Lying Gotten A Bad Rap By Allison Kornet

A Critique of “The Truth about Lying: Has Lying Gotten a Bad Rap” by Allison Kornet

Written by Rakesh Goel

Introduction

Author Allison Kornet in her article (1997) “The Truth about Lying: Has Lying Gotten a Bad Rap” states that deception or lying has become a part of everyone’s life. A person lies or deceives as often as he brushes his teeth or combs his hair. Many psychologists have neglected or ignored the concept of deception or lying and its effects on everyone’s life. Kornet explains that in the previous two to three decades, the psychologists started noticing or analyzing the effects of a person’s deception on others or why a person lies so many times in his day-to-day life. The person might learn lying from childhood

for the small reasons and that will lead him making more excuses or lies in his adult life with no feeling of guilty. Let it be at home, with friends, social gatherings, with partners or even at the workplaces, one could find different people lying for the different reasons. Kornet further stated that a person might lie in order to protect someone or not to hurt the other’s feelings and a person might lie just because he wants without thinking of consequences. According to Kornet, some lies might have positive effect or some negative. At the end, it’s one and the same. Without lying or deception, one cannot live his or her life fully.
Analysis
I find this article excellent for many reasons. In this article, Kornet explained the reality as to how many time and under what situations one lies by taking various studies, surveys and real world examples. Images in this article add to the points presented by Kornet. The main purpose of author is to tell audience the reality about the inherited habit of lying and deception.
Author analyzed numerous findings by various psychologists about lying and deception and tried to present in this article in a very impressive way using images to attract audience eyes at a first glance.
The interesting fact is that none of have bothered to do research about why a person lies or deceives? Even in the encyclopedia of psychology doesn’t mention any major information on this topic. Until 1990s, the topic of deception was totally ignored by the psychologists. Lies or deception are part of every human’s life. Without lying or deceiving one cannot carry his or her day-to-day activities. The main reference group for this article was the people between ages 18 and 71. Dr. Bella DePaulo, a psychologist from University of Virginia conducted a research about the lies with the help of reference group of 147 people between ages 18 and 71. And she states that the lie is a condition of life.
There are many supporting points in this article based on the research. Leonard Saxe, a polygraph expert and psychology professor at Brandies University says that, “Lying has long been a part of everyday life and that we couldn’t get through the day without being deceptive.”
Dr. Bella DePaulo supports Saxe’s words that “most people lie once or twice a day- almost as often as they snack from refrigerator”. (Page-53)
Dr. DePaulo even adds that “both men and women lie in approximately a fifth of every social exchanges lasting 10 or more minutes. She explains that the some relationships like parent and child are the virtual magnets of deception. She says that every teen lies to their mothers’ one out of every two conversations”. (Page 54)
Even in relationship between couples, it is proved that 85% of the couples lied to their partners about their previous relationships, which was interviewed by Missouri psychologist Dory Hollander. (Page 54)
The author of the book titled Lies! Lies!! Lies!!! The psychology of Deceit, Charles Ford adds that “depressed people are tend to deceive others or themselves because depressed people delude themselves about the amount of control they have over situations”.
By these points, I can tell that the author of the article made certain points based on research of others.
Speaking of research methodology, the author of this article is depending on the research conducted by number of psychologists like Dr. Bella DePaulo, Charles Ford and so on. The author of this article didn’t do any of her own research, her article was based on the opinions of experts in the field of psychology who reported their experiments.

Relevance and Applicability
In my opinion, “The Truth about Lying: Has Lying Gotten a Bad Rap” is an effective, informative and interesting article.

It tells us how often we lie or tend to lie under different situations and scenarios by taking real world examples. Kornet explained and analyze the result of various studies by Bella DePaulo, a psychologist at the University of Virginia and her colleagues. As lying and deception becomes an integral part of every individual, it is important to know its impact and its results on our life. We are lying about one or the other thing at almost every moment of our life. It can be at workplace, in a relationship, or even friendship. Kornet concludes this article by saying, “The ubiquity of lying is clearly a problem, but would we want to will away all of our lies? Let’s be honest.” I completely agrees with the author as we have to take a step against lying and deception and to be honest in our lives. Kornet’s article provides really good studies and after analyzing those studies one can think of his/her lying habit and how often he lies in a day. I myself tried and thinking about how many times in a day I lie, and found that I lie a number of times in a day. This article is really interesting and I encourage everyone to read this article. After reading this article, you will come to know the actual truth about lying and its

impacts.