Auckland University psychology lecturer Rebecca Sharp says lying serves a purpose - but where should we draw the line? Photo / Jason Oxenham
Auckland University psychology lecturer Rebecca Sharp says lying serves a purpose - but where should we draw the line? Photo / Jason Oxenham
In a world of alternative facts and fake truth, Joanna Wane asks behaviour analyst and psychology academic Rebecca Sharpif it’s ever okay to lie.
A man with a brain injury once told psychology expert Rebecca Sharp he flew planes and was Tom Cruise’s boss. He might have beena pilot, she says, but he’d confused his life story with the script of Top Gun.
That kind of unconscious “lie” isn’t in the same league as students who run out of grandparents to kill off as an excuse for not handing in their essays on time, says Sharp, a senior lecturer at Auckland University’s School of Psychology.
And it doesn’t hold a candle to the whopping 30,573 “false or misleading claims” made by former US president Donald Trump during his four years in office, according to the Washington Post’s FactChecker database.
Twisting the truth can be dangerous and have far-reaching consequences, acknowledges Sharp, who’s a certified behaviour analyst and clinical psychologist. But if lying is immoral, we’re all guilty as sin.
One US study found people typically lie in a third of all the one-on-one interactions they have over the course of a week. Women tend to be more altruistic, fibbing to avoid hurting someone’s feelings; men are more likely to lie about themselves, often to impress someone.
“We talk about lying as though it’s a bad thing: it’s naughty. It’s immoral, it’s something that we shouldn’t do. But actually we all do it and we do it because it serves a purpose,” says Sharp, one of 20 speakers at Auckland’s Raising the Bar event on August 27.
“I’m interested in reframing how we think about lying as divorced from morality. Instead of being so worried about the content of the lie, it can be more useful to look at the circumstances in which a person is lying - and who they’re lying to.”
In today's world of 'alternative truth', it's getting harder to tell fact from fiction.
Dubbed a “knowledge pub crawl”, Raising the Bar was first held in New York in 2013 and has been hosted here by Auckland University for the past seven years. A programme of free public talks by academic experts, it’s held on a single night across multiple inner-city bars.
This year’s topics range from the secret life of bees and the downside of gig work to whether your immune system can cure cancer.
Sharp’s talk is titled “Little white lies and porky pies” (the reference to Cockney rhyming slang is a nod to her English roots) and will touch on her experience supporting people with dementia and traumatic brain injuries who might be confused about the truth but are often still judged for telling untruths.
“A little white lie to preserve somebody’s feelings is different from putting something on your social media where you have influence, and downwind that could affect people’s lives,” says Sharp, who suggests it’s perhaps the outcome of the lie that really matters.
“We also know the effectiveness of modelling, and that learning from watching other people is really powerful. So, if you see someone lie and it works for them, you’re more likely to go, ‘Okay, I might give that a go, too’.”
Former US president Donald Trump has popularised the use of the term 'fake news' while having his own tenuous relationship with the truth. Photo / Getty Images
The phrase “alternative facts” became a pop-culture reference in 2017 after Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway used it to defend then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s inflation of attendance numbers at the incoming president’s inauguration. “Fake news” actually dates back to the 1890s as a derisive term for sensational newspaper reports.
Sharp, who originally wanted to become a criminal profiler when she began studying psychology at university, says the concept of “spinning a narrative” isn’t new. However, the way information is presented online and shared via social media has made it more difficult to separate fact from fiction.
There’s also a cultural component to what society defines as deceit or merely the niceties of social etiquette. Sharp learned that the hard way after moving to New Zealand as a child. Later, she spent seven years living and working back in the UK and was often told to “just bring yourself” when people invited her for dinner.
“When they say, ‘Don’t bring anything’, it means, ‘You should, and if you don’t, I’m going to judge you for that’. In New Zealand, we’re a bit more upfront. It took me a while to figure that out.”
Social rules around when it’s okay to tell little white lies are defined by culture, geography and generational shifts. In a recent US study, 96% of those interviewed confessed to lying to get out of work. Only one in four regretted it.
There’s no evidence to suggest smart people are more likely to obfuscate the truth. In fact, the opposite is generally true. Irish clinical psychotherapist Padraic Gibson describes lying as a “nuanced dance between truth and deception”, and it seems to be a natural element of human behaviour.
Children learn to lie from the age of about 3, something that’s considered a developmental achievement because it marks a child’s discovery that their mind and thinking are separate from their parents’. At that age, they’re just not very good at it - something Sharp knows from experience with her own 4-year-old son.
“He hasn’t quite learned to be convincing yet,” she says. “But you know what? Sometimes what come across as being the wildest lies are actually true. So I try to approach the world with optimism and assume someone is telling me the truth unless there’s evidence to the contrary.”
Raising the Bar will be held across 10 venues in inner-city Auckland on August 27. All the talks are free, but bookings are essential at rtbevent.com/auckland-24.
Joanna Wane is an award-winning feature writer on the NZ Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special focus on social issues and the arts.
