How Lying Sabotages Your Happiness

Introduction to Honesty

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Research on Lying

0:30There's a bunch of research that comes out of University of Massachusetts in Amherst that shows that the average person tells something like two lies to a stranger within the first 10 minutes of conversation. We lie a lot when you say little white lies to people just to kind of get through the day, make things a little bit easier, et cetera, et cetera. Now, there's a problem with that, which is that there's a literature out there that suggests that people who are telling whopper lies and actually committing crimes, almost always that there's an algorithm that starts with this. If you want a real relationship

1:00that stands the test of time, closeness is what you want and honesty is actually how you get it if you do it right. So consider this. Would you like to be freer and happier? Well, maybe honesty is the way for you to love yourself and love each other more. Hey, friends, welcome to Office Hours.

Office Hours Introduction

1:23I'm Arthur Brooks. This is the show about love and happiness, specifically the science of love and happiness, how you can use the science to live a better life and how you can bring these ideas to other people as well. I try to be as practical as possible while bringing you really interesting ideas such that you can use them over the course of your life and you can explain them to other people. And I appreciate very much that so many of you are writing in to say that you're teaching this material to the people around you all the time. Please do keep doing so. One of the ways that you can spread these ideas, of course, is to share the show.

1:53Please send a link wherever you're listening or watching this to people that you love and people that you know, because the more that we spread these ideas, the happier and better off the world gets, I think. And that's exactly what I want. And I dare say that's probably what you want as well. If you're a longtime listener, viewer, thank you for staying with us. Please feedback telling us how we could make this show more interesting, how we could make it more useful, easier to look at besides getting a different host. And you write in to us at officehours at arthurbrooks.com. That's the email for the show. Or just put it in the comments

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Topic Introduction

3:09So what do I want to talk about today? I want to talk about honesty. This is something that I think about an awful lot that people have asked me about many times about how much does being completely honest affect your happiness? And it could go either way, right? Being a really honest person, really saying what you think in a society, in a world that doesn't encourage that, what will it do to you? I want to make the case today that honesty is a form of love. I want to make the case that being more honest with others than yourself, if you do it right,

3:41and that's a very important caveat, can make you a happier person and can make other people happier as well. And if I do my job, I want to make the case that, in point of fact, you can turn the corner in the way that you communicate with other people that makes you known as somebody who is honest out of a sense of love, which will be very life-enhancing.

Why Honesty is Hard

4:01I want to talk about why, and then I want to tell you about how to do it, because that's what we do here, is the how-to, as much as anything else. Now, before we get started, I want to ask you a question. What is your most controversial opinion that you're hiding? Now, it doesn't have to be something really horrible and offensive, just for some reason, something that you believe that you don't share with other people for some very good reason. Put it in the comments, especially if you like to comment anonymously.

4:32That might be a good way to unburden yourself. But I'd like to know, maybe it's feelings about your family that you're not comfortable sharing for whatever reason. Maybe it's your religious beliefs or non-beliefs about religion that are different than the community that you live in. Maybe it's something that you believe that everybody says yes to, but just isn't true as far as you're concerned. I'd love to hear that in the comments, but I'd also like you to think about this and sort of keep hold of it in your head and ask yourself why. Almost everybody has things

5:04that they believe to be true or things that they have come to believe are untrue, and they're not forthright about these things. As a matter of fact, they might even lie about their actual true beliefs. Almost everybody has these things. I don't know anybody, as a matter of fact, off of the top of my head who isn't doing that in some way, shape, or form. Think about that thing in your own life and ask yourself, why are you doing that? Why are you doing that? And by the way, I'm going to assume that you have very good reasons. So let's think about why that might be the case. Now, number one, let's say that you have a belief that is at odds

5:35with the people that you care about and would affect the people that you care about potentially. You might just not want to hurt people. You might not want to offend people because that's not a nice thing to do. And at a basic charity, you're not sharing everything that's written on your heart. But actually, there might be fear that's motivating you. There might be a fear that somebody won't like you. They won't love you. They won't admire you. They won't take you seriously. Or even worse, maybe you have an opinion that's so at odds with your employment situation

6:06or your school situation that it might lead to professional or social consequences. You might be ostracized. You might be thrown out of the group. Fear, in point of fact, is almost always the motivator of people actually not being forthright with the things that they believe. And it's fear for their own personal security or their own personal prosperity is where it comes from. Now,

Evolutionary Biology of Honesty

6:28if that's the case for you, it doesn't mean you're a coward. There's something morally faulty about you. On the contrary, that's evolutionary biology. I've talked about this ad nauseum on the program that evolutionary biology guides so much of what we do. The middle Pleistocene period around 250,000 years ago when the human brain was about its current dimensions. Not its exact configuration today, but we were effectively modern. by about that period. And that was a time when all Homo sapiens lived in small kin-based bands hierarchically arranged

6:58of 30 to 50 individuals that were hunters and gatherers. That was basically the whole human race. Now, during that time, you needed to get along with the people that you lived with. 30 to 50 people and it was a hostile world. You do not want to be apart from those people. So the result of it is that you had an incredible incentive, a biologically wired incentive to not rock the boat, to stay in line with what other people think. If you had a differing opinion about something, about, you know, a differing opinion about does elk meat taste good? I don't know.

