White Lies.

Honesty vs. White Lies

We study and compare the behavioral consequences of honesty and white lie in communication. An honest agent always recommends the ex post optimal policy to the principal, while a white liar may manipulate information but only for the sake of the principal. We identify the effects of honesty and white lie on communication and show that, even though a white lie is intended to be beneficial to the...

Real Lies, White Lies and Gray Lies: Towards a Typology of Deception

White Lies in Hand: Are Other-Oriented Lies Modified by Hand Gestures? Possibly Not

Previous studies have shown that the hand-over-heart gesture is related to being more honest as opposed to using self-centered dishonesty. We assumed that the hand-over-heart gesture would also relate to other-oriented dishonesty, though the latter differs highly from self-centered lying. In Study 1 (N = 79), we showed that performing a hand-over-heart gesture diminished the tendency to use oth...

Children tell white lies to make others feel better.

We investigated whether children tell white lies simply out of politeness or as a means to improve another person's mood. A first experimental phase probed children's individual insight to use white lies when prosocial behaviour was called for. We compared a situation in which a person had expressed sadness about her artwork and the goal was to make her feel better (Sad condition) with a situat...

Lies, damned lies and……….

The well-known quotation “There are lies, damned lies and statistics” suggests that statistics doesn’t have the greatest of reputations. Why is this? Certainly, statistics can be used to mislead, but logically “lies, damned lies and statistics” reflects high levels of statistical misunderstanding rather than indicating that statistics are inherently ‘bad’. In Bad Science, Ben Goldacre highlight...