not necessary for lying.

For Simple Non-Deceptionists (Augustine 1952 (cf. Griffiths 2003, 31); Aquinas 1952; Shibles 1985), there is nothing more to lying than making an untruthful statement. According to Aquinas, for example, a jocose lie is a lie. This position is not defended by contemporary philosophers.

For Complex Non-Deceptionists, untruthfulness is not sufficient for lying. In order to differentiate lying from telling jokes, being ironic, acting, etc., a further condition must be met. For some Complex Non-Deceptionists, that further condition is warranting the truth of the untruthful statement. For other Complex Non-Deceptionists, that condition is making an assertion.

Thomas Carson holds that it is possible to lie by making a false and untruthful statement to an addressee without intending to deceive the addressee, so long as the statement is made in a context such that one “warrants the truth” of the statement (and one does not believe oneself to be not warranting the truth of the statement), or one intends to warrant the truth of the statement:

• (L12) A person x tells a lie to another person y iff (i) x makes a false statement p to y , (ii) x believes that p is false or probably false (or, alternatively, x does not believe that p is true), (iii) x states p in a context in which x thereby warrants the truth of p to y , and (iv) x does not take herself to be not warranting the truth of what she says to y . (Carson 2006, 298; 2010, 30)
• (L13) A person x tells a lie to another person y iff (i) x makes a false statement p to y , (ii) x believes that p is false or probably false (or, alternatively, x does not believe that p is true), and (iii) x intends to warrant the truth of p to y . (Carson 2010, 37)

Carson includes the falsity condition in both of his definitions; however, he is prepared to modify both definitions so that the falsity condition is not required (Carson 2010, 39). He also holds that the untruthfulness condition is not stringent enough, since, if a speaker simply does “not believe” her statement to be true (but does not believe it to be false), or believes that her statement is “probably false” (but does not believe it to be false), then she is lying.

Carson gives two examples of non-deceptive lies: a guilty student who tells a college dean that he did not cheat on an examination, without intending that the dean believe him (since “he is really hard-boiled, he may take pleasure in thinking that the Dean knows he is guilty”), because he knows that the dean’s policy is not to punish a student for cheating unless the student admits to cheating, and a witness who provides untruthful (and false) testimony about a defendant, where there is a preponderance of evidence against the defendant, without the intention that the testimony be believed by anyone, in order to avoid suffering retaliation from the defendant and/or his henchmen (Carson 2006, 289; 2010, 21). Neither person is lying according to the definitions of lying of Simple Deceptionists (L1, L2, L3, L4, and L5) or Complex Deceptionists (L6, L7, L8, and L9) (cf. Simpson 1992, 631) or Moral Deceptionists (L10, L11). Both are lying according to L12 and L13, because each warrants the truth of his statement, even though neither intends to deceive his addressee.

It has been argued that the witness and the student do have an intention to deceive (Meibauer 2011, 282; 2014a, 105). It has also been argued that they are being deceptive, even if they lack an intention that their untruthful statements be believed to be true (Lackey 2013; but see Fallis 2015). However, it has also been argued that they fail to warrant the truth of their statements, and hence fail to be lying according to L12 and L13. One argument is that, in the witness example, the statement is coerced, and “Coerced speech acts are not genuinely assertoric” (Leland 2013, 3; cf. Kenyon 2010). “In the context of a threat of violent death, the mere fact that he is speaking under oath is not sufficient to institute an ordinary warranting context” (Leland 2013, 4). Another argument is that the witness and the student are not warranting the truth of their statements because they believe that their audiences believe that they are being untruthful.

Carson has said that “If one warrants the truth of a statement, then one promises or guarantees, ether explicitly or implicitly, that what one says is true” (Carson 2010, 26) and “Warranting the truth of a statement presupposes that the statement is being used to invite or influence belief. It does not make sense for one to guarantee the truth of something that one is not inviting or influencing others to believe” (Carson 2010, 36). The result is that to lie is to breach trust: “To lie, on my view, is to invite others to trust and rely on what one says by warranting its truth, but, at the same time, to betray that trust by making false statements that one does not believe” (Carson 2010, 34). The combination of warranting the truth of one’s statement and breaching trust would appear to make Carson’s definition of lying similar to that of Complex Deceptionists such as Chisholm and Feehan. It would also appear to produce similar results. For example, Carson says the following about negotiators:

In the US, it is common and often a matter of course for people to deliberately misstate their bargaining positions during negotiations. Such statements are lies according to standard dictionary definitions of lying—they are intentional false statements intended to deceive others. However, given my first definition of lying [L12], such cases are not lies unless the negotiator warrants the truth of what he says… Suppose that two “hardened” cynical negotiators who routinely misstate their intentions, and do not object when others do this to them, negotiate with each other. Each person recognizes that the other party is a cynical negotiator, and each is aware of the fact that the other party knows this. In this sort of case, statements about one’s minimum or maximum price are not warranted to be true. (Carson 2010, 191)

If a negotiator makes an untruthful statement, “That is the highest I can go,” to another negotiator, then, since the negotiator believes that the other negotiator believes that he is making an untruthful statement, he cannot intend to warrant the truth of his statement, and/or the context (of negotiation) is such that he is not warranting the truth of his statement. As a result, he is is not lying, according to L12. He is not lying according to L13, either, at least if it is true that you cannot “intend to do something that you do not expect to succeed at” (Fallis 2009, 43 n 48; cf. Newey 1997, 96–97).

It seems that the same thing can be said about the student and the witness. If the student believes that the dean already knows he is guilty, and if the witness believes that the jury, etc., already knows that the defendant is guilty, then it seems that neither can intend to warrant the truth of his statement, and/or the context is such that neither is warranting the truth of his statement. If this is so, then neither is lying according to L12 and L13. Carson has said, about their Complex Deceptionist definition of lying, “Chisholm and Feehan’s definition has the very odd and unacceptable result that a notoriously dishonest person cannot lie to people who he knows distrust him” (Carson 2010, 23). It does seem, however, that Carson’s definition has the same result.

Jennifer Saul also holds that it is possible to lie without intending to deceive. She has provided a modified version of L12 that combines the warranting context condition, and the not believing that one is not warranting condition, in the single condition of believing that one is in a warranting context :

• (L14) If the speaker is not the victim of linguistic error/malapropism or using metaphor, hyperbole, or irony, then they lie iff (i) they say that p ; (ii) they believe p to be false; (iii) they take themselves to be in a warranting context. (Saul 2012, 3)

According to Saul, it is not possible to lie if one does not believe that one is in a warranting context. Saul considers the case of a putative lie told in a totalitarian state: “This is the case of utterances demanded by a totalitarian state. These utterances of sentences supporting the state are made by people who don’t believe them, to people who don’t believe them. Everyone knows that false things are being said, and that they are only being said only because they are required by the state. […] It seems somewhat reasonable to suggest that, since everyone is forced to make these false utterances, and everyone knows they are false, they cease to be genuine lies” (Saul 2012, 9). Saul adds that “People living in a totalitarian state, making pro-state utterances, are a trickier case (which they should be). Whether or not their utterances are made in contexts where a warrant of truth is present is not at all clear” (Saul 2012, 11). If a speaker is making an untruthful statement to a hearer, and “Everyone knows that false things are being said,” that is, the speaker knows that the hearer knows that the speaker is being untruthful, then the speaker does not believe that she is in a warranting context. According to L14, the speaker is not lying. However, it is arguable that in both the student and the witness cases, “Everyone knows that false things are being said,” and hence, that the speaker does not believe that he is in a warranting context. If this is so, then according to L14, neither the student nor the witness is lying.

Roy Sorensen agrees with Carson that lying does not require an intention to deceive, and that there can be non-deceptive “bald-faced” lies (Sorensen 2007) and “knowledge-lies” (Sorensen 2010). However, he rejects L12, since it entails that one cannot lie when the falsity of what one is stating is common knowledge: “Carson’s definition of lying does not relieve the narrowness. The concept of warrant is not broad enough to explain how we can lie in the face of common knowledge. One can warrant p only if p might be the case. When the falsehood of p is common knowledge, no party to the common knowledge can warrant p because p is epistemically impossible” (Carson 2007, 254). According to Sorensen, a negotiator who tells “a falsehood that will lead to better coordination between buyer and seller” is telling a bald-faced lie (Sorensen 2007, 262).

Sorensen defines lying as follows: “Lying is just asserting what one does not believe” (Sorensen 2007, 256). It is a condition on telling a lie that one makes an assertion. Sorensen differentiates between assertions and non-assertions according to “narrow plausibility”: “To qualify as an assertion, a lie must have narrow plausibility. Thus, someone who only had access to the assertion might believe it. This is the grain of truth behind ‘Lying requires the intention to deceive.’ Bald-faced lies show that assertions do not need to meet a requirement of wide plausibility, that is, credibility relative to one’s total evidence” (Sorensen 2007, 255).

Sorensen provides, as examples of assertions, and hence, lies, the servant of a maestro telling an unwanted female caller that the sounds she hears over the phone are not the maestro and that the servant is merely “dusting the piano keys,” and a doctor in an Iraqi hospital during the Iraq war telling a journalist who can see patients in the ward in uniforms that “I see no uniforms” (Sorensen 2007, 253). The claim that these are assertions, however, and therefore lies, is controversial (cf. Keiser 2015). These statements neither express the speaker’s belief, nor aim to affect the belief of the addressee in any way, since their falsehood is common knowledge (cf. Williams 2002, 74). As it has been said: “Sorensen does not offer a definition of asserting a proposition (with necessary and sufficient conditions)… To the extent that he does not fully analyze the concept of assertion, Sorensen’s definition of lying is unclear” (Carson 2010, 36). It may be argued against Sorensen that the “utterances in question are not assertions” (Keiser 2015, 12), and hence, on his own account, fail to be lies.

Don Fallis also holds that it is possible to lie without intending to deceive. He has also defended the assertion condition for lying: “you lie when you assert something that you believe to be false” (Fallis 2009, 33). He has held that you assert something when you you make a statement and you believe that you are in a situation in which the Gricean norm of conversation, ‘Do not say what you believe to be false,’ is in effect. His definition of lying was thus as follows:

You lie to x if and only if (i) you state that p to x , (2) you believe that you make this statement in a context where the following norm of conversation is in effect: Do not make statements that you believe to be false, and (iii) you believe that p is false. (Fallis 2009, 34).

Counterexamples to this definition (Pruss 2012; Faulkner 2013; Stokke 2013a) have prompted a revision of this definition in order to accommodate these counterexamples:

• (L15) You lie if and only if you say that p , you believe that p is false (or at least that p will be false if you succeed in communicating that p ), and you intend to violate the norm of conversation against communicating something false by communicating that p (Fallis 2012, 569)
• (L16) You lie if and only if you say that p , you believe that p is false (or at least that p will be false if you succeed in communicating that p ), and you intend to communicate something false by communicating that p . (Fallis 2012, 569)

Both L15 and L16 are able to accommodate the following counterexample to the earlier definition: “when Marc Antony said to the Roman people, ‘Brutus is an honorable man’ … the citizens of Rome know that (a) Antony did not believe that Brutus was an honorable man, that (b) Antony was subject to a norm against saying things that he believed to be false, and that (c) Antony had been a cooperative participant in the conversation so far. Thus, they were led to conclude that Antony was flouting the norm in order to communicate something other than what he literally uttered. In fact, the best explanation of his statement was that he wanted to communicate the exact opposite of what he literally uttered” (Fallis 2012, 567). Since Antony does not intend to violate the norm of conversation against communicating something that he believes to be false (that Brutus is an honorable man) by saying “Brutus is an honorable man,” or, more simply, since Antony does not intend to communicate something false with his untruthful statement, it follows that Antony is not lying. However, in the case of a guilty witness, Tony, against whom there is overwhelming evidence, who says “I did not do it,” without the intention that anyone believe him, he does intend to violate the norm of conversation against communicating something that he believes to be false (that he did not do it) by saying “I did not do it,” or, more simply, he does intend to communicate something believed-false with his untruthful statement, even though he does not intend that anyone believe this.

