Question

Why do people lie?

Answer 1

People lie for all sorts of reasons.
Yes, when I say "people lie," I mean that we all lie. We have all lied at many points in our lives, and we will continue to lie. We're all liars.

You probably already knew this.

No matter what the reason for why we lie,
it all comes down to the same general reason: we lie to get what we want.

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Some lies are even socially expected of us.

When we're out in public, and someone says, "Hi, how are you?"
We are, in a sense, socially expected to say something like..."I'm fine, thanks,"
even if we aren't REALLY feeling fine.

We tell these little lies because we have a desire to maintain social norms.

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Within the first ten minutes of meeting a new person,
we tell an average of three lies.

These are little tiny lies. I'll give you an example, in a conversation between John and Mary:

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JOHN: So you go to Colombia too huh? That's cool. What's your major?

MARY: I'm a bio major. What about you?

JOHN: History.

MARY: Oh really? I've always been interested in history. That's pretty neat!

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The truth:
Mary really has no interest in history. But she tells this little lie, to give John some positive feedback, and maybe even to give him a reason to like her a little more.
In Psychology, we call this "social tuning."

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No matter what the specific reason,
we tell lies because they, ideally, get us what we want.

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A really interesting question would be....why do some lies fail, while other lies succeed?

I once read a book called "Telling Lies," by Paul Ekman.
He's a psychologist, who specializes in human emotion, and deception.

In this book, he talks about different reasons for why people could lie,
and even how to tell when someone is lying.

If you really wanna know more about this whole topic, you could pick up that book. It's very very neat.

Answer 2

Thank you very much.