Hey smart people, Joe here.

So there's this famous experiment on lying.

A behavioral economist named Dan Ariely gave groups of people a set of math problems.

You're supposed to find the two numbers that add up to ten.

Now, pretty much everyone can solve these if they're given enough time, but in the experiment, you're only given five minutes to do a whole bunch of them, and you'd get a dollar for each one that you got right.

When the five minutes are up, stop, count how many questions you got correct, then put your paper in a shredder.

Just tell the tester how many you got right and collect your money.

Except the papers weren't really shredded so that researchers could tell who lied, and around seven in ten people cheat in this scenario.

On average, people said that they solved six problems, but they only actually solved four.

What's interesting is, people didn't lie as big as they could lie.

They made a calculated lie big enough to get some extra moola but not big enough to raise suspicion, they thought.

These were normal people just like you and me.

Just about everyone is willing to tell a little lie like this in return for a reward.

If you think that we could separate people into those who lie and those who don't or if you think that lying is abnormal and unacceptable, well, that's incorrect.

Everyone lies.

Like, you're on the Internet.

You know that people lie all the time, but take an honest look at yourself.

Have you lied today?

I mean ever say, "I know, we should totally catch up."

Oh, oh yeah, bro.

Script's almost done.

Just got, like, two more lines.

Oh, weird.

Uh, must've gone in my spam folder.

Oh yeah, I love flossing.

Every day, uh-huh.

I mean, what's your dating profile say?

Ever drive a little faster than the speed limit?

I mean, last time someone asked you how you're doing, did you tell them the whole truth?

Oh, great.

And these are just little lies.

The world is full of larger lies and more sinister liars, lies that can do real harm.

I mean, most of us consider ourselves pretty good, generally truthful people.

So why do we do this?

I mean, if we're supposed to be the most intelligent species on Earth, the most socially complex organism that we know of in the universe, why are we just incapable of telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?

Well, lucky for you, I have all the answers.

Okay, that is a lie, but you're going to learn a lot.

This is why we lie.

[upbeat pizzicato music] Lie, deception, cheat, falsehood, untruth, mislead, falsity, fiction, concoction, fabrication, hoax, forgery, exaggeration, malarkey, hogwash, baloney, misrepresentation, fake.

Bull[bleep] So what is a lie?

Definitions are a good place to start.

It's someone acting to create a false belief in their victim, even if that victim is themselves.

Yeah, you can lie to yourself, and we all do that, which is pretty wild, because that means one part of our brain is actually keeping information from another part of our brain on a regular basis.

Yikes.

There are a lot of different kinds of lies.

We can say something that isn't true.

We can also lie by avoiding the truth or exaggerating the truth, the total other direction, or even casting doubt on truth itself.

Lies can be actions that we take or actions that we don't take.

These are all lies.

Everyone does this.

Everyone lies, and it's not our fault, at least sort of.

If you've been watching this channel for a while, maybe you've heard this quote before, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."

And that's absolutely true.

Everything that we are, everything that we do, we evolved to be this way.

And in general, traits, even psychological traits like lying-- they stick around for a reason, and that's kind of a dark thought to consider, that lying is actually useful, so useful that not only the nature keep it around, it made us really good at it.

So how often do people lie?

Well, studies on college students show that they lie in a quarter of conversations with a best friend, half the time with acquaintances, and almost 80% of chats with strangers.

They lied to romantic partners in a third of conversations, even lied to their moms in half of their calls home.

Sorry, Mom.

Lying and deception is not even limited to humans.

Living things exchange all kinds of signals with each other: sounds, colors and patterns, movements and behaviors, even chemicals and molecules, and they can deceive with all of them.

Viruses are lying to your immune system, molecular deception.

Parasites that control the minds of their hosts so that the parasites can survive and reproduce.

Flowers that look like female bees to trick males into pollinating them.

Camouflage?

That's just lying with your body.

Or the beetle that covers itself in the chemical odor of a baby ant larva so that the ants will carry it off to the nursery, where it eats their real babies while the ants take care of the murdering fake baby.

All lies.

And these are just a handful.

Lying is everywhere in nature but no other animal is capable of such a broad range of lies and deceptions as we are because we can verbalize.

Verbal lies.

Whoa.

Anyway, we can speak our deception.

The average human adult can speak something like 10,000 words, and many of us can speak far more loquaciously than that.

That was a bit of a humblebrag, which might be another form of lying.

These words can be combined in countless ways to exaggerate facts, omit them, or even invent new ones.

But no one knows when our species first developed the capacity to lie, but scientists think that our lying skills exploded when we develop spoken language.