It has been contended that non-deceptive liars do not intend to communicate anything believed-false with their untruthful statements, and, indeed, may even intend to communicate something believed-true with their untruthful statements (Dynel 2011, 151). Fallis rejects the claim that non-deceptive liars do not intend to communicate anything believed-false, even if they intend to communicate something believed-true:

Bald-faced liars might want to communicate something true. For instance, Tony may be trying to communicate to the police that that they will never convict him. But that does not mean that he does not also intend to communicate something false in violation of the norm. He wants what he actually said to be understood and accepted for purposes of the conversation. It is not as if “I did not do it” is simply a euphemism for “You’ll never take me alive, coppers!” (Fallis 2012, 572 n 24)

However, in the case of polite untruths, such as “Madam is not at home,” the untruthful statement is simply a euphemism: “For example, the words ”She is not at home,“ delivered by a servant or a relative at the door, have become a mere euphemism for indisposition or disinclination” (Isenberg 1973, 256). In the case of polite untruths, it seems, there is no intention to communicate anything believed-false. In the case of the servant who tells the female caller, “I’m dusting the piano keys,” or the Iraqi doctor who tells the journalist “I see no uniforms,” or the negotiator who tells the other negotiator “That is the highest I can go,” or the person living in the totalitarian state who makes the pro-state utterance, it is also arguable that there is no intention to communicate anything believed-false. If this is true, then there is some support for the claim that non-deceptive liars do not intend to communicate anything believed-false with their untruthful statements, and hence, that they are not lying according to L15 or L16.

Andreas Stokke also holds that it is possible to lie without intending to deceive. He has also defended the assertion condition for lying: “you lie when you assert something you believe to be false” (Stokke 2013a, 33). According to Stokke, to “assert that p is to say that p and thereby propose that p become common ground” (Stokke 2013a, 47). A proposition, p , becomes common ground in a group “if all members accept (for the purpose of the conversation) that p , and all believe that all believe that all accept that p , etc.” (Stokke 2013a, 49, quoting Stalnaker 2002, 716). Stokke thus defines lying as follows:

• (L17) x lies to y if and only if … x says that p to y , and … x proposes that p become common ground, and … x believes that p is false. (Stokke 2013a, 49)

In the case of a speaker making an ironic untruthful statement, the speaker does not propose that the believed-false proposition (e.g., “Brutus is an honorable man”) become common ground (Stokke 2013a, 50). However, in the case of a non-deceptive liar, the speaker does propose that the believed-false proposition (e.g., “I did not cheat”) become common ground (Stokke 2013a, 52). The fact that in the case of a non-deceptive lie it is common knowledge that what the speaker is saying is (believed to be) false does not alter the fact that the speaker is proposing that the believed-falsehood become common ground. Indeed, even if the (believed) truth is initially common ground, before the speaker proposes that the believed-falsehood become common ground, it is still the case that the non-deceptive liar is proposing to “update the common ground with her utterance” (Stokke 2013a, 54). For example, in the case of the student and the dean, “The student wants herself and the Dean to mutually accept that she did not plagiarize” (Stokke 2013a, 54).

It is possible to argue that Stokke’s account of assertion, and hence L17, is faced with a dilemma when it comes to non-deceptive lies. Either, in the case of a non-deceptive lie, the speaker does propose that the believed-false proposition become common ground, but becoming common ground is too weak to count as asserting, or becoming common ground is strong enough to count as asserting, but, in the case of a non-deceptive lie, the speaker does not propose that the believed-false proposition become common ground. Stokke considers Stalnaker’s example of a guest at a party saying to another guest, “The man drinking a martini is a philosopher,” and of the two guests proceeding to talk about the philosopher, when it is common knowledge that the drink in question is not a martini. About this example Stalnaker says: “perhaps it is mutually recognized that it is not a martini, but mutually recognized that both parties are accepting that it is a martini. The pretense will be rational if accepting the false presupposition is an efficient way to communicate something true” (Stalnaker 2002, 718). However, if proposing that a believed-false proposition become common ground can mean engaging in and sustaining a “pretence,” possibly in order to communicate truths, then it is not clear that this counts as making an assertion (cf. Keiser 2015). Hence, a non-deceptive liar may be proposing that her believed-false proposition become common ground without this being an act of making an assertion. But this means that she is not lying, according to L17. Alternatively, if proposing that a believed-false proposition become common ground means something more than this, such that the speaker intends or wants herself and her hearer “to mutually accept” her believed-false proposition, then it is not clear that a non-deceptive liar intends or wants this. If this is correct, then non-deceptive lies fail to be lies according to L17.

3. Traditional Definition of Deception

The dictionary definition of deception is as follows: “To cause to believe what is false” ( OED 1989). There are several problems with this definition, however (Barnes 1997; Mahon 2007; Carson 2010). The principal problem is that it is too broad in scope. On this definition, mere appearances can deceive, such as when a white object looks red in a certain light (Faulkner, 2013). Furthermore, it is possible for people to inadvertently deceive others. If Steffi believes that there is a talk on David Lewis and the Christians on Friday, and she tells Paul that “There is a talk on Lewis and the Christians on Friday,” and as a result Paul believes that there is a talk on C. S. Lewis and the Christians on Friday, then Steffi has deceived Paul. Also, it is possible for people to mistakenly deceive other people. If Steffi mistakenly believes that there is not a philosophy talk on Friday, and she tells Paul that there is not a philosophy talk on Friday, and he believes her, then then Steffi has deceived Paul.

Although some philosophers hold that deceiving may be inadvertent or mistaken (Demos 1960; Fuller 1976; Chisholm and Feehan 1977; Adler 1997; Gert 2005), many philosophers have argued that it is not possible to deceive inadvertently or mistakenly (Linsky 1970; van Horne 1981; Barnes 1997; Carson 2010; Saul 2012; Faulkner 2013). They hold that deception, like lying, is intentional . They reserve term “mislead” to cover cases of causing false beliefs either intentionally or unintentionally (Carson 2010, 47).

A modified version of the dictionary definition that does not allow for either inadvertent or mistaken deceiving is as follows:

• (D1) To deceive = df to intentionally cause to have a false belief that is known or believed to be false.

D1 may be taken as the traditional definition of deception, at least in the case of other-deception (Baron 1988, 444 n. 2). As contrasted with ‘lying,’ ‘deceive’ is an achievement or success verb (Ryle 1949, 130). An act of deceiving is not an act of deceiving unless a particular result is achieved. According to D1, that result is a false belief . Note that D1 is not restricted to the deception of other persons by other persons; it applies to anything that is capable of having beliefs, such as (possibly) chimpanzees, dogs, and infants.

There is no statement condition for deception. In addition to deceiving by means of lying, it is possible to deceive using natural or causal signs (indices), such as packing a bag as though one were going on a holiday, in order to catch a thief (Kant 1997, 202). It is possible to deceive by using signs that work by resemblance (icons), for example by posting a smiley face emoticon about a news item that one is actually unhappy about. Finally, it is possible to deceive by non-linguistic conventional signs (symbols), such as wearing a wedding ring when one is not married, or wearing a police uniform when one is not a police officer. It is also possible for a person to deceive by cursing, making an interjection or an exclamation, issuing a command or an exhortation, asking a question, saying “Hello,” and so forth. It is also possible to deceive by omitting to make certain statements, or by remaining silent.

There is also no untruthfulness condition for deception. It is possible to deceive by making a truthful and true statement that intentionally implies a falsehood. This is a palter. Palters include Bill Clinton stating “There is no improper relationship,” with the intention that it be believed that there was never an improper relationship (Saul 2012, 30), greeting a famous person by his or her first name with the intention that other people believe that you are a close friend of his, or making a reservation for a restaurant or a hotel as “Dr.,” intending to be believed to be a (typically wealthier) physician rather than a (typically less wealthy) academic (Schauer and Zeckhauser 2009, 44). If Pavel truthfully and truly tells Trofim that he is going to Pinsk, with the intention that the distrustful Trofim believe falsely that Pavel is going to Minsk, and as a result Trofim believes falsely that Pavel is going to Minsk, then Pavel deceives Trofim (a double bluff). It is also possible to deceive using truthful statements that are not assertions, such as jokes, ironic statements, and even the lines of a play delivered on stage, so long as the intention to deceive can be formed. If, for example, I am asked if I stole the money, and I reply in an ironic tone, “Yeah, right, of course I did,” when I did steal the money, intending that I be believed to have not stolen the money, and if I am believed, then I have deceived using a truthful statement (it is unclear if such cases of “telling the truth falsely” (Frank 2009, 57) are to be considered as cases of paltering).

There is also no addressee condition for deception. In addition to deceiving addressees, it is possible to deceive those listening in, as in a bogus disclosure (e.g., deceiving F.B.I. agents secretly known to be listening in on a telephone conversation) or a disclosure (e.g., deceiving NASA handlers openly listening to exchanges between astronauts and their wives in Capricorn One ). It is also possible to deceive an addressee about some matter other than the content of the statement made (e.g., making a truthful statement, but faking an accent).

Several objections can be made to D1. One objection is that it is not necessary that the deceiver causes another person to have a false belief that is (truly) believed to be false by the deceiver: “if I intentionally cause you to believe that p where p is false and I neither believe that p is true nor believe that p is false” (Carson 2010, 48) then this is still deception (van Frassen 1988; Barnes 1997; cf. Shiffrin 2014, 13). For example, if Michael has no belief whatsoever regarding the condition of the bridge, but he convinces Gertrude that the bridge is safe, and the bridge happens to be dangerous, then Michael deceives Gertrude about the bridge being safe (van Frassen 1988, 124). Or, if Alyce places a fake rabbit in Evelyn’s garden, in which lives a reclusive rabbit, in order to guarantee that Evelyn believes that she is seeing a rabbit in her garden (one way or the other), and Evelyn sees the fake rabbit, and calls Alyce on the phone and tells her “I am looking at a rabbit in my garden!” then Alyce has deceived Evelyn, even though she cannot believe or know that Evelyn is seeing the fake rabbit rather than the real rabbit (Barnes 1997, 11). Although this objection to D1 is not necessarily compelling (Mahon 2007, 191–2), a modified definition of interpersonal deception that incorporates this objection is as follows:

• (D2) A person x deceives another person y if and only if x intentionally causes y to believe p , where p is false and x does not believe that p is true. (Carson 2010, 48)

The most common objection to D1 is that it is not necessary that the deceiver intentionally cause another person to have a new false belief. Although this form of deception, according to which a person intentionally brings about “the change from the state of not being deceived… to that of being deceived” (Chisholm and Feehan 1977, 144), is the most normal form of deception, it is not the only form. A person may deceive another person by causing that person to continue to have a false belief (Fuller 1976, 21; Chisholm and Feehan 1977, 144; Mahon 2007 189–190; Carson 2010, 50; Shiffrin 2014, 19). This is where, “but for the act” of the deceiver, the person “would have lost or given up” the false belief (Chisholm and Feehan 1977, 144), or least have a greater chance of losing the false belief. A modified definition of interpersonal deception that incorporates this objection is the following:

