For this “honesty experiment,” 110 individuals, ages 18-71, participated over a 10-week period. Each week, they came to a laboratory to complete health and relationship measures and to take a polygraph test assessing the number of major lies and white lies they had told that week.
“When they went up in their lies, their health went down,” says lead author Anita Kelly, a psychology professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. “When their lies went down, their health improved.”
Researchers instructed half the participants to stop telling lies for the 10 weeks. The instructions said “refrain from telling any lies for any reason to anyone. You may omit truths, refuse to answer questions, and keep secrets, but you cannot say anything that you know to be false.”
The other half of the participants — which served as a control group — received no such instructions.
Over the study period, the link between less lying and improved health was significantly stronger for participants in the no-lie group, the study found. As an example, when participants in the no-lie group told three fewer white lies than they did in other weeks, they experienced, on average, approximately four fewer mental-health complaints and about three fewer physical complaints.
For the control group, when they told three fewer white lies, they experienced two fewer mental-health complaints and about one fewer physical complaint. The pattern was similar for major lies, Kelly said.
Evidence indicates that Americans average about 11 lies a week. Kelly says the no-lie group participants were down to one lie, on average, per week.
“A reduction in the lies of our participants across the 10 weeks of their participation was associated with better physical and mental health in those same weeks when those individuals had engaged in less lying,” she says. Also, actually inducing people to lie less caused them to see themselves as more honest as compared to the people who were not induced to stop lying. And, getting people to stop lying also strengthens the link between fewer lies and better health to be stronger.”
Overall, Kelly says participants in the more truthful group told significantly fewer lies across the 10-week study. By the fifth week, they saw themselves as more honest, she says. For both groups, when participants lied less in a given week, they reported their physical health and mental health to be significantly better that week.
And for those in the more truthful group, telling fewer lies led them to report improvement in their close personal relationships. Overall, they reported that their social interactions had gone more smoothly that week, the study found.
Among those asked not to lie, the participants explained how they did it. Their responses included realizing they could: simply tell the truth rather than exaggerate; stop making false excuses for why they were late or had failed to complete tasks; answer a troubling question with another question; changed the topic or be vague; and laugh as if the questions were ridiculous.
“People got really good and very proficient at thinking in advance of what they might say if presented with a direct, troubling question,” Kelly says. “They would think how they could circumvent or leave something out and still be honest without saying something hurtful.”
The study presented at the American Psychological Association meeting has yet to be peer-reviewed, Kelly says.
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