Whether it’s a five-year-old child saying they didn’t take a cookie even though they did, a teenager saying they finished their homework even though the papers are still blank, or an adult saying they are fine even though they didn’t sleep last night, it’s very common to lie, no matter what age. So, what is lying? Why do so many people do it?
According to Paul Ekman Group, a lie is “an act in which someone makes a deliberate choice to mislead another person(s) without giving prior notification of that intention.” Lying is mainly used to cover up the truth. You didn’t do anything over the weekend, but you want to have a cool story to tell? You can simply say you went to the beach and had a fancy dinner reservation. This is one out of countless lies that one can tell, and to some, it feels easy to do so.
There are countless reasons to lie, so there’s not just one explanation for why people tell lies. Although the most common motivation to tell a lie is to avoid consequences and to protect others from harm, according to Psychology Today and Paul Ekman Group.
However, I decided to interview some students at ERHS to see their main reason for lying, to see if the data matches mine.
“I lie all the time, honestly,” said a freshman at ERHS. “I lie for a lot of reasons, but they are mainly random and small ones. I’m like a pathological liar.”
“I lie for my own personal gain,” shared another student, a sophomore. “I want to look good in front of people, so I lie about a lot of things about me.”
Besides these two students, I also asked 10 other students. In a total of 12 students, five said to look good, three said to avoid consequences, two said to make another person happy, and two said multiple reasons.
A possible reason why the data doesn’t match much is because of the age group. Paul Ekman Group asked both children and adults; meanwhile, I talked to teenagers, aged 14 to 16.
People often associate a lie with being negative, but not all lies are harmful to oneself or other people. If someone receives a gift they don’t like, they can just say they like it to the other person and move on. In the end, it really comes down to how you use the lie and how it sounds.