• (D3) A person x deceives another person y if and only if x intentionally causes y to believe p (or persist in believing p ), where p is false and x knows or believes that p is false. (Carson 2010, 50)

A further objection to D1 (and D2 and D3) is that it is not sufficient for deception that a person intentionally causes another person to have a false belief that she truly believes or knows to be false; it must also be that this false belief is caused by evidence , and that the evidence is brought about by the person in order to cause the other person to have the false belief (Linsky 1970, 163; Fuller 1976, 23; Schmitt 1988, 185; Barnes 1997, 14; Mahon 2007). If Andrew intentionally causes Ben to believe (falsely) that there are vampires in England by, for example, operating on Ben’s brain, or giving Ben an electric shock, or drugging Ben, then Andrew does not deceive Ben about there being vampires in England. Also, if Andrew causes Ben to believe falsely that there are vampires in England by getting Ben to read a book that purports to demonstrate that there are vampires in England, then Andrew does not deceive Ben about there being vampires in England. However, if Andrew writes a book that purports to demonstrate that there are vampires in England, and Ben reads the book, and as a result Ben comes to believe that there are vampires in England, then Andrew does deceive Ben about there being vampires in England (Fuller 1976). A modified definition of interpersonal deception that incorporates this objection is the following:

• (D4) To deceive = df to intentionally cause another person to have or continue to have a false belief that is known or truly believed to be false by bringing about evidence on the basis of which the person has or continues to have the false belief. (Mahon 2007, 189–190)

All of the definitions so far considered are definitions of positive deception , where a person “has been caused to add to his stock of false beliefs” or has been caused to continue to have a false belief (Chisholm and Feehan 1977, 144). A further objection to D1 (and D2, D3, and D4) is that it is not necessary for deception to cause a new belief or to cause to continue to have a false belief. One can deceive another person by causing the person to cease to have a true belief, or by preventing the person from acquiring a true belief. These are both cases of negative deception , according to which a person “has been caused to lose one of his true beliefs” or been prevented from gaining a true belief (Chisholm and Feehan 1977, 143–144). For example, if I intentionally distract someone who is prone to forgetting things irretrievably when distracted, in order to make that person forget something irretrievably, and, as a result, that person loses a (veridical) memory irretrievably, then I have caused him to cease to have a true belief. (In science-fiction the same result can be achieved by using a memory-erasing device, as in the neuralyzer used in the 1997 science-fiction film Men in Black ). Also, if I hide a section of the newspaper from someone in order to prevent her from learning about some news item, such as an earthquake in a foreign country that harmed no-one, then I prevented her from acquiring a true belief about a distant earthquake. A modified definition of interpersonal deception that incorporates this objection is the following:

• (D5) To deceive = df to intentionally cause another person to acquire a false belief, or to continue to have a false belief, or to cease to have a true belief, or to be prevented from acquiring a true belief.

However, this objection to D1 (and D2, D3, and D4) is not necessarily compelling. It may be argued that negative deception is not deception at all. After all, no false belief has been acquired or sustained. It may be argued that to prevent someone from acquiring a true belief is to keep that person in ignorance, or to keep that person “in the dark,” rather than to deceive that person (Mahon 2007, 187–188; cf. Carson 2010, 53). The state of being ignorant is not the same as the state of being mistaken. One may not know what city is the capital city of Estonia (Tallinn); this is different from mistakenly believing that Riga is the capital city of Estonia. Similarly, although it is more unusual, rendering a person ignorant of some matter is not the same as deceiving that person, at least if it results in no false belief. For example, in the 2004 science-fiction film The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , people go to Lacuna, Inc., to have their memories of their previous relationships, as well as their visits, erased. Those who run Lacuna, Inc., make their clients forget things, or render them ignorant of things. They do not deceive them in doing this. Chisholm and Feehan admit that Augustine and Aquinas “do not call it ‘deception’” to “hide the truth” (Chisholm and Feehan 1977, 187).

D5 only counts as deception cases of deception “by commission” (Chisholm and Feehan 1977, 143–144). According to Chisholm and Feehan, it is also possible to deceive “by omission” (Chisholm and Feehan 1977, 143–144). One may allow a person to acquire a false belief, or allow a person to continue with a false belief, or allow a person to cease to have a true belief, or allow a person to continue without a true belief. For example, one may allow a person to read a news story and acquire a belief that one knows is false (e.g., a news story about the CEO of your company resigning for health reasons, when you know he was forced out for mismanagement of funds), and one may allow a person to continue to have a false belief by not correcting the person’s false belief (e.g., not correcting a child’s belief in Santa Claus). Or, for example, one may allow a person to forget a veridical memory by not stopping them from getting distracted, and one may allow a person to continue without knowing about an earthquake that has occurred in a foreign country. According to Chisholm and Feehan, there can positive and negative deception by commission and by omission. A modified definition of interpersonal deception that incorporates this objection is the following:

• (D6) To deceive = df to intentionally cause another person to acquire a false belief, or to continue to have a false belief, or to cease to have a true belief, or to be prevented from acquiring a true belief, or to intentionally allow another person to acquire a false belief, or to continue to have a false belief, or to cease to have a true belief, or to be prevented from acquiring a true belief.

Finally, D6 only counts as deception actions and omissions that are intentional. According to Chisholm and Feehan, however, deception can be unintentional. A modified definition of interpersonal deception that incorporates this objection is the following:

• (D7) To deceive = df to cause another person to acquire a false belief, or to continue to have a false belief, or to cease to have a true belief, or be prevented from acquiring a true belief, or to allow another person to acquire a false belief, or to continue to have a false belief, or to cease to have a true belief, or be prevented from acquiring a true belief. (Chisholm and Feehan 1977, 145).

The objection to D5 that negative deception is not deception also applies to D6 and D7.

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• –––, 2010. ‘The Distinctive Wrong in Lying,’ Ethical Theory and Moral Practice , 13: 171–179.
• Sweetser, E. E., 1987. ‘The definition of lie : An examination of the folk models underlying a semantic prototype,’ in D. Holland and N. Quinn (eds.) Cultural Models in Language and Thought , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3–66.
• Tollefsen, C. O., 2014. Lying and Christian Ethics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Van Fraassen, B. C., 1988. ‘The Peculiar Effects of Love and Desire,’ in B. McLaughlin and A. O. Rorty (eds.), Perspectives on Self-Deception , Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 124–156.
• Van Horne, W. A., 1981. ‘Prolegomena to a Theory of Deception,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 42: 171–182.
• Webber, J., 2013. ‘Liar!,’ Analysis , 73: 651–659.
• Vrij, A., 2000. Detecting Lies and Deceit , Chichester: Wiley.
• Wiles, A. M., 1988. ‘Lying: Its Inconstant Value,’ Southern Journal of Philosophy , 26: 275–284.
• Williams, B., 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy , Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 2002. Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Wood, D., 1973. ‘Honesty,’ in A. Montefiore (ed.), Philosophy and Personal Relations: An Anglo-French Study , London: Routledge, 192–218.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

[Please contact the author with suggestions.]

• Grimaltos, T. and Sergi Rosell, ‘ On Lying: A Conceptual Argument for the Falsity Condition ,’ forthcoming.

assertion | Chisholm, Roderick | Grice, Paul | Grotius, Hugo | Kant, Immanuel | Peirce, Charles Sanders: theory of signs | Ryle, Gilbert | self-deception | testimony: epistemological problems of | Williams, Bernard

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Greater Good Science Center • Magazine • In Action • In Education

What’s Good about Lying?

Do you teach children to lie?

I do. All the time. And you do, too! If you’re like most American parents, you point to presents under the Christmas tree and claim that a man named Santa Claus put them there. But your deliberate deceptions probably go beyond Santa, the Tooth Fairy, or the Easter Bunny.

How many of us tell our kids (or students) that everything is fine when, in fact, everything is totally wrong, in order to preserve their sense of security? Have you been honest about everything having to do with, say, your love life, or what happens at work? Do you praise drawings they bring home from school that you actually think are terrible?

We don’t just lie to protect our kids from hard truths, either. We actually coach them to lie, as when we ask them to express delight at tube socks from Aunt Judy or Uncle Bob’s not-so-delicious beef stew.

These are what scientists call “prosocial lies”—falsehoods told for someone else’s benefit, as opposed to “antisocial lies” that are told strictly for your own personal gain.

Most research suggests that children develop the ability to lie at about age three. By age five, almost all children can (and will) lie to avoid punishment or chores—and a minority will sporadically tell prosocial lies. From ages seven to eleven, they begin to reliably lie to protect other people or to make them feel better—and they’ll start to consider prosocial lies to be justified . They’re not just telling white lies to please adults. The research to date suggests that they are motivated by strong feelings of empathy and compassion.

Why should that be the case? What is going on in children’s minds and bodies that allows this capacity to develop? What does this developmental arc reveal about human beings—and how we take care of each other? That’s what a recent wave of studies has started to uncover.

Taken together, this research points to one message: Sometimes, lying can reveal what’s best in people.

How we learn to lie

At first, the ability to lie reflects a developmental milestone: Young children are acquiring a “theory of mind,” which is psychology’s way of describing our ability to distinguish our own beliefs, intents, desires, and knowledge from what might be in the minds of other people. Antisocial lying appears earlier than prosocial lying in children because it’s much simpler, developmentally; it mainly requires an understanding that adults can’t read your mind.

More on Honesty

Explore gender differences in prosocial lying .

Learn about the life stages of trust .

Lying expert Paul Ekman discusses trust and deception with his daughter, Eve.

Are you living true to your values? Discover how to cultivate ethical courage .

Take our Relationship Trust quiz .

But prosocial lying needs more than just theory of mind. It requires the ability to identify suffering in another person ( empathy ) and the desire to alleviate that suffering ( compassion ). More than that, even, it involves anticipation that our words or actions might cause suffering in a hypothetical future. Thus, prosocial lying reflects the development of at least four distinct human capacities: theory of mind, empathy, compassion, and the combination of memory and imagination that allows us to foresee the consequences of our words.

How do we know that kids have all of these capacities? Could they just be lying to get out of the negative consequences of telling the truth? Or perhaps they’re simply lazy; is it easier to lie than be honest?

For a paper published in 2015 , Harvard psychologist Felix Warneken had adults show elementary-aged children two pictures they drew—one pretty good, one terrible. If the adults didn’t show any particular pride in the picture, the kids were truthful in saying whether it was good or bad. If the grown-up acted sad about being a bad artist, most of the kids would rush to reassure her that it wasn’t too awful. In other words, they told a white lie; the older they were, they more likely the kids were to say a bad drawing was good. There were no negative consequences for telling the truth to these bad artists; the kids just wanted these strangers to feel better about themselves.

In other words, says Warneken, it’s a feeling of empathic connection that drives children to tell white lies. In fact, children are trying to resolve two conflicting norms—honesty vs. kindness—and by about age seven, his studies suggest, they start consistently coming down on the side of kindness. This reflects increasingly sophisticated moral and emotional reasoning.

“When is it right to prioritize another person’s feelings over truth?” says Warneken. “Say, if someone cooks something for you, and it just doesn’t taste good. Well, if they’re applying for cooking school somewhere, the prosocial thing is to be honest, so that they can improve. But if they just cooked it on their own just for you, then perhaps it’s better to lie and say it tastes good.”

