Research papers

Andijan Region,

District Xo’jaobod,

School №23,

Muminov Elyor’s

RESEARCH PAPERS

Lies

I’ve always wondered what drives people to lie. I talk to a lot of people daily and sometimes at the end of the day I wonder how many people lied to me. Some people can look you in your face and tell you a bold face lie, while others just lie because they believe in the lies they are telling. The three major issues that I want to address about lying are white lies, self-deception, and what people’s motives behind lying are. Lying puts a lot of people in bad situations from being misled to someone dying. Lying is wrong to me and it always has been, no matter what people say it will never be ok.

What is a “white lie”? Most people would say that a white lie is a harmless lie told mostly by children but truthfully they can be told by anybody. According to an article called, “To Lie or Not to Lie: To Whom and Under What Circumstances”, authors Serena A. Perkins and Elliot Turiel describe white lies as “lies that are intended to spare the feelings of others and lies to benefit another or prevent harm” (Perkins and Turiel 609). For instance, if somebody told me they were on their way to pick me up, when in reality that person didn’t even leave their home yet. Lies like this a little lies told but also unnecessary. It would have been better if that person have just told me the truth instead of misleading me to think that this person is actually on their way. Harmless lies like these can lead to a problem bigger than what it has to be. A person that’s picking somebody up from work can tell them that they will be there in five minutes, so that person comes outside expecting their ride to arrive in five minutes. In that short amount of time that person is outside waiting, longer than five minutes a shooting takes place and that person is harmed. Now this is something that could have easily been avoided if this little white lie was never told.

People may tell lies that maybe considered harmless, but then they have to tell another lie to cover up that lie, and maybe even another one to cover up that one. It can be just a long chain of lies, ones that never had to be told in the first place. People put even more pressure on themselves by lying than they would just if they were to just tell the truth. If someone lies and they want to keep it going, they have to make sure all their stories connect. They can’t have more than one version of a story if it is frequently brought to their attention. If a man tells his wife he was at the gym on Saturday at six o’clock, then that’s what he has to stick to. Later that week, on Wednesday, he could have lost his socks and can’t figure out where they are. She could suggest that maybe he lost his socks at the gym, and then he could reply by saying something like, “I know I did not lose them at the gym, I have not been to the gym in over a week. That Saturday when he was supposedly at the gym, he was really having dinner with a friend of his. Now the wife can get suspicious and question why he told her he was at the gym on Saturday, but now he is saying something totally different. Now, he has to clarify what he is just said about not being in the gym in over a week, and then he has to explain where he really was that Saturday at six o’clock. On top of all that, he still does not know where his socks are. The first lie is always the beginning, and then it just turns into a slippery slope from there. The benefits from telling the truth always outweigh the risk involved with lies.

According to “The Ways We Lie”, “omission involves telling most of the truth minus one or two key facts whose absence changes the story completely” (Ericsson 124). Omissions can also tie into someone telling a white lie. A parent can ask their child if they went to school on a specific day, and the child can say that they did go to school that day. Even though, the child went to school that day, he or she could have left school early, or just stopped by that school, technically still going to school that day. By that child saying that they went to school, even though they did not stay, is an omission because the parents don’t know the child didn’t stay the entire time. Omission has the potential to ruin relationships with all kinds of people. A woman can ask her husband where he is at a specific time and he can answer by saying he is at a store picking up some things for himself or for the house. There is also another woman that met him at the store so they could spend some time together away from everyone else. The husband did not mention this woman to his wife when she asked him where he was. He didn’t lie to his wife about where he was, he just didn’t tell her who he was with. A friend of the couple could have seen the two out together and brought it to the wife’s attention. This will almost definitely lead to a confrontation, maybe even something worse, because the husband neglected to tell the whole story. Lies like these can really deceive someone to believe something that isn’t entirely true because the whole story isn’t told.

In this article, there were many people that contributed from the University of Toronto and the University of California, San Diego. Those who contributed were Fen Xu, Genyue Fu, Xuehua Bao, Victoria Talwar, and Kang Lee. Their experiment “examined one hundred and twenty seven, nine, and eleven year olds’ moral understanding of lies and their actual lying behaviors in a politeness situation. The results revealed that as age increased, children increasingly evaluated others’ lying in politeness situations less negatively and were more inclined to lies in such situations themselves” (581). Children are easily influenced by their peers, the older people around them, and from what they see on television and other things of that nature.

When children get comfortable lying at a young age, if no one tries to help them with being more honest, they will only get more comfortable lying as they get older. There can be a young girl, who lies to her mother about something that is not very serious. The mother might not ever find out it was a lie and the girl can escape the situation without punishment. The girl can see how simple it was to just do whatever it is she wants to do, and just tell her mother a different story. The girl can start to use lying to her advantage. The older she gets, the better she becomes in all aspects of lying. She will have learned exactly what excuse she needs when the time comes for explaining and exactly how to act. She will know how to change her voice and facial expressions to get people to believe what she is saying. She can turn into a habitual liar, just because she learned how easy it was and how it can be beneficial to her at an early age. People like this little girl become manipulative, and they will use their dishonest words and actions to their advantage, at the expense of the people around them. These people are very selfish and they can hurt a lot of people, just by not telling them the truth. In the article, “Unmasking the Motives of the Good Samaritan,” Claire Andre and Manuel Velasquez state,” Even at our best, we are only out for ourselves” (Andre and Velasquez 1). That is a statement that should really open up the eyes of people. If people will be selfish at their best, just imagine how it can be when people are at their worst.

