The less surprising finding is that white lies are the glue
that holds tight social networks together.
You can’t overdo it or your social network turns into a love-festing
mush. But at moderate levels, it keeps
conversation social, friendly, and makes it easier to give bad news when you supplement
it with niceties. There is some other research
that the HR performance evaluation of the criticism sandwich (a good thing to
warm them up, the real critical thing, and then another good thing to bandage
the damage) is counterproductive. But in general societal relations, we have
long known that saying nice things has an overall positive effect on
society. The Talmud refers to this as
the “Every Bride is Beautiful” approach.
But the second finding of this study is the one I want to
highlight today. It deals with the effects
of black lies. The ones that benefit the
person telling the lie, but harm the person on the receiving end. These are clearly anti-social at the
one-to-one level. But there is a
society-level silver lining that you all should know about. When people use exploitative lies like these,
they have to keep moving. This is the “Fool
me once, shame on you. Fool me twice,
shame on me” effect. So what these black
liars do is to create diverse bridges among a variety of subgroups that might
never have been in contact. When they
are not caught, they create simple links between clusters by bringing knowledge
from one cluster over to the next one and so on and so on as they keep one step
ahead of the posse.
When they are caught, the different clusters have a bonding
opportunity in exerting joint punishment on the miscreant. This can create stronger connections than most
bridging ties generally are able to.
