Do you have any sense? Have you ever thought about just like, well, why do we keep holding this up on this pillar of like, this is the ultimate right thing to do is to tell the truth?

Yeah, I think about it in two ways.

I mean, one, I think that's the case for lots of different traits and behaviors and values in moral psychology and other areas, too, which is like in general, they're good.

Right.

Like it's good to be nice, but it's not good to be like too nice or nice to bad people or nice to someone's enemies.

Right.

It's good to be nice.

What are some of the methods that you might use?

What do you think?

Yeah, I am also, uh, shaken by Mia's story.

It is a sad one.

I think it's really unfortunate that this mother at the end of her life faced such uncertainty and was not given the chance to say goodbye to her son.

Uh, and I understand the motivation behind not sharing the son's illness with the mother, especially if that was his wishes, right? It, it is pro-social in many senses, both to the son and to protect the mother.

But in, you know, my own research and just reflections, those types of deception tend to be appreciated only when they're temporary, right? If now's not the right time because there's too much uncertainty or she's fragile, we don't have to tell her everything right away.

But eventually, right, most people think you should reveal because there is instrumental value in that truth.

And, and perhaps in, in situations like that, you know, it's more complicated than to say it's just the individual person's decision about, about what to do.

What do you think?

Yeah, I am also, uh, shaken by Mia's story, it is a sad one.

[sighs] I think it's really unfortunate that this mother at the end of her life faced such uncertainty and was not given the chance to say goodbye to her son.

Uh, and I understand the motivation behind not sharing the son's illness with the mother, especially if that was his wishes, right? It, it is pro-social in many senses, both to the son and to protect the mother.

But in, you know, my own research and just reflections, those types of deception tend to be appreciated only when they're temporary, right? If now's not the right time because there's too much uncertainty or she's fragile, we don't have to tell her everything right away.

But eventually, right, most people think you should reveal because there is instrumental value in that truth.

It's grieving and love and saying goodbye.

And, and perhaps in, in situations like that, you know, it's more complicated than to say it's just the individual person's decision about, about what to do.

What are these vignettes?

So imagine that your spouse or partner is very, very ill and in the hospital, and you've cheated on them in the past.

So this is the situation we present to participants.

Should you tell them that you cheated on them? And this is kind of the basic question, but we randomize some details of this vignette.

In one situation, you know that your partner is very likely to recover.

So in this case, about 30% of participants think it's the right thing to do to lie, so actually a substantial amount, even if your partner is likely to recover, think it's acceptable to lie to them about cheating.

But this number goes up, it almost doubles, when you know your partner is about to pass away.

Uh, describe for me what happened, Emma.

But the more community-minded you are, the more you're embedded in social systems, the more you value those social systems, the more you try and take into account social harmony and how other people are feeling and not just, am I telling the truth or am I being lied to?

I think that's partly right.

It's an intuition I certainly had before heading into some cross-cultural research on this topic, which actually proved a bit more complicated than the story you've laid out.

So it's easy to make a prediction that in China, where there's more collectivism versus the U.S., that they'll value social harmony and be more accepting of deception.

than in the U.S. And now we see that in the medical context, but that seems to be a function of the belief and importance of hope and things we think about at the end of life and the role of luck, right? So knowing that you have cancer saying out loud kind of creates bad luck.

But But this actually doesn't carry over into a lot of other situations.

So we ran studies looking at beliefs about and preferences for just critical feedback in the U.S. and China.

Describe for me what happened, Emma.