Lying

Lying and Deception Lying and Self-deception

Questions about truthfulness occur in many contexts—when parents ask their children if they are using recreational drugs, when an employer ask applicants about the reasons they left their last job, when international leaders consider each others’ threats or promises, when voters evaluate candidates’ promises, when physicians consider a patient’s complaint, when at the start of a romantic encoun...

Pathological Lying

Lying because we care: Compassion increases prosocial lying.

Prosocial lies, or lies intended to benefit others, are ubiquitous behaviors that have important social and economic consequences. Though emotions play a central role in many forms of prosocial behavior, no work has investigated how emotions influence behavior when one has the opportunity to tell a prosocial lie-a situation that presents a conflict between two prosocial ethics: lying to prevent...

Pathological lying revisited.

Although pathological lying was first described in the medical literature over 100 years ago, it remains a poorly understood concept. Psychiatrists continue to grapple with the full ramifications of the condition, even though interest specifically in pathological lying seems to have waned in recent times. The impact of pathological lying deserves critical attention from forensic psychiatrists b...

Lying, Deceiving, and Misleadingi

This article discusses recent work on lying and its relation to deceiving and misleading. Two new developments in this area are considered: first, the acknowledgment of the phenomenon of lying without the intent to deceive (so called ‘bald-faced lies’), and second, recent work on the distinction between lying and merely misleading. Both are discussed in relation to topics in philosophy of langu...