It’s a good sign, developmentally, when kids show the ability to make that kind of calculation. Indeed, there is a great deal of evidence that we tend to see prosocial lies as the more moral choice. For example, people seem to behave more prosocially —more grateful, more generous, more compassionate—in the presence of images depicting eyes. While one would expect people to lie less under the eyes, in fact it appears to influence what kind of lie they tell: When Japanese researchers gave students an opportunity to make someone feel good with a lie, they were much more likely to do so with a pair of eyes looking down on them .

No eyes? They were more likely to tell the cold, hard truth!

How lies change as we grow

This moral self-consciousness appears to grow in tandem with the child’s self-control and cognitive ability.

Another study published last year in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology found that “children who told prosocial lies had higher performance on measures of working memory and inhibitory control.” This especially helped them to control “leakage”—a psychologist’s term for inconsistencies in a fake story.

To tell a prosocial lie, a child’s brain needs to juggle many balls—drop one, and the lie will be discovered. Some children are simply better truth-jugglers than others. Far from reflecting laziness, prosocial lying seems to entail a great deal more cognitive and emotional effort than truth-telling. In fact, one 2014 paper found tired adults are much less likely to engage in prosocial lying.

Studies by other researchers show that as kids grow older, the relationship between theory of mind and dishonesty starts to shift. Young children with high theory of mind will tell more antisocial lies than peers. This pattern flips as we age: Older children who have a stronger theory of mind start telling fewer antisocial lies—and more prosocial ones.

Kids also gradually become more likely to tell “blue lies” as they advance through adolescence: altruistic falsehoods, sometimes told at a cost to the liar, that are intended to protect a group, like family or classmates. (Think: lying about a crime committed by a sibling, or deceiving a teacher about someone else’s misbehavior.)

Though adults can (and do) teach children to tell polite lies—and in a lab context, kids can be primed by adults to tell them—Warneken says it’s more likely that successful prosocial lying is a byproduct of developing other capacities, like empathy and self-control. When kids acquire those skills, they gain the ability to start telling both white and blue lies.

But how do other people feel if these lies are found out?

The lies that bind

As they grow older, kids are also developing the ability to detect lies —and to distinguish selfish from selfless ones. The distinction comes down to intent, which studies show can be discerned through recognition of telltale signs in the face and voice of the liar.

In a study published last year, researchers used the Facial Action Coding System , developed by Paul Ekman , to map children’s faces as they told lies that served either themselves or others. The team, based at the University of Toronto and UC San Diego, found that the two different kinds of lies produced markedly different facial expressions.

“Prosocial lying reflects the development of at least four distinct human capacities: theory of mind, empathy, compassion, and the combination of memory and imagination that allows us to foresee the consequences of our words.”

Prosocial lies (which in this case involved delight in a disappointing gift) were betrayed by expressions that resembled joy—a “lip raise on the right side” that hinted at a barely concealed smile, and a blinking pattern associated with happiness. The faces of children lying to conceal a misdeed showed signs of contempt, mainly a slight lip pucker that stops short of being a smirk.

It’s almost certainly the case that we are subconsciously picking up on these signs (along with tells in the liar’s voice) when we catch someone in a lie. But research finds that the consequences of catching someone in a prosocial lie are often very different from those of an antisocial lie, or “black lie,” as they’re sometimes called. In fact, detecting a prosocial lie can increase trust and social bonds.

A series of four 2015 studies from the Wharton School had participants play economic games that involved different kinds of trust and deception. Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that black lies hurt trust. But if participants saw that the deception was altruistic in nature, trust between game-players actually increased. A complex mathematical 2014 study compared the impact of black and white lies on social networks. Again, black lies drove wedges into social networks. But white lies had precisely the opposite effect, tightening social bonds. Several studies have found that people are quick to forgive white lies, and even to appreciate them.

These differences show up in brain scans—and how different types of lies affect the brain can actually influence behavior down the road. A research team led by Neil Garrett at Princeton University assigned 80 people a financial task that allowed them to gain money at another person’s expense if they kept on lying.

“We found that people started with small lies, but slowly, over the course of the experiment, lied more and more,” they write . When they scanned the brains of participants, they found that activity lessened (mainly in the amygdala) with each new lie.

Not everyone lied or lied to their own advantage. One variation in the experiment allowed participants to lie so that another participant would gain more money—and the behavior and the brain scans of those people looked very different. Dishonesty for the benefit of others did not escalate in the same way selfish lies did; while people did lie for others, the lies did not get bigger or more frequent, as with black lies. And it did not trigger the same pattern of activity in the amygdala, which previous research has found lights up when we contemplate immoral acts. (Their methods are described more fully in the video below.)

In short, the brain’s resistance to deception remained steady after participants told prosocial lies—while self-serving lies seemed to decrease it, making black lies a slippery slope.

The upshot of all this research? Not all lies are the same, a fact we seem to recognize deep in our minds and bodies. We may indeed teach children to lie, both implicitly with our behavior and explicitly with our words; but some of those lies help to bind our families and friends together and to create feelings of trust. Other kinds of lies destroy those bonds.

This all might seem overly complex, more so than the simple prescription to not tell a lie. The trouble with do-not-lie prohibitions is that kids can plainly see lying is ubiquitous, and as they grow, they discover that not all lies have the same motivation or impact. How are we supposed to understand these nuances, and communicate them to our children?

In fact, the argument for prosocial lies is the same one against black lies: other people’s feelings matter—and empathy and kindness should be our guide.

About the Author

Jeremy Adam Smith

Uc berkeley.

Jeremy Adam Smith edits the GGSC's online magazine, Greater Good . He is also the author or coeditor of five books, including The Daddy Shift , Are We Born Racist? , and (most recently) The Gratitude Project: How the Science of Thankfulness Can Rewire Our Brains for Resilience, Optimism, and the Greater Good . Before joining the GGSC, Jeremy was a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University.

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The Truth About Online Lying

Are we more honest online it depends..

Reading time min

By Diana Aguilera

U nless you’re the human embodiment of perfection, you have probably lied, even if it was just to say “I’m on my way” when you hadn’t left home yet. A study published recently in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests people tell one or two lies a day, on average. The intersection of this common human trait with the pervasiveness of social media and digital communication tools raises the question: How does technology influence trustworthiness?

Jeff Hancock, a professor of communication and the founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, studies social media behavior and the psychology of online interaction. In an email interview, Hancock discussed deception in the digital age, the different ways we lie, and whether this new era is fostering or hindering trust within our communities — both online and offline.

STANFORD: How does the presence of people who know us influence how we represent ourselves in social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn?

HANCOCK: One of the surprising things about the recent move of documenting and publicizing our social networks, which is what Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn all do, is that it makes us more accountable to those networks. When I make a claim on a social network site, that claim is visible to my network in ways it never was before. That network can see my claims, can evaluate my claims and can judge me for those claims. One effect this has is to make professional claims on sites like LinkedIn more honest than paper résumés. When people say they worked at company A doing job X for N months, there are people in their network that know the truth of those claims. If they’re inaccurate, then we run the risk of being perceived as a liar, and that is one of the worst fears people have.

STANFORD: To what extent do digital communities keep us honest?

HANCOCK: It may seem that with all the attention and concern with fake news and misinformation that there is no way that digital communities can be honest, but our research shows that when we get people to review their personal communications, they find that their online messages are more honest than their face-to-face interactions or phone calls. How can this be? The problem is that there isn’t one big online world. For each person, there are at least two online worlds. One world includes all the people I know and that are inside my social network, like my family, friends, and colleagues — we can call that the “inside world.” The second world is the digital information that we receive from sources online that we don’t know personally and are outside our social network, including tweets or news articles or social media comments from unknown sources — we can call that the “outside world.”

We find that communication in the inside world tends to be more honest online, and this is in part because those messages are recorded and come from people that we will have future interactions with. We don’t want a reputation as a liar, and it’s easier in some ways to get caught in a lie online (just ask any politician caught in a scandal in the last decade). 

Communication from the outside world, however, is from sources that we’re unlikely to engage with again, and so there are little to no reputation costs for people to lie online. These lies include sock puppets [false identities], follower factories, purchased likes, propaganda bots and fake news. So, the degree to which we can trust messages online is really the degree to which you know the source.

STANFORD: Do certain communities foster trust more than others?

HANCOCK: Yes, there can be big differences between communities on trust, and it’s related to the notion of inside versus outside worlds. We have seen huge success in sharing economies, with companies like Airbnb and Uber being good examples. Here we have people interacting in very high-risk situations that require substantial trust, but these people are strangers and part of the outside world. How does that work? There seem to be two things that are important. First, the communities have a reputation system that is prominently displayed (e.g., how many stars an Airbnb host has) and is difficult to manipulate (e.g., only people that have rented the property can leave an Airbnb review). Second, the companies that host the communities operate as trust mediators. I can trust that my Uber driver will take me where I want and not rip me off because if he or she doesn’t I can appeal to Uber. Indeed, there is a record of my request and where the car actually went when I was in it. So, good communities take advantage of digital data to help foster trust between people.

STANFORD: What has been most surprising for you while studying the impact of technology on lying?

HANCOCK: Probably the most surprising thing is how much more psychology predicts deception with technology than anything to do with the technology. It’s easy to forget, but (most) people lie for a reason, and simply because a person is using a phone or a computer or a tablet to communicate doesn’t make them more or less likely to lie. Instead, it’s all about goals and motivations. We found recently that lies in initial conversations between online daters were about appearing more attractive to people they wanted to meet (e.g., “Oh yeah, I love puppies too!” when he doesn’t) and lying about their availability to people they didn’t want to meet (e.g., “Sorry, I’m super busy for the next eight weeks,” but she isn’t busy). No surprises here when you consider a person’s goals — the technology, much like deception itself, simply becomes a tool for accomplishing those goals.

STANFORD: As young alumni are coming of age with more digital tools at their disposal, how can we expect online honesty to develop or change?

HANCOCK: One of the biggest concerns mentioned by millennials and more recently the iGen generation is authenticity. Young people care a good deal about living a life that is authentic, sincere and with meaning. I think this can only be a good thing, and I hope they can take the lead in helping society adapt and deal with the darker aspects of digital communication that come from the outside world and bring out all the positive qualities we see in the inside world. 

Diana Aguilera is a staff writer at S tanford .

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Health Encyclopedia

The truth about lying.

For your birthday, your aunt knits you a sweater that is, well, downright hideous. You tell her, 1) “I'd go out in an army blanket before wearing that;” 2) “It would look better on a peacock;” or 3) “It's beautiful, Aunt Sylvia! I really need a sweater.”

If you chose the third response, well, you’re a liar. Don’t feel bad, however. If the truth be told, most of us lie to some degree, especially when faced with an alternative like hurting the feelings of poor, good-hearted Aunt Sylvia.

Some of us, however, lie so often that we don’t realize it. That’s when it becomes the sort of problem that may need professional help. So, what’s the difference between being diplomatic and being deceptive?

The most common fibs are relatively harmless ones. They’re minor evasions told to prevent hurting someone’s feelings or to prevent conflict. For example, you say “Of course, I’m not angry you were 40 minutes late.” Behavioral experts seem to agree that these lies told with the intention of not hurting someone's feelings are acceptable in moderation to preserve social harmony.

