The people are lying more and more these days.
No, wait, this is not as unthinkable, or a hyped up statement as you’d think. Just look back at your day, and think how many conversations did you have where you were completely and fully honest with the other person. Look back at the number of times you lied, not even through the entire day, but in a single conversation.
This does seem to be a problem, and a recent book by Professor Christian B Miller about how the modern world is experiencing a ‘honesty crisis’ seems to have brought this topic into the limelight.
What Does The Book Reveal?
Christian B. Miller the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University, had his book ‘The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World,’ published by Oxford University Press in May 2026.
Miller had also previously directed the Honesty Project, one of the largest research initiatives ever undertaken specifically on the subject of honesty Wake Forest University and Carnegie Mellon University.
In a recent Q&A done by Wake Forest University, Miller explained that “Although it’s been true for thousands of years that people have lied, cheated, stolen and the rest of it, what I’m seeing now is an acceleration of that kind of behavior, what I call an honesty crisis or really multiple honesty crises.”
He further said, “These honesty crises take a specific form. There are situations where we’re both tempted to be more dishonest than we have been in the past—it’s incentivized and more appealing than it was before—and at the same time, we’re also able to get away with the dishonesty easier than we could have in the past. It is simply harder to catch people being dishonest today. When you put those two things together, you’ve got a bad combination: greater temptation to be dishonest and easier means of being dishonest.”
Miller explained that “Research has found that honesty is the single most important characteristic a person can possess when it comes to liking them, respecting them and understanding them.”
Miller in his book has zeroed in on six specific areas where he says the evidence for a genuine crisis is strongest, and each one gets its own dedicated chapter. These six areas include:
- deepfakes and online spaces,
- infidelity and relationships,
- AI-assisted cheating in education,
- fake news and political polarization,
- celebrity culture,
- dishonesty among religious leaders
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This is also not the first time that studies have shown the increase of people being more dishonest in modern society.
A Reader’s Digest poll from 2004, revealed that almost 96% of people accepted that they lied at least sometimes with “about half of all lies told by just 5% of the subjects.”
Another study published in the Journal of Basic and Applied Social Psychology found that “60% of people can’t go 10 minutes without lying at least once, telling an average of three lies during that brief conversation.”
A 2012 “Science of Honesty” study lead by author Anita E. Kelly, PhD, professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame also found that “Recent evidence indicates that Americans average about 11 lies per week.”
A study by Leslie Martin, PhD, of Wake Forest University’s counseling center, that suveyed 109 psychology graduate students that have experienced therapy, found that around 37% of the participants reported to lying. Martin though explains that this was done “to protect themselves in some way-mostly to avoid shame or embarrassment, to avoid painful emotions and to avoid being judged or rejected by the therapist.”
Another study conducted by the General Social Survey found that the number of adults who agreed with the statement “most people can be trusted” had gone down to 37% in 2018, where the number stood at 46% in 1972.
The concept of trust or expecting honesty from another, furthermore, depends on one’s personal experience, socio-economic standing, age, gender and culture/race as well.
According to reports, in America, the probability of citizens claiming that people can be trusted is less likely to come from those coming from “lower levels of education or income.”
The survey also found that racial and ethnic differences can also affect the trust capacity of people, stating, “Black (21%) and Hispanic Americans (23%) tend to express lower levels of trust than White (40%) and Asian Americans (38%).”
The digital angle given by Miller is also seconded by a study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology that noticed a 50% increase in lying when people communicated through email as compared to handwritten notes.
Albert Bandura’s moral disengagement theory explains the reason for this, one being that many consider emails as informal, further encouraged by the ‘unsend’ option that is often available now, second, online communication instantly seems to take away a person’s rigid hold over social norms, allowing them to reduce their inhibitions, third the disconnect through digital communication also leads to one feeling a decrease in accountability.
Image Credits: Google Images
Sources: The Print, Blog of the APA, Firstpost
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This post is tagged under: honesty crisis, honesty crisis book, honesty crisis christian miller, honesty, honesty current generation, society, social pressure, AI, social media, fake news, morality, deepfakes, modern society, internet anonymity, dishonesty, personal relationships, technology, politics
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