A lie rarely springs from thin air; it is shaped around an imagined outline of the listener’s hopes, fears, and plausibilities.
Oscar Wilde, in The Decay of Lying, calls deception “the telling of beautiful untrue things,” yet insists that such beauty depends on knowing exactly what will tickle the other’s imagination.
Harry Frankfurt warns that the fabricator cares less about truth than about the effect words produce, while Sissela Bok notes that deception works only where speaker and audience share a “presumed common reality.”
Classical roots
- Augustine – In De mendacio he condemns every false utterance, yet admits its power lies in reshaping another’s mind.
- Kant – His 1797 essay rejects any “supposed right to lie,” arguing that distorting another’s rational agency undermines communicative freedom.
- Nietzsche – Truth itself, he claims, is a “mobile army of metaphors”; lying merely exposes the creative labor hidden in everyday speech.
Psychological mechanisms
Children begin to lie as soon as they master theory of mind: once they can represent other beliefs, they exploit that insight. Experiments show that targeted ToM training sharpens their deceptions. In adulthood, Erving Goffman’s impression-management describes social life as theater, where faces are preserved through finely tuned omissions and embellishments. Linguists label this tuning audience design—the speaker adjusts form and content to whatever knowledge state the listener is presumed to occupy, especially under cognitive load.
Algorithmic listeners
Platforms now automate the role of the imagined hearer. Recommender systems mine likes, clicks, and dwell time, then feed back narratives statistically optimized for engagement. Content creators, alert to those incentives, align wording—even false wording—with the algorithm’s predicted sweet spot. Filter-bubble studies trace how this loop magnifies bias; neuroscientists, mapping deception to distributed prefrontal networks, show that simulating an interlocutor guides strategic dishonesty.
Diffused Responsibility
Every lie mirrors the profile the listener projects. The storyteller forges the fiction; the audience—human or machine—supplies the mold. Ethical speech therefore demands vigilance on both sides of the conversational mirror: a readiness to doubt stories that flatter our priors, and a refusal to craft them merely because they fit so well.
Bibliography
- O. Wilde, The Decay of Lying, in O. Wilde, Intentions, London, 1891, 1-56
- H. G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit, Princeton, 2005
- S. Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, New York, 1978
- A. Agostino, De mendacio, Seattle, 2014
- I. Kant, Über ein vermeintes Recht aus Menschenliebe zu lügen, Königsberg, 1797
- F. Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, in J. Medina, D. Wood (a cura di), Truth: Engagements Across Philosophical Traditions, Malden, 2005, 7-14
- X. P. Ding, H. M. Wellman, Y. Wang, G. Fu, K. Lee, Theory-of-Mind Training Causes Honest Young Children to Lie, Psychological Science, 2015, 1812-1821
- E. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Garden City, 1959
- H. H. Clark, G. L. Murphy, Audience Design in Meaning and Reference, Advances in Psychology, 1982, 287-299
- E. Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You, New York, 2011
- D. D. Langleben, J. W. Loughead, W. B. Bilker, K. Ruparel, A. R. Childress, S. I. Busch, R. C. Gur, Telling Truth from Lie in Individual Subjects with Fast Event-related fMRI, Human Brain Mapping, 2005, 262-272