The awful truth

Many of us don't want to hear the awful truth every time. Say someone asks you how she looks. She probably wants to hear that she looks great. If she doesn't look great, and we tell her the truth, we create a conflict and have to deal with the results.

Here, you have to ask yourself how much you have invested in the relationship. For example, if it’s your wife and she’s going to an important interview, you may want to give her constructive feedback and deal with her feelings. If it’s someone in the office you don't know well, you may choose not to risk a confrontation.

The problem arises when people rationalize that some lies are acceptable and necessary. Getting caught in a lie often destroys relationships.

Lying has consequences. When someone finds out you have lied, it affects how that person deals with you forever. If your spouse lies, you may be able to work it out in therapy, but an employer is not likely to forgive.

Even if you convince yourself a lie is OK, it still violates the dictates of conscience. You’re living a lie and waiting for the other shoe to drop. This is psychologically unhealthy. No one is saying you should tell your anxious mother that you have a 102°F fever, or your coworker that you think her clothes are inappropriate. There are many considerations that come into play when deciding whether honesty is the best policy.

What to consider

Here are a few questions to ask yourself:

Would anyone be harmed if I withhold a bit of the truth?

Can someone change and grow from my honest feedback, or am I being unnecessarily blunt by giving an honest opinion that is hurtful?

How would it feel if someone withheld the truth from me under the same circumstances?

Is not revealing the truth in this situation an act of cowardice, or of compassion?

If you often find yourself being deceptive with family and friends to sidestep troubling issues, you may need to strengthen your interpersonal skills. The main reason people lie is low self-esteem. They want to impress, please, and tell someone what they think they want to hear.

For example, insecure teenagers often lie to gain social acceptance. Here, parents should emphasize to their children the consequences of lying. They should say that lying causes anger and hurt, and that people won’t like them when they find out.

When is lying a problem that needs professional help? If you have trouble controlling it. Pathological liars lie constantly and for no apparent reason. They need to discuss their problem with a therapist.

But for most of us, the untruths we tell are not whoppers. They’re fibs that help grease the wheels of everyday social interactions.

Be your own lie detector

All but the hardened liar has some anxiety when telling a lie. Lie detectors are based on the theory that our bodies react physically when we don’t respond truthfully.

Experts recommend that you look for clusters of signals when trying to spot a liar. The signals include:

Avoiding eye contact or shifting eyes

Stuttering, pausing, or clearing the throat

Changing voice tone or volume

Offering multiple excuses for a situation, instead of just one

Standing in a defensive posture with arms crossed over the chest

Reddening slightly on the face or neck

Rubbing, stroking, or pulling on the nose

Making a slip of the tongue while denying something

Deflecting attention from the issue

Appearing uncomfortable

Medical Reviewers:

• Heather M Trevino BSN RNC
• Rita Sather RN
• Susan K. Dempsey-Walls RN
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REVIEW| I’M TELLING THE TRUTH, BUT I’M LYING: ESSAYS

Summary: I’m Telling the Truth, But I’m Lying

Bassey Ikpi is a Nigerian-American writer and poet whose work I first discovered after she attended Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Farafina writing workshop in 2014. But she’s been in the business for many years before. You may have also read her work more recently on Catapult . She’s always been vocal on social media about her life with Bipolar II and her debut essay collection is no different.

I’m Telling the Truth, But I’m Lying follows Bassey’s life from early childhood in Nigeria, moving to join her father in the States, and being an anxious child in the US. After dropping out of college due to anxiety and depression in her early twenties, Bassey  becomes a spoken word artist. She’s well-known for traveling and performing with HBO’s Russell Simmons   Def Poetry Jam.

However, things begin to cycle out of control on tour. Prolonged insomnia, an inability to focus, desperate depression, and other symptoms eventually lead to a Bipolar II diagnosis.

Bassey is unflinchingly honest in this essay collection — nothing is off the table. She discusses her childhood and her experience with multiple dissociative episodes. Central to her book’s title — and disconcerting — is the fact that she has fragmented (and sometimes, false) memories of certain life events. Also in focus is her mental illness and her often difficult relationship with her family. Her writing is also lyrical and utterly engrossing ; I read this book in one sitting! When describing hypomanic periods, the writing style is fast paced, and she renders anxious periods in meandering prose.

Bassey’s life up until this point has been so eventful, I could read a book about every essay in this collection. She opens with an enrapturing introduction, Portrait of a Face at Forty which is exactly what the title says, but in words. Her first actual essay, This First Essay is to Prove to You That I Had a Childhood takes readers back to Bassey’s childhood and her complicated relationship with her mother. The Hands That Held Me is an ode to the shining love she feels for her father, despite the occasional frustration with his response to her mother’s violent anger towards Bassey.

In Tehuti , she details a toxic relationship doomed by unrepentant cheating. Even after her diagnosis, treatment is rocky as Bassey chronicles in Side Effects May Include. Yet, as heavy and raw as this book can feel, there are hopeful parts. Just the fact that this book exists is hopeful. There are kind neighbors and true friends, like Derek, as well as Bassey’s family who do show up for her when it matters. At the end, Bassey’s essays flow into a complete picture and this collection feels more like a memoir than just essays .

Overall: I’m Telling the Truth, But I’m Lying

Have I mentioned that I adore this cover? The fact that the title can be read in both up-to-down and in reverse is apt to Bassey’s often muddled memories.

This book is a vital addition to the league of creative non-fiction about mental illness. Bassey Ikpi’s I’m Telling the Truth, But I’m Lying is a candid look at the life of a woman finding her way in the world with the burden of mental illness. It shows how complex families and relationships can be, especially with a dash of mental illness in the mix. Further, books like this are important for helping unaffected individuals get a sense of what having a mental disorder feels like. Above all things, Bassey’s debut proves that while mental illness is lifelong, the battle is never lost as long you keep fighting to live.

[bctt tweet=”Bassey Ikpi’s I’m Telling the Truth, But I’m Lying is a candid look at the life of a woman finding her way in the world with the burden of mental illness.” username=””]

I’m Telling the Truth, But I’m Lying is gritty, heartbreaking, and necessary . I would strongly recommend this book to everyone looking for a well-crafted essay collection.

Disclaimer: I received an electronic ARC of I’m Telling the Truth, But I’m Lying from Harper Perennial via Edelweiss. My review contains my unbiased opinion.

Buy This Book

[bctt tweet=”I’m Telling the Truth, But I’m Lying by @basseyworld is gritty, heartbreaking, and necessary. I would strongly recommend this book to everyone looking for a well-crafted essay collection.” username=”afomaumesi”]

More Reviews

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• The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls by Anissa Gray
• The Girls at 17 Swann Street by Yara Zgheib

Have you read this book or any of Bassey Ikpi’s essays? What did you think? What are your favorite non-fiction books on mental illnes? I’d love to know!

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• About Afoma Umesi

Afoma Umesi is the founder and editor of Reading Middle Grade where she curates book lists and writes book reviews for kids of all ages. Her favorite genre to read is contemporary realistic fiction and she'll never say no to a graphic novel.

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The truth about lying

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Solution for: The truth about lying

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Exam Review

Over the years Richard Wiseman has tried to unravel the truth about deception - investigating the signs that  give away a liar.

A - Do only humans lie?

In the 1970s, as part of a large-scale research programme exploring the area of Interspecies communication, Dr Francine Patterson from Stanford University attempted to teach two lowland gorillas called Michael and Koko a simplified version of Sign Language. According to Patterson, the great apes were capable of holding meaningful conversations, and could even reflect upon profound topics, such as love and death. During the project, their trainers believe they uncovered instances where the two gorillas' linguistic skills seemed to provide reliable evidence of intentional deceit. In one example, Koko broke a toy cat , and then signed to indicate that the breakage had been caused by one of her trainers .

In another episode, Michael ripped a jacket belonging to a trainer and, when asked who was responsible for the incident, signed ‘Koko’ . When the trainer expressed some scepticism, Michael appeared to change his mind, and indicated that Dr Patterson was actually responsible, before finally confessing.

B - When do we begin to lie?

Other researchers have explored the development of deception in children. Some of the most interesting experiments have involved asking youngsters not to take a peek at their favourite toys. During these studies, a child is led into a laboratory and asked to face one of the walls. The experimenter then explains that he is going to set up an elaborate toy a few feet behind them. After setting up the toy, the experimenter says that he has to leave the laboratory, and asks the child not to turn around and peek at the toy. The child is secretly filmed by hidden cameras for a few minutes, and then the experimenter returns and asks them whether they peeked. Almost all three-year do , and then half of them lie about it to the experimenter. By the time the children have reached the age of five, all of them peek and all of them lie . The results provide compelling evidence that lying starts to emerge the moment we learn to speak.

C - A public test of our ability to spot a lie

So what are the tell-tale signs that give away a lie? In 1994, the psychologist Richard Wiseman devised a large-scale experiment on a TV programme called Tomorrow's World.  As part of the experiment, viewers watched two interviews in which Wiseman asked a presenter in front of the cameras to describe his favourite film. In one interview, the presenter picked Some Like It Hot and he told the truth; in the other interview, he picked Gone with the Wind and lied. The viewers were then invited to make a choice - to telephone in to say which film he was lying about. More than 30,000 calls were received, but viewers were unable to tell the difference and the vote was a 50/50 split. In similar experiments, the results have been remarkably consistent - when it comes to lie detection, people might as well simply toss a coin. It doesn’t matter if you are male or female, young or old; very few people are able to detect deception.

D - Exposing some false beliefs

Why is this? Professor Charles Bond from the Texas Christian University has conducted surveys into the sorts of behaviour people associate with lying. He has interviewed thousands of people from more than 60 countries, asking them to describe how they set about telling whether someone is lying. People’s answers are remarkably consistent. Almost everyone thinks liars tend to avert their gaze, nervously wave their hands around and shift about in their seats. There is, however, one small problem. Researchers have spent hour upon hour carefully comparing films of liars and truth-tellers. The results are clear. Liars do not necessarily look away from you ; they do not appear nervous and move their hands around or shift about in their seats. People fail to detect lies because they are basing their opinions on behaviours that are not actually associated with deception.

E - Some of the things liars really do

So what are we missing? It is obvious that the more information you give away, the greater the chances of some of it coming back to haunt you. As a result, liars tend to say less and provide fewer details than truth-tellers. Looking back at the transcripts of the interviews with the presenter, his lie about Gone with the Wind contained about 40 words, whereas the truth about Some Like It Hot was nearly twice as long. People who lie also try psychologically to keep a distance from their falsehoods, and so tend to include fewer references to themselves in their stories. In his entire interview about Gone with the Wind, the presenter only once mentioned how the film made him feel, compared with the several references to his feelings when he talked about Some Like It Hot.

F - Which form of communication best exposes a lie?

The simple fact is that the real clues to deceit are in the words that people use, not the body language. So do people become better lie detectors when they listen to a liar, or even just read a transcript of their comments? The interviews with the presenter were also broadcast on radio and published in a newspaper, and although the lie-detecting abilities of the television viewers were no better than chance, the newspaper readers were correct 64% of the time, and the radio listeners scored an impressive 73% accuracy rate.

adapted from The National Newspaper

Questions 1-6

The reading passage has six paragraphs, A-F .

Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.  

