Every one of us have some kind of inner dream, I’m no exception to that. I wanted to be a doctor, but never got a chance to unravel my dream because my financial situation made my life miserable and I ended up doing a worthless Bachelor's degree. I worked two jobs to earn a degree and to make my parents’ life better. If my parents took some initiative I would have been a doctor and I would have made my life and theirs much easier. I know, my story is really pitiful expect for the fact that everything I just told is a lie. Sounds shocking?, I lied just to draw the attention of the reader and make my paper more interesting. I’m not alone because people lie to save themselves from an unlikely situation, to shift a blame, to avoid confrontation, perhaps to feel better or to get others attention just like me.
It’s just not me, on average people lie twice a day; it's difficult to believe, but it's true (DePaulo, Kashy, Kirkendol, Wyer, and Epstein, 1996). If we start lying around age 3 and live until 70, we would have lied 48910 times and that’s a lot of lies. It is unfortunate that deception has become a major factor in social interaction and people admit that they use it in 14% of their emails, 27% during face-to-face conversations and 37% during phone conversations (Hancock, 2007). If we say that we have never committed a sin in our life, we just deceived ourselves says the Holy Bible. Each and every one of us would have lied at some point. Just because we lie frequently it doesn't mean that it's an easy job. In fact, lying is very demanding because lairs have to work hard to hide their emotions and expressions. Also, deceivers invest a great deal of effort to protect themselves from being caught so they carefully release ...
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...eir kids for their action, it actually sends a wrong information that they are punished for telling the truth. Thus, kids start lying at an earlier age and continue to tell lies life long.
Works Cited
Ekman, P. (2001). Telling lies: Clues to deceit in the marketplace, politics, and marriage (3rd ed.). New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Ekman, P. & Friesen, W. V. (1969). Nonverbal leakage and clues to deception. Psychiatry, 32, 88-106.
Hancock, J. (2007). Digital Deception: When, where, and how people lie online. In K. McKenna,
T. Postmes, U. Reips, & A. Joinson (Eds.), Oxford handbook of internet psychology
Oxford handbook of internet psychology (pp. 287-301). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Neal Karlinsky and Jessica Hopper, ABC News April 22 2011 http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/washington-teen-gaby-rodriguez-fakes-pregnancy-social-experiment/story?id=13434764
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Lying is simply an act of not telling the truth, and this definition of lying will be used in future sections of this paper. There are three groups of lies t...
Stephanie Ericsson’s The Ways We Lie, analyzes and reflects on how lying has simply become the norm in our society. We all lie, there is not one person in the world that does not lie. Most people lie because they are afraid of telling the truth, however what they do not know is telling a lie can lead them in the wrong direction because many things can happen when lying to a person. The person can find out when everything unravels that person will not have trust in you and you would be known as a liar. To every action there is a consequence, so why not deal with just one consequence when telling the
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Lying is an issue that has been debated on for a long time. Some people believe that lying is sometimes ok in certain circumstances. Some people believe lying is always acceptable. In contrast, some believe lying is always bad. Keeping all other’s opinions in mind, I believe that lying is a deficient way of solving problems and is a bad thing. I claim that only certain situations allow the usage of lies and that otherwise, lying is bad. Dishonesty is bad because it makes it harder to serve justice, harms the liar individually, and messes up records. Furthermore, it should only be said to protect someone from grave danger.
We lie all the time, lying is not something new to our culture. We lie to our parents, we lie to our friends, we even lie to our significant other, but why do we do it? There is not one set reason on why we lie but they can vary from an insignificant reason to something more nefarious. A good operational definition of a lie is “A lie is a false statement to a person or group made by another person or group who knows it is not the whole truth, intentionally.” (Freitas-Magalhães) We have been raised to know that lying is usually a bad thing, and it’s better to tell the truth, not to mention the circumstances get exponentially worse if you are caught lying. No one wants to be labeled as a liar, or untrustworthy. This may sound unorthodox but I personally think lying is perfectly fine; depending on the situation. If you have a prima-facie duty to be dishonest it’s perfectly acceptable. Ross says a prima facie duty or obligation is an actual duty. “One’s actual duty is what one ought to do all things considered.” (Carson) I’m not the only one who finds this too be true. Ross would also agree with me, He says “Lying is permissible or obligatory when the duty not to lie conflicts with a more important or equal important prima facie duty.” (Carson) As I was doing research on this topic I did read one extremely compelling argument on why we ought not to lie. Aristotle basically said a person who makes a defense for lying could never be trusted. (King.)
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