Long Island Expressway

It’s recently come to my attention that all of my favorite movies and TV shows are about people who lie under pressure. In School of Rock, Dewey Finn impersonates his friend Ned Schneebly and lies to the faculty of an elite private school (not to mention a whole classroom of innocent third graders). In Good Will Hunting, Chuckie postures as a Harvard student and Will feeds Skylar an elaborate (fake) backstory about his 12 brothers. In New Girl, the cutest show of all time, someone is lying to someone else every three seconds. Jess says she’s a dancer named Katie when Sam approaches her as such; Nick pretends he’s gay to avoid confrontation with Jess’ date; Winston tells Jess that Cece’s into Nick when she’s really into Schmidt. It’s all a big mess.

Joe and Jerry in Some Like It Hot. Ben and Andie in How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days. Andrew and Margaret in The Proposal. Daniel Hillard in Mrs. Doubtfire! All of these protagonists are lying through their teeth to be someone they’re not.

Let me remind you that these aren’t movies about wanted con artists, or sociopaths, or evil villains. They’re mostly rom-coms, for crying out loud! They’re about (and written by) average people. Could the argument be made that, for that premise to be this pervasive in pop culture, we’re all just hot wrecks with no morals? Maybe. But I think there’s another explanation.

I believe we lie to get closer to who we want to be. When we’re put in a time-sensitive or high-stakes situation, we don’t see our current reality; we see our potential. It’s not easy to confront the things we don’t like about ourselves, even when given ample amounts of time. So, in pressure cookers, we lean into whatever it takes to secure stability, to avoid failure, to protect ourselves and others. Dewey so badly wants to be a rockstar that he voluntarily puts himself in a deeply precarious situation for the chance to get one step closer. Daniel is so desperate to spend time with his kids that he’s willing to don a bodysuit and wig every day to become their babysitter. Andrew is so hell-bent on advancing his career as an editor that he agrees to marry the boss who has ruined his life for years…and deceive his entire family to pull it off.

Subconsciously, we bend the truth in an attempt to secure what we see for our future.

Now, save pathological liars and swindlers who spew dishonesty for sport, no one feels good about saying something they know to be untrue. Words are often all we have in this world: if we can’t rely on them, what can we rely on? Crystal balls? I think it’s well-understood that lying is no baseline for interpersonal relationships. That being said…it’s undeniably endemic. Decades worth of research, conducted by renowned psychologists such as Robert S. Feldman and Bella DePaulo, all point to the same conclusion: the average person tells multiple lies a day. “How are you doing?” “Great!” LIE. Your car just broke down on a highway of the same name and you cried waiting for the tow truck.

Perhaps that lie isn’t as big as identity theft or a sham marriage, but it does prove that the instinct to omit or alter or falsify is in all of us. The sooner we admit that, the sooner we can figure out what it means — and what to do about it.

A 2022 paper by J. McArthur, published in the Canadian Journal of Behavioral Science, analyzes the results of a study on the most common motivations for lying. The study’s sample size was a fairly varied assortment of traditionally successful people: 103 women and 154 men between 18 and 73 years of age, 67% of whom were employed full-time, and 89% of whom had some level of college education. As it is explained, participants were presented with 11 motivations for lying, and asked to detail how often they lied for each of those reasons in the past six months (while hooked up to a lie detector test, of course). The research concluded that the most common motivation for lying, by a decent margin, was altruism (the desire to protect others from discomfort or harm). The predominant secondary motivations are also worth noting: fear of being seen in a negative light, and fear of being punished. The motivation each of us seems to fear most — calculated deceit for personal gain or good old-fashioned enjoyment — was at the bottom of the list.

Thus, as far as intention is concerned, lying is not always malicious. In fact, certain experts have postulated that altruistic lies are often perceived more favorably than selfish truths. In a 2014 study out of The Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania), co-authors Emma Levine and Maurice Schweitzer conducted a series of three experiments designed to pit justice (the obligation to honesty) against care (the obligation to help and protect others), in order to identify which of the two moral foundations is valued more highly in our society. In each experiment, participants were randomly assigned the role of either Sender or Receiver. Subsequently, Senders were told a number (1, 2, 3, 4, or 5), supposedly generated by a “random number generator”; the number, an experimental control, was always 4. (We’re already lying in the name of science! Form echoes content, baby!) Each Sender was then asked to report the outcome of the number generator to their partner, the Receiver, who was tasked with selecting the correct number on their end to “win the game”. Sounds simple enough…until you add in the small fact that the Receiver only won money when they were being lied to. And the Sender was the only one who knew that.

After reviewing the actions and responses of their 752 participants, Levine and Schweitzer concluded that concerns for care supersede those for justice; as shown in their ANOVA (Analysis of Variance), people who lie with benevolent motives are regularly understood to be more moral than individuals whose honest words cause harm. Later on, the authors cite a core principle of moral psychology to further substantiate their findings: “morality is about protecting individuals.” Taken as a reputable axiom, it follows that intentions would hold more weight than outcomes in perceptions of deception.