1 i ii iii iv v vi vii viii   Paragraph A Answer: vi

2 i ii iii iv v vi vii viii Paragraph B Answer: ii

3 i ii iii iv v vi vii viii Paragraph C Answer: viii

4 i ii iii iv v vi vii viii   Paragraph D Answer: iv

5 i ii iii iv v vi vii viii  Paragraph E Answer: i    

6 i ii iii iv v vi vii viii  Paragraph F Answer: v

List of headings

i        Some of the things liars really do

ii       When do we begin to lie?

iii     How wrong is it to lie?

iv      Exposing some false beliefs

v       Which form of communication best exposes a lie?

vi     Do only humans lie?

vii     Dealing with known liars

viii   A public test of our ability to spot a lie

Questions 7-10

Look at the following statements and the list of experiments below.

Match each statement with the correct experiment, A-C .

You may use any letter more than once .

7 A B C       Someone who was innocent was blamed for something. Answer: A

8 A B C      Those involved knew they were being filmed. Answer: C

9 A B C     Some objects were damaged. Answer: A

10 A B C       Some instructions were ignored. Answer: B

List of Experiments

A the gorilla experiment

B the experiment with children

C the TV experiment

Questions 11-13

Complete the sentences below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for  each answer.

11           Filming liars has shown that they do not  display  behaviour. Answer: nervous

12           Liars tend to avoid talking about their own Answer: feelings

13           Signs of lying are exposed in people’s   rather than their movements. Answer: words

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The Truth About Lying

Deception is rampant—and sometimes we tell the biggest lies to those we love most..

By Allison Kornet published May 1, 1997 - last reviewed on June 9, 2016

If, as the cliché has it, the 1980s was the decade of greed, then the quintessential sin of the 1990s might just have been lying. After all, think of the accusations of deceit leveled at politicians like Bob Packwood, Marion Barry, Dan Rostenkowski, Newt Gingrich, and Bill Clinton.

And consider the top-level Texaco executives who initially denied making racist comments at board meetings; the young monk who falsely accused Cardinal Bernardin of molestation; Susan Smith, the white woman who killed her young boys and blamed a black man for it; and Joe Klein, the Newsweek columnist who adamantly swore for months that he had nothing to do with his anonymously-published novel Primary Colors . Even Hollywood noticed our apparent deception obsession: witness films like Quiz Show, True Lies, The Crucible, Secrets & Lies, and Liar, Liar .

Leonard Saxe, Ph.D., a polygraph expert and professor of psychology at Brandeis University, says, "Lying has long been a part of everyday life. We couldn't get through the day without being deceptive." Yet until recently lying was almost entirely ignored by psychologists, leaving serious discussion of the topic in the hands of ethicists and theologians. Freud wrote next to nothing about deception; even the 1500-page Encyclopedia of Psychology , published in 1984, mentions lies only in a brief entry on detecting them. But as psychologists delve deeper into the details of deception, they're finding that lying is a surprisingly common and complex phenomenon.

For starters, the work by Bella DePaulo, Ph.D., a psychologist at the University of Virginia, confirms Nietzche's assertion that the lie is a condition of life. In a 1996 study, DePaulo and her colleagues had 147 people between the ages of 18 and 71 keep a diary of all the falsehoods they told over the course of a week. Most people, she found, lie once or twice a day—almost as often as they snack from the refrigerator or brush their teeth. Both men and women lie in approximately a fifth of their social exchanges lasting 10 or more minutes; over the course of a week they deceive about 30 percent of those with whom they interact one-on-one. Furthermore, some types of relationships, such as those between parents and teens, are virtual magnets for deception: "College students lie to their mothers in one out of two conversations," reports DePaulo. (Incidentally, when researchers refer to lying, they don't include the mindless pleasantries or polite equivocations we offer each other in passing, such as "I'm fine, thanks" or "No trouble at all." An "official" lie actually misleads, deliberately conveying a false impression. So complimenting a friend's awful haircut or telling a creditor that the check is in the mail both qualify.)

Saxe points out that most of us receive conflicting messages about lying. Although we're socialized from the time we can speak to believe that it's always better to tell the truth, in reality society often encourages and even rewards deception. Show up late for an early morning meeting at work and it's best not to admit that you overslept. "You're punished far more than you would be if you lie and say you were stuck in traffic," Saxe notes. Moreover, lying is integral to many occupations. Think how often we see lawyers constructing far-fetched theories on behalf of their clients or reporters misrepresenting themselves in order to gain access to good stories.

Of Course I Love You

Dishonesty also pervades our romantic relationships , as you might expect from the titles of books like 101 Lies Men Tell Women (Harper Collins), by Missouri psychologist Dory Hollander, Ph.D. (Hollander's nomination for the #1 spot: "I'll call you.") Eighty-five percent of the couples interviewed in a 1990 study of college students reported that one or both partners had lied about past relationships or recent indiscretions. And DePaulo finds that dating couples lie to each other in about a third of their interactions—perhaps even more often than they deceive other people.

Fortunately, marriage seems to offer some protection against deception: Spouses lie to each other in "only" about 10 percent of their major conversations. The bad news? That 10 percent just refers to the typically minor lies of everyday life. DePaulo recently began looking at the less frequent "big" lies that involve deep betrayals of trust, and she's finding that the vast majority of them occur between people in intimate relationships. "You save your really big lies," she says, "for the person that you're closest to."

Sweet Little Lies

Though some lies produce interpersonal friction, others may actually serve as a kind of harmless social lubricant. "They make it easier for people to get along," says DePaulo, noting that in the diary study one in every four of the participants' lies were told solely for the benefit of another person. In fact, "fake positive" lies—those in which people pretend to like someone or something more than they actually do ("Your muffins are the best ever")—are about 10 to 20 times more common than "false negative" lies in which people pretend to like someone or something less ("That two-faced rat will never get my vote").

Certain cultures may place special importance on these "kind" lies. A survey of residents at 31 senior citizen centers in Los Angeles recently revealed that only about half of elderly Korean Americans believe that patients diagnosed with life-threatening metastatic cancer should be told the truth about their condition. In contrast, nearly 90 percent of Americans of European or African descent felt that the terminally ill should be confronted with the truth.

Not surprisingly, research also confirms that the closer we are to someone, the more likely it is that the lies we tell them will be altruistic ones. This is particularly true of women: Although the sexes lie with equal frequency, women are especially likely to stretch the truth in order to protect someone else's feelings, DePaulo reports. Men, on the other hand, are more prone to lying about themselves—the typical conversation between two guys contains about eight times as many self-oriented lies as it does falsehoods about other people.

Men and women may also differ in their ability to deceive their friends. In a University of Virginia study, psychologists asked pairs of same-sex friends to try to detect lies told by the other person. Six months later the researchers repeated the experiment with the same participants. While women had become slightly better at detecting their friend's lies over time, men didn't show any improvement—evidence, perhaps, that women are particularly good at learning to read their friends more accurately as a relationship deepens.

Saxe believes that anyone under enough pressure, or given enough incentive, will lie. But in a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , DePaulo and Deborah A. Kashy, Ph.D., of Texas A&M University, report that frequent liars tend to be manipulative and Machiavellian , not to mention overly concerned with the impression they make on others. Still, DePaulo warns that liars "don't always fit the stereotype of caring only about themselves. Further research reveals that extroverted , sociable people are slightly more likely to lie, and that some personality and physical traits—notably self-confidence and physical attractiveness —have been linked to an individual's skill at lying when under pressure.

On the other hand, the people least likely to lie are those who score high on psychological scales of responsibility and those with meaningful same- sex friendships. In his book Lies! Lies!! Lies!!! The Psychology of Deceit (American Psychiatric Press, Inc.), psychiatrist Charles Ford, M.D., adds depressed people to that list. He suggests that individuals in the throes of depression seldom deceive others—or are deceived themselves—because they seem to perceive and describe reality with greater accuracy than others. Several studies show that depressed people delude themselves far less than their nondepressed peers about the amount of control they have over situations, and also about the effect they have on other people. Researchers such as UCLA psychologist Shelley Taylor, Ph.D., have even cited such findings as evidence that a certain amount of self-delusion—basically, lying to yourself—is essential to good mental health. (Many playwrights, including Arthur Miller and Eugene O'Neill, seem to share the same view about truth-telling. In Death of a Salesman and The Iceman Cometh , for example, lies are life sustaining: The heroes become tragic figures when their lies are stripped away.)

Detecting Lies

Anyone who has played cards with a poker-faced opponent can appreciate how difficult it is to detect a liar. Surprisingly, technology doesn't help very much. Few experts display much confidence in the deception-detecting abilities of the polygraph, or lie detector. Geoffrey C. Bunn, Ph.D., a psychologist and polygraph historian at Canada's York University, goes so far as to describe the lie detector as "an entertainment device" rather than a scientific instrument. Created around 1921 during one of the first collaborations between scientists and police, the device was quickly popularized by enthusiastic newspaper headlines and by the element of drama it bestowed in movies and novels.

But mass appeal doesn't confer legitimacy. The problem with the polygraph, say experts like Bunn, is that it detects fear , not lying; the physiological responses that it measures—most often heart rate, skin conductivity, and rate of respiration—don't necessarily accompany dishonesty.

"The premise of a lie detector is that a smoke alarm goes off in the brain when we lie because we're doing something wrong," explains Saxe. "But sometimes we're completely comfortable with our lies." Thus a criminal's lie can easily go undetected if he has no fear of telling it. Similarly, a true statement by an innocent individual could be misinterpreted if the person is sufficiently afraid of the examination circumstances. According to Saxe, the best-controlled research suggests that lie detectors err at a rate anywhere from 25 to 75 percent. Perhaps this is why most state and federal courts won't allow polygraph "evidence."

Some studies suggest that lies can be detected by means other than a polygraph—by tracking speech hesitations or changes in vocal pitch, for example, or by identifying various nervous adaptive habits like scratching, blinking, or fidgeting . But most psychologists agree that lie detection is destined to be imperfect. Still, researchers continue to investigate new ways of picking up lies. While studying how language patterns are associated with improvements in physical health, James W. Pennebaker, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Southern Methodist University, also began to explore whether a person's choice of words was a sign of deception. Examining data gathered from a text analysis program, Pennebaker and SMU colleague Diane Berry, Ph.D., determined that there are certain language patterns that predict when someone is being less than honest. For example, liars tend to use fewer first person words like I or my in both speech and writing. They are also less apt to use emotional words, such as hurt or angry, cognitive words, like understand or realize, and so-called exclusive words, such as but or without, that distinguish between what is and isn't in a category.

While the picture of lying that has emerged in recent years is far more favorable than that suggested by its biblical "thou shalt not" status, most liars remain at least somewhat conflicted about their behavior. In DePaulo's studies, participants described conversations in which they lied as less intimate and pleasant than truthful encounters, suggesting that people are not entirely at ease with their deceptions. That may explain why falsehoods are more likely to be told over the telephone, which provides more anonymity than a face-to-face conversation. In most cases, however, any mental distress that results from telling an everyday lie quickly dissipates. Those who took part in the diary study said they would tell about 75 percent of their lies again if given a second chance—a position no doubt bolstered by their generally high success rate. Only about a fifth of their falsehoods were discovered during the one-week study period.

Certainly anyone who insists on condemning all lies should ponder what would happen if we could reliably tell when our family, friends, colleagues, and government leaders were deceiving us. It's tempting to think that the world would become a better place when purged of the deceptions that seem to interfere with our attempts at genuine communication or intimacy. On the other hand, perhaps our social lives would collapse under the weight of relentless honesty, with unveiled truths destroying our ability to connect with others. The ubiquity of lying is clearly a problem, but would we want to will away all of our lies? Let's be honest.