According “yourdictionary.com” self-deception refers to the act of lying to yourself or of making yourself believe something that isn't really true. People actually lie to themselves knowing that it’s a lie but truly begin to believe it because they have said it so much. In this case a woman is cheating on her husband because she feels like he is doing wrong in the marriage. When she cheats on her husband she knows that is wrong but she keeps cheating. She begins to believe that what she is doing is permissible and thinks there is no wrong doing in cheating. The point is she is doing so much cheating that she begins to think that it is ok to cheat because she does not want to face the truth. I feel like the foulest lie is self-deception.

According to many people, including an author named Harry C. Triandis, there are psychological reasons behind self-deception. In the article, “Culture and Self-Deception: A Theoretical Perspective,” Triandis defines self-deception as “what occurs when individuals use their hopes, needs, and desires to construct the way they see the world” (Triandis 3). There are people who really want something to happen and they can start to believe things that they think are leading to that something happening, but in reality, it’s just circumstance. A person’s mind can really start to mess with them to the point where they think the smallest things mean a lot more than what they actually do. Jean-Pierre Dupuy had an example for self-deception that involved a man going bald. Pierre-Dupuy says that “a man preoccupied by growing baldness who manages, using various cosmetic and, especially , psychological means to deny the obvious, but whose efforts have perhaps more successful effects on his own beliefs than they do on those of others” (Pierre-Dupuy 124). That man may think he is seeing improvement in the middle part of his head, when in reality; his head looks the same as if he never used any products. He just wants to see improvement. The man should just be able to accept the fact that he is going bald, and if none of the hair products helped, then he should just prepare for living without any hair.

There are people who have never really achieved anything in their life because of different reasons. One of the reasons a person never really accomplished much could be from their lack of ambition. There are a lot of people in the world who would rather blame somebody else for everything, rather than to accept the responsibility themselves. If they are late to work, they will point out how much traffic it was on the streets and the expressway, or how they could have been held up by a train. They never mention how they could have woke up ten minutes earlier than they did, or how they could left the house fifteen minutes before they did leave out. They won’t indicate that there was something, or a few things, that they could have done a little different. They tell themselves that all these occurrences are the reason for being late, that they start to really believe that there was nothing else they could have done to improve the situation. This is just one of the minor circumstances. There are much more serious ways that a person can be deceiving themselves.

Parents can play a much more active role than they do, and they really play a bigger role in how their children mature than they think. There are people who have children that turn out ways that they never wanted them to or imagined they would. They will say that the schools and society affected how their children are, and those two things amongst other things definitely play a role in how children develop, but it is not the whole reason. Those people blame everything else for how things turn out, but they can’t seem to look in the mirror. They feel that they have done everything right and they even try to blame the kids for what they have become. In reality, the children may have even turned out better than the parents. The parents are lying to themselves by saying that everything, but their selves, affected the way their children have grown up. They tell everybody all of the things that they do for their children, how hard they work, or all the things they buy them. None of that matters if they have never even had a real relationship with them. The parents can be so focused on the wrong things, that they never really have an effect on their children in ways that really matter when it comes to them growing into adults. People can be so fixed on why their children developed the way they did and telling themselves that they did the best they could, when; actually, they could have done so much more for their children. Those people telling themselves the things they do tell them so much that they really start to believe it is true, is an example of why self-deception is detrimental to society.

Lying will never be acceptable to me. I have never, and will never, want to be around someone who feels that it is reasonable to lie, in any situation. If a person has to lie in order to get what they want, then they probably do not even deserve it, or it just makes me wonder how important it is that they get it. There are so many people that can be affected by just one lie. Things can be very bad for a lot of people because of one lie that benefits one individual. It is really unfair that people tell lies because no one can read minds, so whatever the person who tells a lie is saying, that is the only thing other people can go from. Once a person finds out that they have been lied to, then they can, and probably will, develop trust issues. Those issues can follow someone for a very long time, if not over the course of their life. Dishonesty can really affect people in ways that are not capable of just being seen. If anything sounds like it can be a lie, it will be taken as a lie, or with some restraint by the person the lie is being told to. They won’t know what to believe and will be unsure of the things people tell them. It might not always get to an extreme case like having trust issues, but it is always a possibility. Lying can lead to people just not believing in other people in general, or even developing a pessimistic view of society or the world. Lies can lead to a number of things, and they aren’t good things, to any person other than the one who told the lie.

Resourses:

"Santa Clara University Web Site." Santa Clara University. http://www.scu.edu/ethics/publications/iie/v2nl/samaritan.html

Dupuy, Jean-Pierre. Self-deception and Paradoxes of Rationality. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 1998. Print.

Ericsson, Stephanie. “The Ways We Lie”. Fifty Essays Boston: Bedford, 2004. Web.

Perkins, Serena, Elliot Turiel. “To Lie or Not To Lie: To Whom and Under What Circumstances” Child Development 78 (2) (2007): 609-621. Print.

Triandis, Harry C. “Culture and Self-Deception: A Theoretical Perspective.” Social Behavior and Personality. 39(1) (2011) 3-14. Print.

Xu, Fen, Xuehua Bao, Genyue Fu, Victoria Talwar, Kang Lee. “Lying and Truth-Telling in Children: From Concept to Action.” Child Development 81 (2010): 581-596. Print.