John Stuart Mill, a stalwart philosopher and economist of 19th century England, was one of the first to double down on this concept: in his essay Utilitarianism, he asserts that an act is morally imperative if it creates the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, relative to its alternatives. This is to say, because circumstances exist in which lying serves the greater good more than truth-telling does, we sometimes have an obligation to behave dishonestly. Of course, not everyone is Team Mill. St. Augustine, for one, believed that lying is always impermissible. Similarly, Immanuel Kant (famed 18th century German philosopher and central figure of Enlightenment discourse) avowed that dishonesty is an assault on morality, as it undermines our capacity to make free, rational choices. Certainly, there are many in our modern world who would agree that intentions become irrelevant when an untrue piece of information is deliberately being put forth.

Truth be told (wink wink), I’m more of a Plato girl. In his enduring Socratic dialogue The Republic, he maintained that the moral valence of a lie depends upon the context in which it is told. This ideology renders the ethics of lying far more nuanced than some of his historical peers might suppose. Luckily, he wasn’t alone in his notions. Hugo Grotius (a revered 17th century theologian and key influence on Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke) argued that moral wrongness is inextricable from the act of lying; thus, calling lying “immoral” is tautological, as harmless falsehoods should not be defined as lies in the first place. When applied to the present day, this suggests a need to reconsider what the word “lie” should truly mean. If a lie is told with the purest of hearts, should it be linguistically classified in the same file as one uttered with impure intentions?

One of the reasons I love movies so much is because, for some reason, it’s easier for us to see ourselves in other people. Is Dewey Finn a grown ass man who gets wasted on weeknights and stage dives into non-existent crowds? Yes. Would we ever have forgiven someone like that for impersonating a licensed teacher and hijacking a classroom in real life? Probably not. But we’re sitting in the theater rooting for him every step of the way. Why? Because the aim of his pursuit turns from personal gain to altruism faster than you can say “slap it, shoot it, kaboot it”. We see the categorical goodness of his ambitions in the way he helps these kids to believe in themselves, no matter who they are or what they’ve experienced. He’s clearly a well-meaning guy stuck in a shitty situation. So we love him…even if that shitty situation is mostly his own fault.

Why do people only deserve empathy when they’re a character on a screen?

My assertion is visuality. We are a visual people: for us, seeing is believing. Unfortunately, we can’t always see our own lives as clearly as we can see those of others. For all the grace we give these fictitious figures, we can tend to witch-hunt those closest to us (ourselves included) over the smallest things. “You can’t trust anyone” just might win the award for most overused generalization in human history.

Taking it to back to the McArthur study, it seems our greatest collective fear is being the collateral damage of someone else’s dishonesty: someone saying they love you when they don’t, someone promising you a job they’ll never give you, someone assuring you that you’ll be fine when they’re about to stab you in the back. By the numbers, however, those motivations are incredibly few and far between. This leaves us with two possible explanations for our cautious convictions:

1. We are so traumatized by any lies we were told in the past that we have become acutely (if not gratuitously) paranoid.
2. The more outwardly we mistrust people, the more likely they are to lie.

A 2008 study by Victoria Talwar and Kang Lee, published in the National Library of Medicine, examines the psychological mechanisms of how pressure begets lying. In each round of their experiment, a child (between three and eight years old) was tested on their ability to guess a toy from its accompanying sound. After the child had guessed the first two toys, the researcher would announce that they had to leave the room for a moment, and explicitly told the child not to peek at the third toy while they were gone. When they returned, the researcher explained, the guessing game could continue.

Combine innate curiosity with a keen desire for accomplishment, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster here. Needless to say, most children snuck a peek. Moreover, when the researcher returned to the room and asked them if they had looked at the toy, they lied. They knew they were being sniffed out, and (rightfully) believed they’d be in trouble if they told the truth. Apply these principles to our everyday interactions, and it’s not hard to see how being lied to can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I think people like me are drawn to these lighthearted movies and shows because we ultimately don’t have to worry about mistrusting anyone. Genre usually reveals itself pretty immediately, and the heroes in chick flicks always have the best of intentions. So, we have faith in them, even when they’re doing something we might not agree with. Is it possible for us to do that for each other? Is it possible for us to have empathy for certain situations in which people feel the need to lie, some of which may be the product of our own making? Difficult as it may be to admit, perhaps our heightened suspicion leads us to create environments in which telling the truth becomes harder than it should be. Perhaps by holding so vehemently to doubt, we are actively catalyzing the dishonesty we so zealously fear.

The takeaway here is not to normalize lying. If you watch these suckers all the way through, you’ll see that it never ends well. They all get theirs. That said, there’s always room for a little bit of redemption. Dewey opens a rock n’ roll after-school program for his former “students”; Daniel’s court case is dismissed, and he’s granted daily time with his kids; Jess and Sam end up dating for real. So do Andrew and Margaret. And so do Ben and Andie.

Alright…so they’re rom-coms. Maybe there’s an extended suspension of disbelief. After all, anything is possible with cinematic closeups and a heartfelt soundtrack.

Nevertheless, the takeaway is to acknowledge the bigger picture before making definitive judgment calls. Idealistic and exaggerated as these silver-screen premises may be, the essence of their messages is undeniably simple: everyone deserves grace. Weaponizing truth as the sole metric for goodness gets us nowhere; there are so few objective certainties in this life. At the end of the day, we’re all just humans trying to make sense of the circumstances we’re handed. We all struggle in some way, and most of us are doing our very best. If you’re really someone who values truth, it’s time to make peace with the fact that expecting permanent perfection from flawed beings is laughable. And in my eyes, the claim that dishonesty is inherently immoral just might be the biggest lie there is.

Roll credits.