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The Possible Collapse of the U.S. Home Insurance System

A times investigation found climate change may now be a concern for every homeowner in the country..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

From “The New York Times,” I’m Sabrina Tavernise. And this is “The Daily.”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Today, my colleague, Christopher Flavelle, on a “Times” investigation into one of the least known and most consequential effects of climate change — insurance — and why it may now be a concern for every homeowner in the country.

It’s Wednesday, May 15.

So, Chris, you and I talked a while ago about how climate change was really wreaking havoc in the insurance market in Florida. You’ve just done an investigation that takes a look into the insurance markets more broadly and more deeply. Tell us about it.

Yeah, so I cover climate change, in particular the way climate shocks affect different parts of American life. And insurance has become a really big part of that coverage. And Florida is a great example. As hurricanes have gotten worse and more frequent, insurers are paying out more and more money to rebuild people’s homes. And that’s driving up insurance costs and ultimately driving up the cost of owning a home in Florida.

So we’re already seeing that climate impact on the housing market in Florida. My colleagues and I started to think, well, could it be that that kind of disruption is also happening in other states, not just in the obvious coastal states but maybe even through the middle of the US? So we set out to find out just how much it is happening, how much that Florida turmoil has, in fact, become really a contagion that is spreading across the country.

So how did you go about reporting this? I mean, where did you start?

All we knew at the start of this was that there was reason to think this might be a problem. If you just look at how the federal government tracks disasters around the country, there’s been a big increase almost every year in the number and severity of all kinds of disasters around the country. So we thought, OK, it’s worth trying to find out, what does that mean for insurers?

The problem is getting data on the insurance industry is actually really hard. There’s no federal regulation. There’s no government agency you can go to that holds this data. If you talk to the insurers directly, they tend to be a little reluctant to share information about what they’re going through. So we weren’t sure where to go until, finally, we realized the best people to ask are the people whose job it is to gauge the financial health of insurance companies.

Those are rating agencies. In particular, there’s one rating company called AM Best, whose whole purpose is to tell investors how healthy an insurance company is.

Whoa. So this is way down in the nuts and bolts of the US insurance industry.

Right. This is a part of the broader economy that most people would never experience. But we asked them to do something special for us. We said, hey, can you help us find the one number that would tell us reporters just how healthy or unhealthy this insurance market is state by state over time? And it turns out, there is just such a number. It’s called a combined ratio.

OK, plain English?

Plain English, it is the ratio of revenue to costs, how much money these guys take in for homeowner’s insurance and how much they pay out in costs and losses. You want your revenue to be higher than your costs. If not, you’re in trouble.

So what did you find out?

Well, we got that number for every state, going back more than a decade. And what it showed us was our suspicions were right. This market turmoil that we were seeing in Florida and California has indeed been spreading across the country. And in fact, it turns out that in 18 states, last year, the homeowner’s insurance market lost money. And that’s a big jump from 5 or 10 years ago and spells real trouble for insurance and for homeowners and for almost every part of the economy.

So the contagion was real.

Right. This is our first window showing us just how far that contagion had spread. And one of the really striking things about this data was it showed the contagion had spread to places that I wouldn’t have thought of as especially prone to climate shocks — for example, a lot of the Midwest, a lot of the Southeast. In fact, if you think of a map of the country, there was no state between Pennsylvania and the Dakotas that didn’t lose money on homeowner’s insurance last year.

So just huge parts of the middle of the US have become unprofitable for homeowner’s insurance. This market is starting to buckle under the cost of climate change.

And this is all happening really fast. When we did the Florida episode two years ago, it was a completely new phenomenon and really only in Florida. And now it’s everywhere.

Yeah. And that’s exactly what’s so striking here. The rate at which this is becoming, again, a contagion and spreading across the country is just demolishing the expectations of anyone I’ve spoken to. No one thought that this problem would affect so much of the US so quickly.

So in these states, these new places that the contagion has spread to, what exactly is happening that’s causing the insurance companies to fold up shop?

Yeah. Something really particular is happening in a lot of these states. And it’s worth noting how it’s surprised everyone. And what that is, is formally unimportant weather events, like hailstorms or windstorms, those didn’t used to be the kind of thing that would scare insurance companies. Obviously, a big problem if it destroys your home or damages your home. But for insurers, it wasn’t going to wipe them out financially.

Right. It wasn’t just a complete and utter wipeout that the company would then have to pony up a lot of money for.

Exactly. And insurers call them secondary perils, sort of a belittling term, something other than a big deal, like a hurricane.

These minor league weather events.

Right. But those are becoming so frequent and so much more intense that they can cause existential threats for insurance companies. And insurers are now fleeing states not because of hurricanes but because those former things that were small are now big. Hailstorms, wildfires in some places, previous annoyances are becoming real threats to insurers.

Chris, what’s the big picture on what insurers are actually facing? What’s happening out there numbers-wise?

This is a huge threat. In terms of the number of states where this industry is losing money, it’s more than doubled from 10 years ago to basically a third of the country. The amount they’re losing is enormous. In some states, insurers are paying out $1.25 or even $1.50 for every dollar they bring in, in revenue, which is totally unsustainable.

And the result is insurers are making changes. They are pulling back from these markets. They’re hiking premiums. And often, they’re just dropping customers. And that’s where this becomes real, not just for people who surf balance sheets and trade in the stock market. This is becoming real for homeowners around the country, who all of a sudden increasingly can’t get insurance.

So, Chris, what’s the actual implication? I mean, what happens when people in a state can’t get insurance for their homes?

Getting insurance for a home is crucial if you want to sell or buy a home. Most people can’t buy a home without a mortgage. And banks won’t issue a mortgage without home insurance. So if you’ve got a home that insurance company doesn’t want to cover, you got a real problem. You need to find insurance, or that home becomes very close to unsellable.

And as you get fewer buyers, the price goes down. So this doesn’t just hurt people who are paying for these insurance premiums. It hurts people who want to sell their homes. It even could hurt, at some point, whole local economies. If home values fall, governments take in less tax revenue. That means less money for schools and police. It also means people who get hit by disasters and have to rebuild their homes all of a sudden can’t, because their insurance isn’t available anymore. It’s hard to overstate just how big a deal this is.

And is that actually happening, Chris? I mean, are housing markets being dragged down because of this problem with the insurance markets right now?

Anecdotally, we’ve got reports that in places like Florida and Louisiana and maybe in parts of California, the difficulty of getting insurance, the crazy high cost of insurance is starting to depress demand because not everyone can afford to pay these really high costs, even if they have insurance. But what we wanted to focus on with this story was also, OK, we know where this goes eventually. But where is it beginning? What are the places that are just starting to feel these shocks from the insurance market?

And so I called around and asked insurance agents, who are the front lines of this. They’re the ones who are struggling to find insurance for homeowners. And I said, hey, is there one place that I should go if I want to understand what it looks like to homeowners when all of a sudden insurance becomes really expensive or you can’t even find it? And those insurance agents told me, if you want to see what this looks like in real life, go to a little town called Marshalltown in the middle of Iowa.

We’ll be right back.

So, Chris, you went to Marshalltown, Iowa. What did you find?

Even before I got to Marshalltown, I had some idea I was in the right spot. When I landed in Des Moines and went to rent a car, the nice woman at the desk who rented me a car, she said, what are you doing here? I said, I’m here to write a story about people in Iowa who can’t get insurance because of storms. She said, oh, yeah, I know all about that. That’s a big problem here.

Even the rental car lady.

Even the rental car lady knew something was going on. And so I got into my rental car and drove about an hour northeast of Des Moines, through some rolling hills, to this lovely little town of Marshalltown. Marshalltown is a really cute, little Midwestern town with old homes and a beautiful courthouse in the town square. And when I drove through, I couldn’t help noticing all the roofs looked new.

What does that tell you?

Turns out Marshalltown, despite being a pastoral image of Midwestern easy living, was hit by two really bad disasters in recent years — first, a devastating tornado in 2018 and then, in 2020, what’s called a derecho, a straight-line wind event that’s also just enormously damaging. And the result was lots of homes in this small town got severely damaged in a short period of time. And so when you drive down, you see all these new roofs that give you the sense that something’s going on.

So climate had come to Marshalltown?

Exactly. A place that had previously seemed maybe safe from climate change, if there is such a thing, all of a sudden was not. So I found an insurance agent in Marshalltown —

We talked to other agents but haven’t talked to many homeowners.

— named Bobby Shomo. And he invited me to his office early one morning and said, come meet some people. And so I parked on a quiet street outside of his office, across the street from the courthouse, which also had a new roof, and went into his conference room and met a procession of clients who all had versions of the same horror story.

It was more — well more of double.

A huge reduction in coverage with a huge price increase.

Some people had faced big premium hikes.

I’m just a little, small business owner. So every little bit I do feel.

They had so much trouble with their insurance company.

I was with IMT Insurance forever. And then when I moved in 2020, Bobby said they won’t insure a pool.

Some people had gotten dropped.

Where we used to see carriers canceling someone for frequency of three or four or five claims, it’s one or two now.

Some people couldn’t get the coverage they needed. But it was versions of the same tale, which is all of a sudden, having homeowner’s insurance in Marshalltown was really difficult. But I wanted to see if it was bigger than just Marshalltown. So the next day, I got back in my car and drove east to Cedar Rapids, where I met another person having a version of the same problem, a guy named Dave Langston.

Tell me about Dave.

Dave lives in a handsome, modest, little townhouse on a quiet cul-de-sac on a hill at the edge of Cedar Rapids. He’s the president of his homeowners association. There’s 17 homes on this little street. And this is just as far as you could get from a danger zone. It looks as safe as could be. But in January, they got a letter from the company that insures him and his neighbors, saying his policy was being canceled, even though it wasn’t as though they’d just been hit by some giant storm.

So then what was the reason they gave?

They didn’t give a reason. And I think people might not realize, insurers don’t have to give a reason. Insurance policies are year to year. And if your insurance company decides that you’re too much of a risk or your neighborhood is too much of a risk or your state is too much of a risk, they can just leave. They can send you a letter saying, forget it. We’re canceling your insurance. There’s almost no protection people have.

And in this case, the reason was that this insurance company was losing too much money in Iowa and didn’t want to keep on writing homeowner’s insurance in the state. That was the situation that Dave shared with tens of thousands of people across the state that were all getting similar letters.

What made Dave’s situation a little more challenging was that he couldn’t get new insurance. He tried for months through agent after agent after agent. And every company told him the same thing. We won’t cover you. Even though these homes are perfectly safe in a safe part of the state, nobody would say yes. And it took them until basically two days before their insurance policy was going to run out until they finally found new coverage that was far more expensive and far more bare-bones than what they’d had.

But at least it was something.

It was something. But the problem was it wasn’t that good. Under this new policy, if Dave’s street got hit by another big windstorm, the damage from that storm and fixing that damage would wipe out all the savings set aside by these homeowners. The deductible would be crushingly high — $120,000 — to replace those roofs if the worst happened because the insurance money just wouldn’t cover anywhere close to the cost of rebuilding.

He said to me, we didn’t do anything wrong. This is just what insurance looks like today. And today, it’s us in Cedar Rapids. Everyone, though, is going to face a situation like this eventually. And Dave is right. I talked to insurance agents around the country. And they confirmed for me that this kind of a shift towards a new type of insurance, insurance that’s more expensive and doesn’t cover as much and makes it harder to rebuild after a big disaster, it’s becoming more and more common around the country.

