Professor Bella DePaulo, who specializes in the study of human deception, asked a group of ordinary people to keep a notebook of lies they told in one week. She discovered that they had lied at least once to between 30 and 38 percent of the people they came into contact with. Based on her research, DePaulo says that we all fall into one of two categories of liars: Some of us are ‘self-centred liars’ — we lie in order to make ourselves look better to others. The rest of us are ‘other-centred liars’ — we lie in order to avoid hurting someone else’s feelings. The experiment also found that people tend to tell ‘white lies’ more often to strangers; and deeper lies to those they loved most.
But there are, of course, two people we can never successfully lie to: ourselves and God.