Why lying isn't always bad and when to do it

The great philosopher Immanuel Kant could not stand lies and believed Kant I. On the imaginary right to lie out of philanthropy // Kant I. Treatises and letters. M., 1980. WITH. 232–237 that telling the truth is the duty of every person. But are there situations when deception is useful or even necessary? Science journalists Shankar Vedantam and Bill Mesler think so.

Their analysis can be trusted: they have written an entire book about lies, drawing on scientific research and crime reports. In Russian “Illusion of Truth. Why does our brain seek to deceive ourselves and others? " was published by Individuum. With his permission, Lifehacker publishes an excerpt from the third chapter.

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Distinguished Professor of Duke University Dan Ariely is one of the world's leading experts in the psychology of deception. He has written several books on the ubiquity of lies and their complex mechanics.

In modern economics, it is common to explain cheating by simple cost benefit analysis: we lie as much as possible in order to get the maximum advantage with the minimum risk. But Arieli demonstrated that the frequency and extent of our lies are usually governed by the urge to moral balance: we want to receive as many benefits as possible, while feeling good at the same time people. He calls this "personal fallibility."

Much of Arieli's work focuses on the cost of lying and how you can reduce it. But besides, he is fighting the idea benevolent lies: when one side wants to be deceived, and the other, taking into account its interests, fulfills this desire. It turned out that such deception and self-deception helped Arieli himself in one of the most difficult periods of his life. Perhaps it is for this reason that he is alive today.

At the age of 17, misfortune happened to Arieli. During the fireworks, one of the charges exploded next to him. He was rushed to hospital where he spent the next three years. “I was already in the 12th grade In US schools, 12th grade is graduation. and ended up being torn out of life, ”he recalls. As a result of the tragedy, he received burns 70% of the body. He still needs elective surgery to treat various complications.

Arieli says that during his time in the hospital, he seemed to have looked at life through a "magnifying glass". Like all people who received such serious burns, he could easily die in the first months after the tragedy. But no one ever told him that.

They didn’t tell him about what torment the rest of his life would turn into. “Like everyone who gets seriously injured, I have been thinking about getting out of this life,” he told me. - I think if at that moment I objectively looked at what awaits me in the future, I could try to do it. I'm not sure if I would have stood the truth if the doctors had told me. ”

This was not the only time that the lies of the paramedics helped him. On one occasion, as part of a surgical operation, more than ten metal rods were inserted into his arm. About three weeks before they were to be taken out, he learned that he would have to undergo this procedure consciously and only under local anesthesia. It horrified him, but the nurse promised that everything would be simple, fast and painless.

Three weeks have passed. The procedure was excruciating. “It turns out that it really hurts,” Arieli laughs at it now. "And it took a while to get those 15 rods out." Anger to the nurse who misled him, quickly evaporated as soon as Arieli presented an alternative. If she had told the truth, he would not only have to endure painful surgery, but also Also a few weeks before, tormented by fear.

“Think of three weeks of agony that I would have to go through,” Arieli said. - I still could not escape the pain, but I escaped the horror that would have preceded it. Does this justify a lie? This is a difficult question, but I admit that the deception was good for me. The patient has no control over anything and is terribly afraid of everything. You just lie in a hospital bed and other people decide what to do with you and when. Probably, at that moment it would have been very, very difficult for me to cope with the fear that these rods would be removed from me without anesthesia. I am grateful for this lie. "

Once he nevertheless faced the truth - and it turned out to be terrifying. The hospital staff invited another patient, suffering from severe burns, who was several years closer to recovery, in the hope that the meeting would inspire Arieli.

“I had no idea I would look like this,” he shared with me. “The patient they brought in was supposed to represent recovery. He had been recovering for 15 years and looked terrible with very bad burns. It was clear that his hands would not obey him - I don't have such problems now. But then I was shocked. I myself presented everything in a much more optimistic light. They brought this patient in to show me how well everything should end. For me it was like a bolt from the blue. "

This experience taught Arieli that there are circumstances in which it is necessary to moderate our desire to speak the truth in order to protect and encourage others. “Several years ago I was asked to help a young boy who got burned,” he said. - His relative asked if I could drop this guy a life-affirming message about what awaits him in the future. It was a terrible torture for me. On the one hand, I did not think that a very bright future awaited him. On the other hand, I didn’t think it would be right to dump on him all the nightmarish burden of the years ahead. I meditated for two days with tears in my eyes. In the end, I found some kind of compromise that suited me. And it was definitely not a blatantly brutal truth. "

If you look at benevolent deception and optimistic self-deception not as vices and weaknesses, but as adaptive responses in difficult circumstances, it is not hard to imagine that many of us, faced with unbearable pain, will choose the lie that gives hope, and not the truth that leads to despair.

Of course, not all of them. Some in unison with Immanuel Cant declare that truth is more important than hope, health and well-being. These brave men will have a hard time. Whatever one may say, natural selection is not worried about the truth, but about performance.

Your chances of survival are higher when you look at the world through rose-colored glasses.

The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota once examined 534 adult patients suffering from the disease that ultimately killed my father, lung cancer. They divided the patients into two groups - optimists and pessimists. It turned out that the optimists outlived the pessimists by six months.

Okay, let's say optimists do better than pessimists, but what about realists? Surely you can be realistic without being a pessimist? A few years before the Mayo Clinic experiment, another study looked at the life expectancy of 74 homosexuals diagnosed with AIDS.

In 1994, when the study was published, this diagnosis effectively amounted to a death sentence. The study found that patients with a more realistic view of the disease and its outcomes died for nine months earlier than optimistic patients. The researchers titled their work Realistic Acceptance Predictor of Reduced Expected Time to Survival in Gay Men with AIDS.

In another study at the Mayo Clinic, researchers asked 839 patients to undergo psychological testing for a variety of medical problems. These people were observed over the next thirty years, noting which of them died and when it happened. It was found that mortality among patients with a "pessimistic mindset" 19% higher.

If I told you that researchers have discovered a special trick without which human mortality rises by 19%, but it is systematically ignored by clinics and hospitals around the world, you would call it medical negligence. Why doesn't every hospital and medical center aim to instill hope and optimism in patients?

The fact is that we ourselves have driven ourselves into a corner: lying is always wrong.

What if we give people hope, and then we are accused of encouraging false optimism? Not recognizing that deception and self-deception can sometimes be good, we are perplexed when facts testify to this.

Children of the Enlightenment, we have tied ourselves to the mast of rationality, to the genius of reason. We reject the intuition, instincts and discordant urges of ancient abilities in our brains. Truth, we proclaim, is our only banner; logic is the wind in our sails. What if the wind should be blowing the other way? Our worldview forces us to ignore such evidence.

If you would like to understand the reasons for lying, its role in our life and the difference between optimism and self-deception, "The Illusion of Truth" is a suitable assistant.

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