Why Do People Lie?

Why Do People Lie?

What is a lie? A lie is an untruth, a deviation, big or small, from what is known to be real. It is a false statement deliberately presented as being true, thus misrepresenting a situation or giving a totally wrong impression about something. Everywhere you look today you see lies. Have you ever stepped back and thought about why we have so many lies in this world? That is what I will be focusing on in this paper. People lie for so many reasons, whether it is to keep out of trouble or whether it is to keep from hurting someone's feelings. People lie to escape the fear of telling the truth. When a person lies, it breaks a bond of trust, and if that bond is broken to many times, it can cause a lot of damage.

I recently spoke with Chelsea Jenkins, a fifteen year old, high school student. I asked her to give me a reason why she has ever lied and she quickly, without pause, answered, "So that I don't get in trouble." That is the primary reason why children between the age of 6 and 18 lie. "We start lying around the age 4 to 5 when children gain an awareness of the use and power of language," Dr. Gail Saltz, Why people lie-and how to tell if they are, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4072816/. For instance, a child at the age of six often lies to his parents by telling his parents that he cleaned his room when he didn't. What the child doesn't realize, at this age, is that all the parent has to do is walk into the child's room to see that he didn't clean it. Children at a young age don't really understand how the process of lying works. By the time children become teenagers, the lying process has become understood to a greater degree. Teenagers usually add a story with their lies and as time passes and they get away with it you will find that they must continue to lie to keep the original lie from being revealed. Chelsea Jenkins was able to inform me that lying has never helped her and usually after she has told a lie, she worries if anybody will find out and she has to keep lying to keep the lie from being revealed. In the end though, she states, "I always end up getting into trouble."

Not only do people lie to other people, but also people lie to themselves to make themselves feel better about something that they know that they shouldn't be doing. "Dr. Charles Ford, author of "Lies! Lies!! Lies!!!", says that the average Joe lies seven times an hour -- if you count all the times people lie to themselves. Dr. Ford is a psychiatrist and professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham." When interviewing Tim Popp, a thirty year old father of two, he admitted to lying to himself to feel better about smoking cigarettes even though he knew that he shouldn't be smoking cigarettes due to the health risks. White lies are told to protect people's feelings, and this is another main reason why people lie. Although, these types of lies can be harmless it can still lead to a lot of trouble. White lies mostly consist of one person telling another that they like the person's outfit even if they don't like it at all. As adults, we usually lie to make ourselves look better in the eyes of other people. A person might say that they have a large