To Lie or to Tell The Truth?

There are many good reasons to be honest. Here are just a few of them: even telling a white lie risks being labelled as a liar, which would damage our reliability. Also, only one lie often leads to other more significant lies, which brings about even greater negative consequences if discovered. Finally, when we tell a lie – or a chain of lies – our sense of guilt could cause us far more distress than we imagine.

Some people surprisingly argue that in some cases it's actually better to lie than to tell the truth. It is true that we lie as an attempt to prevent harm or to make other people feel good. We tell our spouse that he/she looks good when we think he/she doesn't but we want to make him/her feel happy. We tell the random stranger that we agree with their “racist” ideas because we do not want him/her to give us harm. We tell our friends that we are sick so we cannot join them for that cinema night, because we do not want them to think they are not wanted.