A Measure of Honesty: More Than Just Truth and Lies

mybackyardlab
Measuring Life and Beyond
6 min readMar 14, 2024

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Image by 905513 from Pixabay.

A recent medium article I wrote about self-honesty made me think about the complexity of being truthful and the science behind the virtue we call honesty. As I mentioned in the article, as children we think of honesty as either being truthful or lying; however, as we grow into adults, we realize not only the complexity of the concept but also its far-reaching consequences in all spheres of life.

Dictionary Definition: hon.es.ty (noun)

Image created by the author.

In one form or another, everyone I have come across has heavily emphasized honesty in both the personal and professional arena; however, we don’t always know what it means to be honest, how honest we should be, and what about being overly honest. While honesty is considered an important virtue, there is very little historical research on the subject. A project was launched just to address this specific gap.

In 2020, The Honesty Project was initiated under the leadership of researchers at Wake Forest University and Carnegie Mellon University. Funding was awarded to competition-winning researchers from various organizations and universities across the world to explore the science and philosophy of honesty…

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mybackyardlab
Measuring Life and Beyond

A life-long learner, a mom, a volunteer, an educator, a citizen scientist, and an engineer. Support me by becoming a Medium member: https://mybackyardlab.medium