7:30Does that animal skin look good on us? Whatever. Whatever the, you know, the controversy might have been. And you don't think like the rest of the tribe, the rest of the band, you're not going to share that. If you do, if you're particularly at odds with people about things that are important, you might find yourself walking the savannah alone. And that's the perfect way to become a cheetah's lunch. So therefore, our brains are literally wired to be terrified of going against the crowd, of social exclusion on the basis of something that we do. The dorsal anterior

8:01cingulate cortex, I've talked about it three or four times on the show for the past 40 episodes or so. That's a little part of the limbic system that's designated, that's been evolved to give us very, very aversive emotions, very uncomfortable feelings, because we're afraid of social exclusion. It gives us a sense of sadness and we don't like it. And so the result is that it's not that you're afraid of being left alone, you're afraid of how you'll feel if you're left alone. You're afraid of the feeling of social exclusion. And that's what will induce you

8:31to choose dishonesty over honesty a lot of the time. This is not a moral failing. This is a feature, not a bug on the human genome. But of course, today,

The Case for Honesty

8:42that can be maladapted. You can easily see how we would think about walking the frozen tundra and dying alone. And we would port that basic primeval fear into having the wrong opinion in a biology class at the university. I say the wrong thing. I think something that my colleagues think is retrograde. And the result is that I'm going to be socially ostracized or, God forbid, canceled on social media. And that gives me the same primordial terror because it uses the same parts of the brain

9:12as the consequences would have been 250,000 years ago or, for that matter, 10,000 years ago. Well, that's anachronistic. We need to move on, but we have to have the proper knowledge. We have to have the proper information set such that we can use the updated circumstances and stand up to our limbic system and choose the way we want to live as opposed to going according to our animal impulses. That's what I really want to talk about when it comes to going your own way. Now, I've talked in the past in this show, I'm not going to talk about it today,

9:43but I've talked in the past about my favorite philosopher, who's Ralph Waldo Emerson. He wrote Self-Reliance in 1841, an essay, beautiful essay, that was so controversial that his own aunt publicly denounced him for the rugged individualism of going your own way. You know, the whole idea that, you know, when he talked about a very famous expression in that essay was he talked about the hobgoblins of little minds. You probably heard that expression before. It actually came from Waldo Emerson with the little minds

10:13of the conformists, the people who don't believe something, but they say it anyway. And so there's this moral aspiration to be honest in an appropriate, non-hurtful way, but there's a fear about doing it. That's what I want to adjudicate. And the reason is because I believe that you can be honest, and if you do it the right way, you'll be happier. That's what I really want to argue, but it takes skill. So that's where I'm going. Done properly, honesty is an act of charity toward others

10:43and an act of charity toward yourself. Now, I have a friend who is in kind of the same business as me. He's very public-facing, you know, a thinker, a public educator kind of like me. He's in front of audiences all the time, both in media and in public, doing a lot of public events, et cetera, et cetera. And he talks about pretty controversial stuff. He talks about politics, for example. He talks about public policy where everybody's constantly at each other's throats in America today, God knows. He takes honesty to an extreme because he says that honesty is an act of love

11:13and committing an act of radical honesty, saying what he thinks in the spirit of love actually makes him a lot happier. He thinks it's his happiness secret. He regularly disagrees with people on controversial topics. I mean, he and our friends and he disagrees with me all the time. He doesn't, you know, he thinks I'm wrong, he tells me. When he thinks I'm wrong and I say, so what do you think? Just to make it easier, to grease the skids, he doesn't say it's, you know, it's fine, whatever. No, that's wrong, right? And he does that with audiences. He does that with strangers.

11:44You know, he believes that getting at the complete truth of things is a favor he's doing to other people. As a matter of fact, he calls those love conversations. Imagine that. His theory is that people can only understand each other deeply and act accordingly when they are completely honest. and he, generally speaking, gets away with it. People have a sense that he's looking out for their welfare and he's offering up his opinion not out of egotism and not out of aggression but as kind of a gift

12:15as it were. He doesn't expect you to agree with him at all. On the contrary, if you don't agree with him, he expects you to tell him. What a way to live, right? Now, as a philosophical matter, you would say that he's Emersonian or even better, you'd say he's Kantian. Now, Ralph Waldo Emerson and his best friend, Henry David Thoreau, who wrote Walden, these were called American Transcendentalists of the Transcendental School and the name was actually taken

12:45from kind of their philosophical godfather who lived earlier than they did in Germany who was the originator of what we would think of as Transcendentalism and that was Immanuel Kant. Kant was the sort of the father of Transcendentalism, Continental Transcendentalism, European Transcendentalism and his whole gig was honesty. That's what he was really all about. Here's a quote from Immanuel Kant in his, perhaps his greatest book called The Metaphysics of Morals that was published in 1797.

