Why Do People Lie to You? by Bella DePaulo Ph.D.

The question of why people lie is profoundly important and endlessly intriguing. Before I turned my attention to research and writing about single peopleand single life, I spent about two decades studying lying.

​When my colleagues and I asked college students and people from the community to keep a diary of all their social interactions and all the lies they told in those interactions every day for a week, we became the first to look at lying in such a systematic way. From time immemorial, people had opined about liars and their lies without the benefit of careful data on some of the most fundamental questions about the matter — who lies, how often people lie, and why they lie.

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