A couple days ago, I told a Nigerian engineer to "Work online. Use freelancing sites. Lie about the country you’re in. [...] There’s a big stigma against Nigeria. That’s just reality, and you need to deal with it."

A reader replies -

I feel for this guy but I am surprised you recommend lying. There has to be another way. ... I have a problem with lying, period, and perhaps I’ve misunderstood Sebastian but I think he stands for straightforwardness.

Let's talk about this straightforwardly, like adults, like grown-ups.

Most people won't do that. It's inherently weird. Most people don't own up to the fact that they lie, yet almost everyone does so. A lot, actually.

How often?

Humans are funny. We're good at deleting information that doesn't fit the story we want to believe. But here's a summary of a neat little 2002 study...

Feldman et al. (2002) told 121 participants they were going to have a chat with someone new for 10 minutes. Then half were divided into 3 groups, each with different goals from the conversation... try to present yourself as competent, likable, or no specific goal.

The people were videotaped, and then asked to analyze the tape later and now be honest about when they lied and didn't.

End result? 40% of people said they didn't lie at all. Among the remaining 60%, they averaged just under 3 lies in only 10 minutes... in a situation that fundamentally didn't matter.

Stop and reflect on just that for a moment. 60% of people lied on average 3 times in 10 minutes, moreso if they were trying to be "liked" or "appear competent."

The researchers categorized lies into five rough buckets - feelings, achievements, plans, explanations, and facts. Everyone's most frequent lying by category was consistently when they were trying to look competent, with two exceptions - when men want to appear likable, they lie about their feelings. When women want to be likable, they lie more about facts.

But again, the stakes here are basically nonexistent. This is just for a silly little exercise in a lab with no extra payoff.

Most of the lies weren't evil mutant vicious lies -

Lies about feelings are interesting because they are not something we prototypically think of as outright lies. For example when I meet you I might ask: "How are you?" and you might reply "Fine" when actually you feel like crap. Technically that is a lie. But there is also a social convention at work here; especially if you're a stranger I've just met. You understand that I don't want to know exactly how you are, it's a social nicety.

The question is: what is the moral dimension? The kind of lies we find most detestable are those with a malicious intent of some kind: lies designed to swindle or hoodwink us, lies that will cause us some pain down the road. Yet many lies about feelings are motivated by the exact reverse, they are quite often pro-social lies.

Pro-social lies. Indeed.

But this can easily be coupled with rationalization. Who wants to think of themselves as a liar? So people rationalize that they only tell these "little lies, that besides, aren't really lies anyways - they're just being tactful and polite."

It reminds me of one of the most insightful comments I ever saw on Hacker News. It's by Jonathan Tang (nostrademons) -

Common sense is nothing more or less than tacit knowledge that you learn implicitly through observing your peers within a culture. If there's nobody in your peer group with that knowledge, that sense won't be very common.
Here's an example from the startup world. Imagine that you have this great idea and you're desperate for funding. You're approached by a key investor, and they ask you "Is anybody else interested in your startup? Have you been talking to other investors?" Nobody else has expressed interest, and you haven't been talking to any other investors. How do you respond?

If you spend any amount of time with successful entrepreneurs, the answer is common sense: you lie and say "Oh yes, we're talking to a bunch of people and everyone's pretty excited." This is the answer the investor expects you to give: it shows that you know how to drum up interest in your product from nothing, and if you can't do that with him, you probably can't do it with anyone and you've just disqualified yourself in his eyes.

But if you grew up with a typical middle-class upbringing, this advice will seem very strange, even evil. Because you're lying. And more than that, you're lying to a powerful person about a business deal that directly concerns him. What would your mother think?

It's even more complicated because there're specific, unwritten rules about what you can lie about, and nobody ever explains this. If a journalist asks you "Are you working on X?" and you are, you're perfectly within your rights to lie and flat out say "No." If you lie about how interested people are in your product, that's fine, and people even expect that. But if you fudge the numbers in a due diligence audit, you're guilty of securities fraud and can go to jail for that. It's an awfully fine tight-rope with no clear guidebook.

Indeed. Pro-social lies (niceties, tact, spreading the credit around, highlighting people's good points) are not just tolerated, but mandated by society. There's also a class of lies, especially during adversarial situations, that you're expected to make. When I'm in a city for only one day, I sure as hell don't say that to someone selling me something. If they ask if I'm a tourist, I'll often say "No" or "No, I work here" or "I used to live here" - even if it's a bit of a stretch (see? I say "even if it's a bit of a stretch," not "even if it's a lie" - nobody wants to own it when they do it, myself included).