13:16It was 1841 that Ralph Waldo Emerson was writing. So this was roughly, not exactly a contemporary but more or less the same period, just a little earlier. Here's what Kant said. By a lie, a human being throws away and as it were annihilates his dignity. In other words, when you lie to somebody for transactional purposes or for just basic ease or especially because you're afraid, you hurt yourself and you hurt them. And Kant, he believed in

13:47complete radical honesty all the time. Now, I will rush to share that Kant was a single man. He never got married. And so it's pretty easy for him to say, yeah, yeah, tell it like it is all the time. He lived by himself and there might be a reason that he lived by himself and he was very eccentric, kind of a loner as a matter of fact. So perhaps that's an easier thing for him to do than you.

Kant and Emerson on Honesty

14:12And that's one of the reasons in this episode I'm going to tell you how I can be a little Kantian or Emersonian. Emerson was happily married and you can maintain your relationships at the same time because that's the trick, right? That's pulling the rabbit out of the hat in this way. So how can you be a Kantian? How can you be an Emersonian? How can you make it work for you? Let's go to the present and let's think about somebody who's written philosophically about this, not in 1841 or 1797, but somebody who's writing about it in kind of a more contemporary self-improvement kind of way.

14:42And that's from the 1990s, an author by the name of Brad Blanton, who wrote a pretty big bestseller from the 1990s and early 2000s. He had a book that actually came out in 2005 called Radical Honesty, How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth. And he was of this Emersonian belief that you got to go your own way and tell the truth all the time in a way that's actually helpful to people. And he made the case because he's a modern writer and he's got the data that when you do that,

15:12it has consequences for sure, but it's really, really worthwhile. And he shows in that book and I'll put the book as always into the show notes so you can click on it and get it easily if you want. It's nice to read. And then it can reduce stress and, you know, your mom told you don't lie because you're going to actually weave this web of deceit and you're going to get caught up in it because you're not going to remember your lies. And then it's hard to stay consistent with a bunch of lies because they're hard to remember. And he says that therefore it reduces stress to say the truth all the time to everybody and you never have to worry about what you told

15:43somebody else. It deepens connections with other people because the people who really are your friends, the people who really do love you, they do appreciate it if you do it right. More on that later. And they reduce emotional reactivity because when you're used to getting and giving the truth, you're not going to freak out when somebody says something that's not completely complimentary all the time. On the contrary, if you get nothing but compliments, you're being lied to. That's the bottom line because you're not perfect. Let's go back to a prior episode when we talked about not being perfect. So Immanuel Kant,

16:13Ruffield, Emerson, Brad Blanton of that school are making the case that more honesty properly undertaken leads to greater happiness. That's their argument. Now, that goes completely contrary to what most people think and how most people act because of the basic physiological functioning of the limbic system of the brain. We lie all the time. But there's nothing strange about that. The fact that we naturally do something and a bunch of philosophers coming along and saying that if we did the opposite,

16:45we'd be happier. They very well might be right. Remember, I've made the case again and again and again that you have two choices in life. And this is the miracle of the amazing human prefrontal cortex, the supercomputer in the front of your head. You can choose to go according to your animal impulses or you can choose to go against your animal impulses because you're trying to serve your moral aspirations. I mean, people do this all the time. You know, they're attracted to somebody who's not their spouse, but they choose not to pursue that attraction. That's your moral aspiration as opposed to

17:15your animal impulse. And guess what? The moral aspiration which goes against your animal impulse actually makes you happier. A lot of the time, going against Mother Nature's animal impulses is the best thing you can do. Standing up to yourself, being at war with these impulses is the act of self-discipline that makes you truly who you are. Go back to my earlier episode about my morning protocols. You think when my clock goes off at 4.30 in the morning, I'm like, hooray! It's another great day. No. I'm like, ugh.

17:47Gratitude, gratitude. What am I doing? I get out of bed. Say a little prayer. I go and I get my supplement stack ready and I go down to my gym because I want my moral aspirations. I want my day to be set up in a particular way because I've decided to do so not because it feels good. This is another example of this. Your limbic system is on one side and your need, your desire, your Kantian

18:17moral aspiration is on the other. How can you do the thing that the philosophers say will make you happier well enough that the consequences, that the costs, don't outweigh the benefits? That's what we're going to come back to.

