Two posts on lying by Dr Steve over at The Top Two Inches blog:
In Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying! Dr Steve discusses different types of falsehood, mendacity and self-deception, in an effort to “show how tricky it is to define lying or the lie”. He concludes that
What qualifies something as a lie, then, is not its truth or falsity, but the conscious (or unconscious) attempt to deceive (or be deceived by) others (and/or oneself).
Great post and some lovely comments, and followed up the next day with 35 aphorisms on liars and lying. My favourites:
3. Mark Twain: “One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat only has nine lives.” Mark Twain also has number 29: “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.”
4. Samuel Butler: “The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.”
11. Mr Justice Darling: “Much truth is spoken, that more may be concealed.”
and finally:
32. Dr. Johnson: “A man would rather have a hundred lies told of him, than one truth which he does not wish to be told.” Indeed.
2 Comments
First let me tell you that your site/blog is great !
Very interesting articles and ressources.
I am looking desperately for a research study about lying behaviour with children under 10 (from 3 to 10 in fact). Would you happen to know any ?
Let me know and keep up the good work. Please use my email to contact me.
Thanks for the compliment Thierry, glad you find it useful.
Have you checked out the ‘children’ category on the left hand side of the blog: http://deception.crimepsychblog.com/?cat=22 There are several articles on children’s deception there.
Also, if you don’t have access to PsychINFO or a similar citation database, Google Scholar is often worth a try. Here is the URL for a search on ‘children lying’: http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=children+lying&hl=en&lr=&btnG=Search that brings up some useful results.
Other free resources for scholarly research searches are Scirus: http://www.scirus.com
and PubMed: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez
Try searching with different combinations (child / juvenile / infant and deception / lying / lies / deceiving etc) and you should come up with something.
Good luck,
Emma
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