Our ethical principles often come
into conflict. On the one hand, we
believe that honesty is the best policy.
On the other hand, we also believe that we should try to be nice to
other people as often as possible.
Consider, then, the case of a bad meal at a restaurant. Perhaps the restaurant is crowded, and your
food arrives late. To top it off, the
dish has cooled off. Invariably in those
situations you are in a hurry, and so you start eating your meal. After a few minutes the server comes by and
asks you how you’re doing.
In that situation, you may choose
to say honestly that you are disappointed that the food came out cold. In many cases, though, you may opt out of
telling the truth and instead tell the server that everything is fine. These little untruths are often called “white
lies,” because they seem to cause little harm and often help social situations
go more smoothly.
Do these white lies have any
influence on your later behavior?
This question was explored in a
set of studies by Jennifer Argo and Baba Shiv in the April, 2012 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. These researchers argued that in many cases,
white lies have little effect on the teller later. However, in situations in which the policy of
being honest is highlighted, liars often do nice things for the person they
lied to.
In one study, students at a
university went to a research lab.
Participants then received lists of words that could be used to form
sentences. For example, a participant
might get the words him before cat they met. These words can be used to form the sentence
“They met him before.” For some participants, the words included
many that were related to the concept of honesty. For other participants, no honesty-related words
were used. This procedure is known to be
effective at priming people to think about a concept without their awareness.
Next, the research assistant
running the study left the room saying that she had run out of experiment
packets and needed to make some copies.
The research assistant was then gone from the room for 12 minutes, which
got the research participants annoyed.
Upon returning to the lab, the research assistant asked half of the
participants how they were doing.
People’s general response to this question is, “Fine.” In this case, of course, the participant was
not fine, and so this response was a white lie.
At the end of the study,
participants were given the chance to do one of two additional studies. The experimenter told the participants that
one of the piles had a study that she was running for her own research, while a
second pile had a different person’s research study in it. (In actuality, both piles had the same
packets in it.) In that packet,
participants were told that as part of their participation in the study, they
were entered into a drawing to win $100.
They were asked to state how much of that $100 they would be willing to
donate to the experimenter to help her for her research in the event that they
won the raffle.
Those participants who were not
given the chance to tell a white lie (regardless of whether they were primed to
think about honesty) selected the experimenter’s study about 40% of the time,
and they were willing to donate about $35 to the experimenter if they won the
raffle.
For those participants who were
given the chance to lie, the results were quite different depending on whether
they were primed to think about honesty.
Those who were not primed to think about honesty acted like those people
who did not lie. Those people who did
think about honesty, though, acted much more favorably toward the
experimenter. They selected her study
88% of the time, and were willing to donate an average of $53 to her
research. That means that these
participants were actually willing to give away more money than they would keep
for themselves in order to make up for having told a lie.
These findings suggest that white
lies aren’t simply a form of social grease that we apply to make our social
interactions go more smoothly. We really
do recognize them as being lies. As a
result, we need to be quite careful about how these lies affect our future
behavior toward the people we have lied to.