And thanks to language, unlike most other lying animals, we direct most of our lies at our own species, at each other.

So how do we rationalize this?

How do we make excuses for all this lying?

Think about this for a second.

What do we want out of the everyday interactions that we have with other people?

Maybe just to be pleasant, maybe we want our opinion heard or to give some impression of ourselves or maybe we just want to make others feel good, strengthen our friendships, influence people, push them to do something that we want them to do, or increase our status and power by wanting people to believe that we have the answers to things.

Can we cut that last one?

I just-- We all have motivations like these, and we can act on these motivations truthfully or deceptively.

Most of the lies that we tell are everyday white lies, and these generally fall into five categories: lies about our feelings and opinions...

I love that shirt.

It's--it's your color.

Our plans or our whereabouts... Oh, I already donated at work a lot.

Our knowledge, achievements, or even our failings...

I'm a constitutional law expert on Twitter.

Explaining our actions or behaviors... Ah, sorry I am late.

Car trouble.

The--the rotator splint or something.

Or personal facts or possessions...

I--I don't have any change at all.

I don't like money.

Bitcoin only.

Now, these are not Earth-shattering things, but they are super common.

How do we rationalize lying about stuff like this so frequently?

Well, when people lie, they often justify it, consciously or unconsciously, by feeling that they are protecting the target of the lie and also protecting themselves, thinking that both they and the target would feel worse if truth had been told, rather than the lie.

In this way, lying is a form of prosocial behavior.

Self-centered lies are lies that are told to protect the liar psychologically, like saving the liar from embarrassment or disapproval or conflict, or they're told for the liar's personal gain.

(man) Oh, what kind of watch is that?

It's a Rolex.

You can't look at it.

Other-oriented lies are kind of the opposite.

They're also told for psychological protection, but to protect the target of the lie, not the liar, trying to spare other people from embarrassment or disapproval, conflict, or from getting their feelings hurt.

Oh, your baby is... so cute.

Now, maybe unsurprisingly, people are more likely to tell self-serving lies than lies that serve others.

And people are more likely to tell self-serving lives to strangers or acquaintances, and they tell more protective other-oriented lies to close friends and family.

But from the liars' point of view, both of these are kind-hearted, altruistic actions, like, in your head, you're being nice by lying.

Most lying isn't to manipulate and exploit people, no.

Most common lies are to boost self-esteem or to protect people's feelings or to get people to like us more.

According to psychologists, being honest all the time isn't always the best idea for strengthening social bonds, which is a lot to unpack.

I mean, bring that up in your next therapy session and let me know how it goes.

People do tell more serious lies, of course, lies that have the potential to seriously harm relationships or that cover up fundamental parts of their identity or that even put others in danger, and whereas people are less likely to tell those small, self-serving lies to the people that are closest to, well, they're more likely to tell large, serious lies to people that they're closest to, which is messed up, but that's because those little lies you tell to strangers or acquaintances to save embarrassment or conflict-- well, sharing those truths with people that we're closest to actually strengthens those relationships.

I mean, you might tell a casual work friend you don't mind that they stole your best knock-knock joke.

And then you go tell your partner that you actually do care.

Who's there?

Hurt feelings.

And you and your partner strengthen your bond over that.

So psychologically, it's to our advantage not to lie about little stuff to people that we value, but because we value the people we're closest to, because those relationships mean so much to us, it actually makes it more likely that we'll tell them riskier or more serious lies because there's a lot more to lose.

It's easy to think of lying as absolutely wrong and worth condemning when we view it as a moral issue all on its own.

But it isn't an issue that exists all on its own.

We care about honesty, but we also care about love and happiness and not doing things that are painful or uncomfortable.

We have to weigh all of these goals at the same time, and complete honesty doesn't always win over those other concerns.

Maybe acknowledging that we care about other people's feelings or that we're loyal to the people who depend on us or that people's intentions are sometimes more important than their actions... Oh, that is a really great picture.

I'm going--I'm going to hang that up in my office 'cause I can tell what it is.

I mean, maybe acknowledging those things can be the moral high ground sometimes.

It's great when love and honesty coincide, but they don't always, because relationships are complicated and being constantly uncomfortable and that moment between the two sides-- I think maybe that keeps us working hard to make our relationships better.

Besides these prosocial behaviors, there is another big way that people rationalize lying, and they don't do any of this consciously, by the way.

They look for hints that lying is socially acceptable in that moment.

Do you remember that experiment with the math problems and the money?

