What’s the point?

People lie. It’s a fact. But why?

“No mom, it definitely wasn’t me who broke the lamp”.

“Hm, well that’s funny, considering we don’t have a dog, and I am the only other person home…”.

Everybody lies. It’s an inevitable fact of life. You will lie at some point in your life. Kids, especially, lie when they think that their parents are mad at them. They feel that if they lie and say that they didn’t do the bad thing that their parents are mad about, everything will be alright. They think that their parents will automatically believe them when they lie, and they will no longer be mad, but in reality, it just makes everything worse. If their parents catch them in a lie, then they will end up being more angry than they were before. So why do they do it over and over and over again thinking that the outcome will be different each time, when it just ends up being the same?

“I’m innocent! I swear I didn’t rob that jewelry store!”

“You just keep on lying, it won’t get you anywhere. We have footage of you at the store during the time of the crime and we saw you stuffing jewelry into a bag and running away. We caught you red handed.”

Just as much, if not more so, than kids, criminals will lie so long as they believe that they can get the police to believe them. Some criminals, however, lie on impulse and it just ends up being worse for them in the end. Why risk lying? If you’ve done something wrong, and are being convicted for it, the best course of action is to just go along with what the police say. Cooperative criminals will get the best treatment. Lying to a judge while under oath is a crime in itself, so why take the chance of getting a longer sentence by lying, when you could just be cooperative and then end up having a shorter sentence? Criminals confuse me, but that’s besides the point. So why do they do it? Why do they lie? Ever more so, why do regular, everyday citizens lie in different situations?

All of this can connect back to Po Bronson’s Learning to Lie. In the article, Bronson explains that lying develops from a very early age, almost from the moment a child begins to speak. And, believe it or not, these children will learn to lie from their parents.

Their parents? No, that can’t be true. Well I guess there’s Santa…and the easter bunny….and the tooth fairy…and that time when they asked where babies come from. The point is, parents lie all the time. Sometimes it’s for the child’s benefit, sometimes it’s for their enjoyment. Bronson explains in his article that parents that use an angry tone of voice, a type of alarm goes off in the child’s brain which tells them that they should lie in order to stay out of trouble. So, I suppose that one reason for a person to lie is to stay out of trouble. That would make sense for many people as to why they themselves lie. However, I don’t believe that that is the only reason. There could be all kinds of reasons for any one person to lie, it just depends on the kind of situation that they in. Staying out of trouble is probably the most prominent one and the one that is being tested in Bronson’s article (Testing the ability to lie in children i.e. staying out of trouble). Everyone lies. There’s no way to get around it. It’s just there. It happens. In fact, it’s kind of ironic that people learn to lie from other people isn’t it? That’s quite amusing actually, but if you’ll excuse me I’ve got a city to go save. Oh, I didn’t tell you I was a superhero?