But it's basically expected behavior. In many countries, if a salesperson knows you're having a one-off transaction, they're going to try to rip you off. So you lie to them when they ask. But you don't call it lying, you call it "a bit of a stretch" because who wants to think of themselves as a liar?

Then there's the "kind of lies we find most detestable are those with a malicious intent of some kind: lies designed to swindle or hoodwink us, lies that will cause us some pain down the road" - that's the securities fraud type stuff. You don't want to do that.

We're not even talking about ethics yet - it's just objectively, pragmatically a bad idea to get in the habit of telling malicious lies.

As a martial arts instructor told me recently, "What you do in one place, you do in every place. How you do any action is going to be the same way you approach your whole life."

Or as Mark Twain put it, "Better to tell the truth. Then you don't need to remember what you said."

People who lie malicious get into habits of it and it screws up their life eventually.

But when is it okay and not okay? Society generally feels that lying is...

1. Expected and demanded in pro-social situations.

2. Tolerated and understood in adversarial situations.

3. Despised and punished when done maliciously outside of an adversarial situation.

Experience tells you how to sort the buckets.

Stay away from #3, yes, definitely.

You could maybe break away from #1 with some sort of radical honesty type thing. I actually do that sometimes (who came up with universal suffrage as a good idea? everyone votes, even if they're really ignorant and opinionated? and the ignorant people's votes count the same as the informed people's? and these votes are binding on sane and reasonable people? what kind of idiot system is that?) - and it gets me in trouble sometimes too!

I actually don't recommend extreme straightforwardness. I recommend you think about what's important to you, design an ethical system, and live effectively within your ethical system. That almost certainly includes telling pro-social lies sometimes ("how are you?" - "great").

I think for most people, knowing the line in adversarial situations is tricky and comes with experience.

Imagine that you have this great idea and you're desperate for funding. You're approached by a key investor, and they ask you "Is anybody else interested in your startup? Have you been talking to other investors?" Nobody else has expressed interest, and you haven't been talking to any other investors. How do you respond?

If you spend any amount of time with successful entrepreneurs, the answer is common sense: you lie and say "Oh yes, we're talking to a bunch of people and everyone's pretty excited." This is the answer the investor expects you to give: it shows that you know how to drum up interest in your product from nothing, and if you can't do that with him, you probably can't do it with anyone and you've just disqualified yourself in his eyes.

It's expected and understood. Cooking the books is never acceptable under any circumstances. But feigning like you've got more options than you do is expected and understood behavior, as is sports general mangers lying and saying that their star player won't be traded until it finally happens or the consumer technology executive saying they have no plans to ever build a cellphone.

It takes the "cultural capital" to understand, but it's possible to be both generally a scrupulously honest person when it comes to situations where you have a duty and to be... tactful... in pro-social and potentially adversarial situations.

So, about Nigeria. I'd never hire a freelancer from Nigeria unless I already knew him/her personally. I just wouldn't. There's already 10 million things that can go wrong in the world, I'm not going to send money to a country that has a reputation for taking money from people and running.

Is that fair? No. Is that right? No. Is that good? No.

But this is the truth here. If I need to get something done, I want to give myself the best chance of it happening. If I'm shopping around for a provider, there'll be hundreds of options. I need to filter quickly. So I'm going to pick someone in a region that I know is going to speak fluent English and a place where I already understand and generally like the pace, work habits, and amount of direction typically required.

These are heuristics. I wouldn't hire a Nigerian I didn't already know.

Which is a bit of a nasty catch-22 if you want to start freelancing, eh?

So - I say lie about it, and I figure it's a type 1 or type 2 lie. It's not malicious. If I started working with the engineer who wrote to me, he did great work, and then he wrote and said, "By the way, Sebastian, I should tell you - I actually live in Abuja, not Johannesburg. There's a stigma against Nigeria, so I list myself as South Africa and get a lot more work. But I wanted to tell you now that we've been working together, so that you understand that there's honest hard-working people in my country and so we're on the level. I hope you don't mind."

Would I mind?

Hell no. I'd understand. And I'd approve.

When exactly should you lie? It's hard to say. It comes with experience. I respect the people who refuse to do even type 1 pro-social lies, and are super-blunt and super-raw because of it. But those people rare, way less than 1% of the population. And people are very careful about what events they invite them to! ;)

And unless you're already going for radical honesty, skipping type 2 situation lies is kind of dangerous in a naive way. "Is anyone else interested in your company?" "No, actually, and it's been worrying us that no one has responded to our calls. You're the first person who responded. So anyways, what do you think about investing in us?"

And of course, avoid type 3 malicious lies like the plague. Of course, like Tang writes, that's not a very clear line much of the time...