The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

When we lie for another person’s benefit, we call it a “white lie.” When we tell a white lie, we’re expanding the fudge factor, but we’re not doing it for selfish reasons. For example, consider the importance of insincere compliments. We all know the gold standard of white lies, in which a woman who is less than svelte puts on a slinky new dress and asks her husband, “Do I look fat in this?” The man does a quick cost-benefit analysis; he sees his whole life pass before his eyes if he answers with the brutal truth. So he tells her, “Darling, you look beautiful.” Another evening (marriage) saved.

Sometimes white lies are just social niceties, but other times they can work wonders to help people get through the most difficult of circumstances, as I learned as an eighteen-year-old burn victim.

After an accident that nearly killed me, I found myself in the hospital with third-degree burns covering over 70 percent of my body. From the beginning, the doctors and the nurses kept telling me, “Everything will be okay.” And I wanted to believe them. To my young mind, “Everything will be okay” meant that the scars from my burns and many, many skin transplants would eventually fade and go away, just as when someone burns himself while making popcorn or roasting marshmallows over a campfire.

One day toward the end of my first year in the hospital, the occupational therapist said she wanted to introduce me to a recovered burn victim who’d suffered a similar fate a decade earlier. She wanted to demonstrate to me that it was possible for me to go out into the world and do things that I used to do—basically, that everything would be okay. But when the visitor came in, I was horrified. The man was badly scarred—so badly that he looked deformed. He was able to move his hands and use them in all kinds of creative ways, but they were barely functional. This image was far from the way I imagined my own recovery, my ability to function, and the way I would look once I left the hospital. After this meeting I became deeply depressed, realizing that my scars and functionality would be much worse than I had imagined up to that point.

The doctors and nurses told me other well-meaning lies about what kind of pain to expect. During one unbearably long operation on my hands, the doctors inserted long needles from the tips of my fingers through the joints in order to hold my fingers straight so that the skin could heal properly. At the top of each needle they placed a cork so that I couldn’t unintentionally scratch myself or poke my eyes. After a couple of months of living with this unearthly contraption, I found that it would be removed in the clinic—not under anesthesia. That worried me a lot, because I imagined that the pain would be pretty awful. But the nurses said, “Oh, don’t worry. This is a simple procedure and it’s not even painful.” For the next few weeks I felt much less worried about the procedure.

When the time came to withdraw the needles, one nurse held my elbow and the other slowly pulled out each needle with pliers. Of course, the pain was excruciating and lasted for days—very much in contrast to how they described the procedure. Still, in hindsight, I was very glad they had lied to me. If they had told me the truth about what to expect, I would have spent the weeks before the extraction anticipating the procedure in misery, dread, and stress—which in turn might have compromised my much-needed immune system. So in the end, I came to believe that there are certain circumstances in which white lies are justified.

CHAPTER 7

Creativity and Dishonesty

We Are All Storytellers

Facts are for people who lack the imagination to create their own truth.

—ANONYMOUS

Once upon a time, two researchers named Richard Nisbett (a professor at the University of Michigan) and Tim Wilson (a professor at the University of Virginia) set up camp at their local mall and laid out four pairs of nylon stockings across a table. They then asked female passersby which of the four they liked best. The women voted, and, by and large, they preferred the pair on the far right. Why? Some said they liked the material more. Some said they liked the texture or the color. Others felt that the quality was the highest. This preference was interesting, considering that all four pairs of stockings were identical. (Nisbett and Wilson later repeated the experiment with nightgowns, and found the same results.)

When Nisbett and Wilson questioned each participant about the rationale behind her choice, not one cited the placement of the stockings on the table. Even when the researchers told the women that all the stockings were identical and that there was simply a preference for the right-hand pair, the women “denied it, usually with a worried glance at the interviewer suggesting that they felt either that they had misunderstood the question or were dealing with a madman.”