They did it again, except this time, somebody stands up after, like, 30 seconds and loudly declares, "I solved all of them."

They're obviously lying.

If you think that this super liar is not like you, maybe they look different or they dress different, they aren't in your in-group, it'll actually make you act more honestly.

You don't want to be like them.

But if a person that's like you for whatever reason or identifier, a person that's in your in-group lies and gets away with it, that increases the chance that you will lie, too, because that person sends a signal.

Lying is socially acceptable.

The key to making a lie work even if you're lying to yourself, which, again, we do a lot, is the person you're lying to can't spot the lie.

But luckily for liars, which all of us are, we are really bad at spotting lies.

Even professionals-- interrogators, lawyers, "Among Us" Twitch streamers-- are lousy at lie spotting.

And that's because we have a bias to believe that what other people tell us is generally true.

Our default assumption is that we're not being lied to, even though we obviously get lied to all the time.

So why do we err on the side of assuming that something is true?

Well, at this point, it's useful to take a look at human history, like all the way back.

The human brain took the form it has today about 150,000 years ago.

We live a very different life than those ancestors, but we're using essentially the same hardware and most of the same software as Stone Age humans.

Human brains did not evolve to be the greatest tool in the universe for the pursuit of truth.

They only did what they had to do to survive, and surviving 100,000 years ago involved very different choices.

Imagine you hear a predator sound in the grass.

Even if it's the wind 99 times out of 100, there's a big potential punishment for assuming that it's not a predator.

You could die.

But there's a low punishment and high reward for assuming that it is actually a predator.

I mean, sure, you might be wrong, but you're alive because your default assumption was that what you think you heard was true.

And the humans who didn't assume that got eaten, and our Stone Age mind is the one that survived, warts and all.

But we are carrying that Stone Age mind through a very different world today, and some people aren't sure that that old-school mind is cut out for the job.

I mean, I'm probably not the only one wondering if lying is getting worse lately.

I mean, we're on the Internet right now, remember?

Researchers did that math problem money experiment one more time.

You do your math problems, timer goes off, shred your paper, report your answers.

Only this time, first, you get tokens, then you take those tokens somewhere else, over there to get the actual money.

This bit of distance, the separation between the actual lie and the person that you were cheating and getting the reward from-- it made people cheat twice as much.

This is kind of scary.

We're more distant from each other these days than ever before.

It's easier to lie when you don't have to do it to someone's face.

So is it just going to get worse until no one tells the truth ever?

I--I actually don't think so, because luckily, getting lied to really sucks.

Primary researcher Frans De Waal once trained monkeys so that they traded a token, they get some yummy cucumber.

But if one monkey witnessed another monkey getting a free cucumber, the first monkey would throw food.

I don't know, probably throw poop, too.

The monkey that got lied to refused to cooperate until fairness was restored.

So other animals agree.

Getting lied to or cheated sucks.

And this is probably why social animals have to keep lying and cheating kind of under control, because if you lie and deceive too often or too obviously, the rest of your species won't cooperate with you, and you have less chance of surviving and passing on your genes.

But even if nature keeps lying from totally taking over, it isn't going anywhere.

I mean, it seems pretty hopeless, huh?

I mean, I'm a scientist.

I'm in the truth business, and I want my business to succeed.

Are we just doomed to lie and be lied to?

Maybe not.

Scientists did that experiment one more time with the math problems, timer, shredder, money, but before they started, they made the test subjects just promise not to cheat.

And those people lied less just by saying they weren't going to lie.

Because instead of letting your unconscious mind drive your behavior and all of the lying and cheating that that leads to, your conscious mind weighs in, and that's enough to get you to lie less often.

Maybe that's all that morals are: using our conscious mind, this amazingly powerful tool capable of imagining, capable of putting us into the footsteps and minds of others and experiencing the world from their perspective, using this tool to control our actions instead of that silent, unseen, unconscious controller the one that's willing to lie so much.

I kind of love that we can succeed in that by doing that thing that only our species can do, by telling ourselves a story.

I will strive for truth and try to be honest, and maybe we can all lie less.

I hope that's true, anyway.

Stay curious.

Here's one thing I can guarantee is 100% true, and that it how much I am thankful for everyone who supports the show on Patreon.

We really couldn't do it without you.

If you would like to learn more about our community, there's a link down in the description where you can learn how you can support the show, help us keep making awesome episodes like this.

You can get special new merch announcements about things we might have just released, on top of my head-- you know, that sort of thing.

All right, we'll see you next time.

Okay?

(crew) What kind of glasses are those?

These?

These are Louis Gucci Vuitton.