This pretty much quantifies one of my core beliefs about human behavior: people are dishonest by nature.
The reward mechanisms for our world are clearly optimized for dishonesty and deception. This isn’t to make some kind of statement about our culture, rather it’s an observation about reality. Dishonesty and falsity are everywhere, and you even find it in nature and animals.
I don’t think it has anything to do with good or bad per se, as it does with the path of least resistance; a lie is almost always more connvienent than the truth. People who are most successful tend to be those that are the most dishonest and are also very good at knowing how to tell fact from fiction which they then use to create more elaborate offensive and defensive models of the world.
If you think about it this way it doesn’t seem that odd, as even nature and evolution are constantly truth testing, it’s like at some level you must assume everything is a lie until proven otherwise, and even that evidence may itself be just a more elaborate falsehood.
People rarely go to the movies to be entertained by the truth.
Things are probably more nuanced than that. People are also honest by nature.
Telling the truth has way less cognitive load, and people generally aren't going to be stupid enough to get stuck in weaving an elaborate net of lies just to support that one original lie that they refuse to come clean on.
But there's also certain levels of dishonesty or lies by omission etc that people will do at a social level. Sometimes it's even beneficial for greater harmony between people.
I bet game theorists have studied this type of stuff quite a bit.
IIRC, the research (or some research) shows that altruism is an adaptive behavior, an evolutionary advantage. We're social beings; we survive or die as groups.
If you think about it, most people are honest most of the time. Most comments in this discussion are honest; if I go to the store, the salesperson doesn't lie to me. My coworkers and family don't. There are exceptions, but honesty is pretty normal.
The reward mechanisms for our world are clearly optimized for dishonesty and deception. This isn’t to make some kind of statement about our culture, rather it’s an observation about reality. Dishonesty and falsity are everywhere, and you even find it in nature and animals.
I don’t think it has anything to do with good or bad per se, as it does with the path of least resistance; a lie is almost always more connvienent than the truth. People who are most successful tend to be those that are the most dishonest and are also very good at knowing how to tell fact from fiction which they then use to create more elaborate offensive and defensive models of the world.
If you think about it this way it doesn’t seem that odd, as even nature and evolution are constantly truth testing, it’s like at some level you must assume everything is a lie until proven otherwise, and even that evidence may itself be just a more elaborate falsehood.
People rarely go to the movies to be entertained by the truth.