Practical Advice on Honesty

18:33But before we do that, because I promise you I'm going to be very practical today as always, I want to back up and I want to talk about the kinds of lies and why we tell them. And this, I mean, this research has always blown my mind. There's a bunch of research that comes out of University of Massachusetts in Amherst that shows that the average person tells something like two lies to a stranger within the first 10 minutes of conversation. We lie a lot. I mean, and that's not well replicated. But you know people lie all the time and the most interesting

19:04and reliable part of the social science research on this is the types of lies. So there's a very nice article from 2008, which is now almost 20 years old, but there's no reason to think that this would be out of date. Psychologists writing in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships talked about the big three types of lies. This is actually in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. As I mentioned before, it's called Individual Differences and Lying in Everyday Life. It's pretty much on its face. And once again, this goes in the notes like everything else. They classified lies

19:35in three types. Number one are self-centered lies to influence others or to make a good impression. Like, you know, hey, you know, President of the United States asked me to be his vice president, but I turned him down. Right? That's a kind of a self-burnishing lie. That's lifting yourself up. That's a, you know, exaggeration falls into that particular category to make yourself actually look better. People do that a lot. The second type of lie are other-oriented lies to protect the feelings of a person you're lying to. So, you know, people say to me, it's like, you haven't aged a day. It's like,

20:05yeah, really? You need to get your eyes checked. Are you kidding me? You know, I'll see people I haven't seen in 20 years and say, wow, you look great. I don't have to have a big lie detector to figure out that that one is right. What are they doing? They're actually trying to protect my feelings. They're not going to say, you have lost a lot of hair because it's sort of not polite or they think that it's going to actually be a problem for the relationship. Now, with me, it's actually not going to hurt my feelings very much because the truth is the truth, to be sure. But people do that all the time. That's number two. Number three is altruistic lies

20:35to protect a third party. That would go into the kind of category of she was with me all night, officer. In other words, to create an alibi or something where you lie to protect somebody is the way that that works. And so those are the three types of lies that these psychologists actually found. Now, here's the interesting part about that. With close friends and romantic partners, we're most likely to tell other-oriented and altruistic lies, number two and three, because we love them. And we think that we're actually being better with them by doing those things,

21:06by lying to them so that we won't hurt their feelings and lying to protect them. But we don't tell very many of these if we really love them, these self-centered lies. I mean, it's very unlikely that I'm going to go home to my wife and I'm going to tell her something great that happened to me professionally that didn't happen, for example. That would be a weird thing to do, as a matter of fact. On the other hand, with strangers, we do the opposite. With strangers, you know, you're sitting next to somebody on the plane and they ask you what you do for a living and you kind of gilded a little bit, perhaps. So, you're a writer, really, really.

21:37What's your latest book? Okay, how's it doing? Great, great. People are buying it all. It turns out that three people have bought the book, whatever. But the whole point is that you tend to puff yourself up more before strangers and you're way less likely to protect them or lie to them to spare their feelings, especially to protect them because you have no skin in the game. You've got no reason to actually do that. So, that's interesting, isn't it? That we, how we approach lies with respect to people close to us as opposed to people farther away from us. Now, this is starting to create a taxonomy of lies and I want to add a couple of others that actually come

22:08from the research outside of that paper I just talked about. There are two other motives for lying that we can add to the first three. Number one is just sheer laziness. So, when the waiter asks, how's your lunch? And it's like, gross and salty and you're like, fine. I mean, technically that's a lie. I'm not saying that, you know, you got to go confess to a priest because you told that lie necessarily. You figured that one out yourself but you said that because you didn't want to go to the trouble of explaining my fish tacos were just unbelievably salty

22:39and what was wrong with them because you look like a complainer and it becomes a problem and people actually say stuff that isn't true because they want to get in and get out. Sheer laziness is really, really common. These types of white lies, they kind of smooth the flow of interactions. That's what, that's how a couple of scholars put it in a paper called The Effects of Deception in Social Networks. So that's laziness. Here's another one. I guess that was number four so this would be lie reason number five adding to the first three that I talked about.

23:10Little white lies are often a social lubricant and they can actually seem virtuous. You know, you can kind of pat yourself on the back for your sensitivity and tact when you say something that's actually not really true but, you know, and again, these are not mutually exclusive. These are related to other things that I've talked about here but you can turn your lying vice into a little virtue inside your own head when you say little white lies to people just to kind of get through the day, make things a little bit easier, et cetera, et cetera. And people do this a lot actually. Now,

23:40there's a problem with that which is that there's a literature out there that suggests that people who are telling whopper lies and actually committing crimes almost always that there's an algorithm that starts with this. Little white lies that are a social lubricant that are making your life a little bit easier or maybe that's the laziness motive and it turns into something a little bigger and something turns into something a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger. So, these relatively innocuous motivations, they tend to be not innocuous at all because this escalates.

24:10Dishonest behavior builds on itself. And again, social scientists