11 June 2015
Lies, damned lies and…..
by Lynda Goetz
One of the latest, rather dubious statistics to emerge this week is that women tell more lies than men. That is, if you believe a survey of 2,000 people undertaken by insurance company, Privilege. If, on the other hand, you were to put your faith in surveys undertaken by the comparison website PayingTooMuch.com in August last year, or by the Science Museum in 2010, you would believe that men were the more frequent or bigger liars.
Does any of this matter? Does it all depend on the sort of lies we tell or the reasons behind them? It would appear from most research that it is men who tell the bigger lies (rather than perhaps the most frequent) but that on the whole there is a subtle difference behind the reasons why men and women lie. What about children? We raise our children not to lie and yet it would seem that most adults lie almost as naturally as breathing. How on earth can we adults justify our stance with our children when we cannot let a day past without lying to them, to our spouses, to our friends and sometimes even to ourselves? Do we in fact have double standards on lying? Is it alright to lie if we are doing so to save hurting someone’s feelings, but not alright if we are lying to try and get ourselves ‘out of a hole’ or to make ourselves look better than we really are?
There is a difference between ‘fibs’ told to save hurting someone’s feelings and those lies told to ‘save face’, to get out of something, or self-centred or boasting lies told in an attempt to appear better or more interesting than we really are. What we try to instil in children is not to lie for these latter reasons. At the same time, we positively encourage them to go in for the former kind. “Say thank you to Granny for her lovely present,” or “You must write your ‘thank you’ letter to Aunt Jane for the enjoyable weekend” are not unusual instructions (although the ‘thank you’ letter is sadly a dying art these days). If however, we are told by our child that there is no longer any English homework at weekends, whilst at school the teacher is being told that the homework was ‘left at a friend’s house’ or ‘on the bus’ and, as we are eventually bound to do, we find out, then we do not approve of this kind of deception. It is, put simply, ‘telling lies’.
There are several things about lying which are offensive. One of them is the insult to our intelligence. This is where children’s lying tends to fall down. Because of their lack of sophistication, their lying tends on the whole to be simplistic and therefore easy to see through. It is not usually difficult to find them out because we can apply our intelligence and logic and fairly rapidly reach a conclusion that they are attempting to dupe us. From a child, this is not insulting. However, if an adult tries to do this to us, it is insulting that they think we will be taken in by something that is clearly not true. This brings us to the second thing that is so offensive about lying and that is that it results in a lack of trust. If you are lied to, then you tend to lose trust in the person who has lied to you. If they can lie about one thing, then what is to stop them lying about other, perhaps more important, things?
A lack of trust in politicians and public figures has been a feature of life in this country for some time now. The expenses scandal in 2010 made us take a fresh look at the behaviour of our MPs and at their self-serving attitude, which whilst it might not have entailed outright lies, did, to use a now classic phrase, involve being ‘economical with the truth’. Scandals which have involved sexual ‘peccadilloes’ have likewise caused members of the press and the public to question whether someone who can lie to their spouse can really be trusted to deal honestly with corporate affairs or affairs of state. In other countries, of course, different standards may well apply. In France, politicians who do not have mistresses might be regarded as unusual, or at the very least, having a mistress would not be regarded in any way as bringing into question the politician’s morality in matters of state (whether the two are interconnected is in any event possibly a moot point). In Italy, Sr Berlusconi was for years able to get away with behaviour and untruths which in this country would have seen him long since forced to resign. In other parts of the world even less savoury behaviour and blatant lying seem not only to have been ignored, but to have been positively connived at by so many involved that it is hard not to wonder whether these people actually believed their own lies. The situation within FIFA surprises few. What is surprising is that it has gone unchallenged for so long.
According to the most recent poll, 80% 0f those surveyed said that they would only lie if it was not going to cause anyone harm. However, 10% also admitted that their lies had in fact caused harm. More than one in three people lied at least once a day. Four out of five women admit to telling lies every day, compared with two out of five men. Some women admitted to telling ‘white lies‘ up to 30 times a day. The truth is most likely to be told in court or in a doctor’s surgery (well thank goodness for that). Interestingly, the average age of those who admitted telling lies regularly was 46,an age by which the lessons of childhood may have begun to wear off. Do any of these bits of information really tell us anything much at all or are they just…..statistics? Now what I really want to know is who coined that phrase in the first place.
