A quarter say they lie once a week or more.
A new study from YouGov Omnibus took an honest look at American dishonesty to find out more about our complicated relationship with the truth. Many respondents (40%) agreed that only harmless, white lies were somewhat morally acceptable--and that more severe examples like fabrication (i.e., telling others something you don’t know for sure is true) and bold face (telling others something they know is a lie) are not at all morally acceptable.
Despite a general consensus that lying is wrong, respondents did tell us about how often they lie and to whom.
The most common response as to how often respondents admit to lying was ‘Less often than once a month’ with 36%. About a fifth of respondents said they never lie at all, while 6% said they tell some kind of lie every day.
While most respondents said they don’t lie often, there was a significant portion of respondents who admitted to lying to a significant other more than once. At nearly half of all respondents, 49% have told some kind of lie, more than once, to their special someone. Just less than a fifth have not.
So in the end, while most Americans may agree that lying is wrong, we just can’t quite seem to do without it.
For complete results, see here.
