I am always surprised at how easily, and cheaply, we humans lie.
Have you ever been in a conversation about, say, a particular book and been tempted to say you’ve read it even though you haven’t?
I am guessing the answer is yes. But why would anyone bother to lie in such a low-stakes situation?
The book lie is what you might call a lie of reputation: you are concerned with what other people think of you. Of the many reasons that people lie, I have always thought that the lie of reputation is the most interesting — as opposed to a lie to gain advantage, to avoid trouble, to get out of an obligation, etc.
A new paper by the economists Cesar Martinelli and Susan W. Parker offers some fascinating insights into lies of reputation. It is called “Deception and Misreporting in a Social Program,” and will be published soon in the Journal of the European Economics Association.
Martinelli is a Peruvian-born, U.C.L.A.-educated economic theorist who teaches at I.T.A.M. in Mexico City; Parker is an American-born economist, educated at Yale, who also teaches in Mexico City, at C.I.D.E..
Their paper takes advantage of a remarkably rich data set from Oportunidades, a Mexican welfare program. It records the household goods that people say they have when they are applying for the program and then it also records the household goods that are actually found to be in that household once the recipient’s application has been accepted. Martinelli and Parker worked with data from more than 100,000 applicants, representing 10 percent of the applicants interviewed that year (2002).
It turned out that a lot of people underreported certain items that they thought might exclude them from getting benefits. Below is a list of underreported items followed by the percentage of recipients who owned a certain good but who said they didn’t:
Car (83.10 percent)
Truck (81.71)
Video recorder (79.73)
Satellite TV (73.91)
Gas boiler (73.12)
Phone (73.12)
Washing machine (53.46)
That’s not very surprising: you might expect people to lie to gain the advantage of a welfare benefit. But here’s the surprise. Below is a list of household items that were overreported — i.e., which applicants said they had but in fact did not (again, followed by percentages):
Toilet (39.07 percent)
Tap water (31.76)
Gas stove (28.56)
Concrete floor (25.41)
Refrigerator (12.05)
So 4 out of 10 applicants without a toilet said they had one. Why?
Martinelli and Parker chalk it up to embarrassment, plain and simple. People who were desperately poor were also apparently desperate to not admit to a welfare clerk that they lived without a toilet or running water or even a concrete floor. This is one of the most amazing lies of reputation I can imagine.
It should be noted that there is a lot of incentive to lie to get into the Oportunidades program, for the cash benefit equals about 25 percent of the average applicant household’s expenditures. Furthermore, the penalty for underreporting was not very strong: many of the people found to be underreporting goods like satellite TV’s and trucks were were not kicked out of the program. You could argue that the penalty for overreporting, meanwhile, was greater since it might mean being excluded from the program in the first place — which makes the overreporting even more costly.
The Martinelli-Parker paper may have broad implications for not only poverty programs but any kind of project where the data are self-reported. Think about the typical survey on drug use, sexual behavior, personal hygiene, voting preference, environmental behavior, etc.
Here’s what we once wrote, for instance, in an article about the lack of hand hygiene in hospitals:
In one Australian medical study, doctors self-reported their hand-washing rate at 73 percent, whereas when these same doctors were observed, their actual rate was a paltry 9 percent.
We’ve also written about the subjects that online daters are most likely to lie about, and the risky business of election polling — especially when the issue of race is involved.
But as often as we or anyone else writes about the perils of self-reporting, the Martinelli-Parker paper really gives the whole topic a foundation to stand on. Not only does it deliver a surprising insight into why we lie, but it is also a sobering reminder to naturally distrust self-reported data — at least until some scientists enable us to peer into one another’s minds and see what’s really going on there.
I am interested in hearing from readers what kinds of lies you tell, and why.
[Note: I'll be discussing this topic early tomorrow (Tues.) morning on the new public-radio program The Takeaway.]
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I’d tell you, but I’d probably be lying about it
When I’m horrendously late for somewhere (the airport, for instance), I’ve lied to the taxi driver and told him that my flight was later than it actually was. I can’t believe that I actually value what some stranger who I will never see again’s opinion of my time management over him maybe driving a bit faster!
I’m 6’4″ and I’ve noticed that most guys lie about their height by a fantastic degree, sometimes up to 3″. How can you be 6’2″ when I can see the top of your head?
This will sound very self-righteous, but it’s true: I do not lie.
Now, to be fair, I may use a little wisdom about how I answer someone’s question, but I do not lie. (Which is not to say I have never lied, just that that is not at all a practice of my life.)
I heard of a preacher who was given a cake by a certain cat-loving woman in his congregation. The cake was strewn with cat hairs, so he simply placed it in the garbage. The next Sunday, the parishoner asked, “Pastor, how did you like that cake?” “Sister, cakes like that don’t last long around my house!”
No lying involved, yet her feelings are spared.
I finally figured out that if we can kill in self-defense or even in administering punishment (which would be an exception to the principle of “thou shalt not kill”), then we can also lie in self-defense (e.g., the Nazis knock on the door and ask, “Do you have any Jews in your home?”). Or for that matter, we can fail to observe the sabbath if we have an ox in the ditch.
And on and on.
The principles of scripture are given as absolutes…but there is the understanding that there are dilemmas and situations that demand a different response.
The truth, however, is that most people lie for far less worthy reasons. They lie for advantage. They lie because they are cowards. They lie because it makes a better story.
For shame.
As a guy who lies about his height (because for some perverse reason, women in the US consider you “short” if you’re under 6′ tall, despite the average height for a man being 5’9″ or so), I can say guys generally lie about their height because it’s nearly impossible for people to verify or even accurately estimate, yet they seem to put a great premium on the specific number.
Of course, I only add an inch to my height when self-reporting, I don’t know how anyone could expect to get away with adding several inches.
Interestingly, WaPo has a story on a survey of Americans on religious topics (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/23/AR2008062300813.html), according to which 1 in 5 atheists believes in God. Either they have a different definition of atheism than I’m familiar with, or somebody’s lying.
“So 4 out of 10 applicants who didn’t have a toilet said they did.”
Actually, isn’t it that 4 out of 10 applicants who said they had a toilet actually didn’t? There’s a difference there …
I had to laugh out loud at your first example.
I work in a public library; I lie all the time about what I have and haven’t read/watched/listened to. The reason – and I suspect the reason that would explain a great deal of this kind of behavior – is simple social lubrication, and your “low-stakes” characterization explains it.
If a patron who loves a particular series asks me if I’ve read it, and I haven’t – but say that I have, or that I intend to – it makes them feel like I’m sympathetic to their interests and tastes and will therefore be attentive to their requests. Which I am, and will – being personally invested in the same interests and tastes isn’t a prerequisite; I’m just being professional. If I say, truthfully, “Oh, I have no interest in that series, but I know it’s popular,” I’m not creating a welcoming atmosphere for them. Perversely, the cost of telling the truth – in terms of trust and comfort – is higher than the cost of lying.
There’s a reason they’re called “little white lies” or “social lies.” They deflect situations of social awkwardness, and are relatively easy to retroactively re-frame as truth (if it seems that important, I can go read the book before I see that person again).
The second example, with the welfare statistics, is more complicated, and not quite the same category. Shame, of course, is a powerful and often unacknowledged motivator.