Your Lies Weigh Nothing. Your Sister Carries Them.
Pin 06 · the plaza
Plays from YouTube (privacy-enhanced mode). Watch on YouTube
In Mardenford, every lie drops a brick into the liar's backpack. Everyone is carrying something. Except you: your bag stays flat. Your little sister's doesn't. Sometimes the lies we think are free land on the people around us.
What's real in this episode
- In a survey of 1,000 US adults, 60% said they told no lies in the past day, and about 5% reported roughly half of all the lies (self-reported).
- In a one-week diary study, students lied in about a third of their phone calls, but in only one email in seven.
- In one study, 98% of students missed a clause in a site's terms that asked for their firstborn child.
- In a lab study, 69% of students signed a confession to crashing a computer by pressing a key they never pressed.
- Pinocchio didn't make kids more honest. A story where a boy confesses and gets praised did.
Sources
- Serota, Levine & Boster (2010), The prevalence of lying in America, Human Communication Research 36:2–25, doi:10.1111/j.1468-2958.2009.01366.x
- Hancock, Thom-Santelli & Ritchie (2004), Deception and design, CHI 2004, doi:10.1145/985692.985709
- Obar & Oeldorf-Hirsch (2018/2020), The biggest lie on the Internet, Information, Communication & Society 23(1), doi:10.1080/1369118X.2018.1486870
- Kassin & Kiechel (1996), The social psychology of false confessions, Psychological Science 7:125–128, doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.1996.tb00344.x
- Lee, Talwar et al. (2014), Can classic moral stories promote honesty in children?, Psychological Science 25:1630–1636, doi:10.1177/0956797614536401