So, Chris, if Dave and the people you spoke to in Iowa were really evidence that your hunch was right, that the problem is spreading and rapidly, what are the possible fixes here?

The fix that people seem most hopeful about is this idea that, what if you could reduce the risk and cause there to be less damage in the first place? So what some states are doing is they’re trying to encourage homeowners to spend more money on hardening their home or adding a new roof or, if it’s a wildfire zone, cut back the vegetation, things that can reduce your risk of having really serious losses. And to help pay for that, they’re telling insurers, you’ve got to offer a discount to people who do that.

And everyone who works in this field says, in theory, that’s the right approach. The problem is, number one, hardening a home costs a fantastic amount of money. So doing this at scale is hugely expensive. Number two, it takes a long time to actually get enough homes hardened in this way that you can make a real dent for insurance companies. We’re talking about years or probably decades before that has a real effect, if it ever works.

OK. So that sounds not particularly realistic, given the urgency and the timeline we’re on here. So what else are people looking at?

Option number two is the government gets involved. And instead of most Americans buying home insurance from a private company, they start buying it from government programs that are designed to make sure that people, even in risky places, can still buy insurance. That would be just a gargantuan undertaking. The idea of the government providing homeowner’s insurance because private companies can’t or won’t would lead to one of the biggest government programs that exists, if we could even do it.

So huge change, like the federal government actually trying to write these markets by itself by providing homeowner’s insurance. But is that really feasible?

Well, in some areas, we’re actually already doing it. The government already provides flood insurance because for decades, most private insurers have not wanted to cover flood. It’s too risky. It’s too expensive. But that change, with governments taking over that role, creates a new problem of its own because the government providing flood insurance that you otherwise couldn’t get means people have been building and building in flood-prone areas because they know they can get that guaranteed flood insurance.

Interesting. So that’s a huge new downside. The government would be incentivizing people to move to places that they shouldn’t be.

That’s right. But there’s even one more problem with that approach of using the government to try to solve this problem, which is these costs keep growing. The number of billion-dollar disasters the US experiences every year keeps going up. And at some point, even if the government pays the cost through some sort of subsidized insurance, what happens when that cost is so great that we can no longer afford to pay it? That’s the really hard question that no official can answer.

So that’s pretty doomsday, Chris. Are we looking at the end of insurance?

I think it’s fair to say that we’re looking at the end of insurance as we know it, the end of insurance that means most Americans can rest assured that if they get hit by a disaster, their insurance company will provide enough money they can rebuild. That idea might be going away. And what it shows is maybe the threat of climate change isn’t quite what we thought.

Maybe instead of climate change wrecking communities in the form of a big storm or a wildfire or a flood, maybe even before those things happen, climate change can wreck communities by something as seemingly mundane and even boring as insurance. Maybe the harbinger of doom is not a giant storm but an anodyne letter from your insurance company, saying, we’re sorry to inform you we can no longer cover your home.

Maybe the future of climate change is best seen not by poring over weather data from NOAA but by poring over spreadsheets from rating firms, showing the profitability from insurance companies, and how bit by bit, that money that they’re losing around the country tells its own story. And the story is these shocks are actually already here.

Chris, as always, terrifying to talk to you.

Always a pleasure, Sabrina.

Here’s what else you should know today. On Tuesday, the United Nations has reclassified the number of women and children killed in Gaza, saying that it does not have enough identifying information to know exactly how many of the total dead are women and children. The UN now estimates that about 5,000 women and about 8,000 children have been killed, figures that are about half of what it was previously citing. The UN says the numbers dropped because it is using a more conservative estimate while waiting for information on about 10,000 other dead Gazans who have not yet been identified.

And Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, gave a press conference outside the court in Lower Manhattan, where Michael Cohen, the former fixer for Donald Trump, was testifying for a second day, answering questions from Trump’s lawyers. Trump is bound by a gag order. So Johnson joined other stand-ins for the former president to discredit the proceedings. Johnson, one of the most important Republicans in the country, attacked Cohen but also the trial itself, calling it a sham and political theater.

Today’s episode was produced by Nina Feldman, Shannon Lin, and Jessica Cheung. It was edited by MJ Davis Lin, with help from Michael Benoist, contains original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, and Rowan Niemisto, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Sabrina Tavernise. See you tomorrow.

• May 24, 2024   •   25:18 Whales Have an Alphabet
• May 23, 2024   •   34:24 I.C.C. Prosecutor Requests Warrants for Israeli and Hamas Leaders
• May 22, 2024   •   23:20 Biden’s Open War on Hidden Fees
• May 21, 2024   •   24:14 The Crypto Comeback
• May 20, 2024   •   31:51 Was the 401(k) a Mistake?
• May 19, 2024   •   33:23 The Sunday Read: ‘Why Did This Guy Put a Song About Me on Spotify?’
• May 17, 2024   •   51:10 The Campus Protesters Explain Themselves
• May 16, 2024   •   30:47 The Make-or-Break Testimony of Michael Cohen
• May 15, 2024   •   27:03 The Possible Collapse of the U.S. Home Insurance System
• May 14, 2024   •   35:20 Voters Want Change. In Our Poll, They See It in Trump.
• May 13, 2024   •   27:46 How Biden Adopted Trump’s Trade War With China
• May 10, 2024   •   27:42 Stormy Daniels Takes the Stand

Hosted by Sabrina Tavernise

Featuring Christopher Flavelle

Produced by Nina Feldman ,  Shannon M. Lin and Jessica Cheung

Edited by MJ Davis Lin

With Michael Benoist

Original music by Dan Powell ,  Marion Lozano and Rowan Niemisto

Engineered by Alyssa Moxley

Listen and follow The Daily Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube

Across the United States, more frequent extreme weather is starting to cause the home insurance market to buckle, even for those who have paid their premiums dutifully year after year.

Christopher Flavelle, a climate reporter, discusses a Times investigation into one of the most consequential effects of the changes.

On today’s episode

Christopher Flavelle , a climate change reporter for The New York Times.

Background reading

As American insurers bleed cash from climate shocks , homeowners lose.

See how the home insurance crunch affects the market in each state .

Here are four takeaways from The Times’s investigation.

There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.

We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.

Christopher Flavelle contributed reporting.

The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Dan Farrell, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Summer Thomad, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sofia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Renan Borelli, Maddy Masiello, Isabella Anderson and Nina Lassam.

Christopher Flavelle is a Times reporter who writes about how the United States is trying to adapt to the effects of climate change. More about Christopher Flavelle

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Trump, Allies Misrepresent FBI Order on Document Search at Mar-a-Lago

By Alan Jaffe

Posted on May 24, 2024

Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino .

FBI agents who searched for classified documents held by former President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022 followed standard protocol. But Trump supporters and social media posts now falsely claim the search was an “attempted assassination” of Trump. The claim is based on a misquote of FBI policy in a legal motion — and Trump wasn’t in Florida during the search.

The standard policy of the U.S. Department of Justice on the use of deadly force is spelled out in the department’s Justice Manual.

The section on deadly force begins by stating, “Law enforcement officers and correctional officers of the Department of Justice may use deadly force only when necessary, that is, when the officer has a reasonable belief that the subject of such force poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or to another person.”

That basic policy is reiterated on the FBI website in its section on frequently asked questions.

But lawyers for former President Donald Trump misquoted the policy in a motion, which was unsealed on May 21, in Trump’s classified documents case, the Associated Press reported . The motion said the operations order for the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 stated that “law enforcement officers of the Department of Justice may use deadly force when necessary” — omitting the word “only.”

The release of the unsealed motion, with the misquoted order, was then shared by Julie Kelly, a writer with RealClear Investigations, according to Washington Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler. Kelly posted on X, “Oh my god. Armed FBI agents were preparing to confront Trump and even engage Secret Service if necessary. … Gestapo.”

But the operations order was just repeating standard Department of Justice policy, and there was no plan to “confront Trump,” who was in New York City during the search for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s resort in Palm Beach, Florida.

“The FBI followed standard protocol in this search as we do for all search warrants, which includes a standard policy statement limiting the use of deadly force,” the FBI said in a statement to the Associated Press. “No one ordered additional steps to be taken and there was no departure from the norm in this matter.”

In his fact-checking article for the Post, Kessler noted that Steven D’Antuono, a former FBI assistant director in charge of the Washington field office when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, told the House Judiciary Committee in a June 7, 2023, interview that the FBI coordinated the search with the Secret Service “to make sure we could get into Mar-a-Lago with no issues.” D’Antuono said he was “adamant” that there would be no show of force — let alone use of force — at the former president’s resort.

“It wasn’t even a show of force, right, because we were all in agreement. We didn’t do a show of force, right. I was adamant about that, and that was something that we agreed on, right, the FBI agreed on, right. No raid jackets, no blazed FBI,” D’Antuono, who has since retired, said. “We made sure we interacted with the Secret Service to make sure we could get into Mar-a-Lago with no issues. We’re not banging down any doors. We weren’t bringing any like FBI vehicles, everything that was reported about helicopters and a hundred people descending on, like a Die Hard movie, was completely untrue, right. That is not how we played it.”

The release of the motion, with its mention of “deadly force,” sparked a firestorm from the former president and his allies.

A May 21 post on Trump’s Truth Social account claimed, “Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE.” A fundraising appeal on the Trump National Committee web page said, “BIDEN’S DOJ WAS AUTHORIZED TO SHOOT ME!”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a supporter of Trump, posted on X on May 21, “The Biden DOJ and FBI were planning to assassinate Pres Trump and gave the green light.”

The claim spread on other social media accounts associated with Trump adviser Steve Bannon, including a May 22 Instagram post by the account @bannonswarroom, which said, “The FBI Raid At Mar-A-Lago Was An Attempted Assassination On President Trump.”

But, as we said, the DOJ order contained standard language for a search like the one conducted at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, and the FBI coordinated its operation with the Secret Service.

Trump and two of his employees, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, were indicted in 2023 on charges of mishandling sensitive classified documents and obstructing federal officials who tried to retrieve them, as we’ve written . The case is being heard in Florida by U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who has not yet set a date for the trial.

Editor’s note:  FactCheck.org  is one of several organizations  working with Facebook  to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found  here . Facebook has  no control  over our editorial content.

Dawsey, Josh, et al. “Trump’s secrets: How a records dispute led the FBI to search Mar-a-Lago.” Washington Post. 13 Aug 2022.

Farley, Robert, D’Angelo Gore and Eugene Kiely. “Q&A on Trump’s Federal Indictment.” FactCheck.org. Updated 31 Jul 2023.

Feuer, Alan. “Judge’s Decisions in Documents Case Play Into Trump’s Delay Strategy.” New York Times. 8 May 2024.

FBI. “What is the FBI’s policy on the use of deadly force by its special agents?” fbi.gov. Accessed 23 May 2024.

Goldin, Melissa. “FACT FOCUS: Trump distorts use of ‘deadly force’ language in FBI document for Mar-a-Lago search. ” Associated Press. 23 May 2024.

Kessler, Glenn. “How Trump used his own court filing to claim an ‘assassination’ attempt.” Washington Post. 23 May 2024.

RealClear Investigations. Author Archive: Julie Kelly. Accessed 23 May 2024.

U.S. Department of Justice. Justice Manual.

U.S. Department of Justice. Justice Manual. 1-16.200 – Deadly Force . Accessed 23 May 2024.