Joseph Grenny asks: If lying is the natural order of things, how can people behave unnaturally and tell the truth?

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A few years ago, my colleagues and I did an experiment to test what induces people to lie or tell the truth. Click here (registration required) to see the full experiment.

One of our subjects was 15-year-old Jake, a high school basketball star. We invited Jake to toss beanbags through holes of various sizes in a plywood target. He scored six out of a possible 15 points (not too good for a basketball phenom). As Jake approached our table to report his score, we wondered would he embrace his shame and tell the truth? Or would he lie to get the extra $1 per point we promised him?

We all lie. And if you dont believe that, youre probably lying to yourself. Studies have shown that lying is actually the natural order of things. From the time we are small, we learn there are powerful incentives to modify how we appear and to control the information we share with others.

So, given the importance of trust to healthy relationships, families and communities, how can we help people do the unnatural? How can we, in spite of all the immediate incentives to do the opposite, influence people to tell the truth?

Turns out, simply changing the way we communicate can be a powerful way to influence greater honesty.

Psychologist Bella DePaulo from UC Santa Barbara estimates that the average person tells three lies every 10 minutes. We lie about how we feel. We strategically edit our opinions to fit the group were chatting with. We select which parts of ourselves to reveal or suppress in order to create particular impressions. We overstate (or, if were trying to avoid an assignment, understate) our competence. We frequently feign powerlessness in order to exit conversations Sorry, Ive got to go! (A. Are you really sorry? And B. What is forcing you to go? Someone holding your cat hostage, perhaps?)

Our proclivity to lie begins early. Once we did an experiment in which we randomly assigned 3-year-olds to drink either a small cup of sweet, delicious orange juice or a similar cup tainted with salt. The salt was so strong that the tykes puckered involuntarily. Immediately after they drunk the juice, we asked the child to look into the camera and say, as convincingly as they could, Yum! This is great juice! You should try some. We videotaped the performances and then showed them to adults asking them to guess which tots were fibbing. Few could spot the liars. At age 3, the kids had learned the basics of lying. They knew enough to look sincerely into the camera, smile and in other ways fake emotion they didnt really feel.

Now back to the beanbag toss. In the first round of our experiment, we asked teenagers to report their own scores (which we verified using a hidden camera), and we paid them $1 for each point. Eighty percent of the subjects lied. Some of them lied by more than 200 percent. And ironically, many of these kids had just finished a Bible study class.

Read more:
Insights from the Behavioral Science Guy: Lying is the natural order of things