Strelka Institute/Flickr/Attribution License It can be hard to detect if someone is lying to you, especially because face-to-face meetings are increasingly rare.
- Everyone's guilty of occasionally telling lies at work.
- Most of us tell lies in an attempt to appear more competent.
- Business Insider spoke with Lynn Taylor, a national workplace expert, to discover the most common white lies told in the workplace, and what to do instead.
You're a liar. I'm a liar. Even Hope Hicks admitted she was a liar at work.
"Lying in the office is a pandemic," Lynn Taylor, a national workplace expert and the author of "Tame Your Terrible Office Tyrant: How to Manage Childish Boss Behavior and Thrive in Your Job," told Business Insider. "Especially if you consider the amount of tiny white lies circulating in the daily course of business."
According to a University of Massachusetts study conducted by psychologist Robert Feldman, most us lie two to three times every 10 minutes.
Buy why are we lying?
"We bend the truth to make life easier," Taylor explained. "In many cases, we rationalize them as protecting others, thinking 'it'll keep the peace' or 'it's something everyone does.'"
"But mostly lies are told because they're convenient and often a cover up," she said.
It can be hard to detect if someone is lying to you, especially because face-to-face meetings are increasingly rare. But according to Taylor, even that's no guarantee of lie detection.
"The most difficult lies to detect are lies of omission. They're usually discovered much later. The typical conversation would go something like, "why didn't you tell me?" Followed by, "I assumed that ... "
The more egregious garden variety of lies include "massive" and "destructive" lies. A massive lie, for example, is promising an employee a promotion or salary increase and later going back on your word. A destructive lie is spreading malicious gossip about a coworker.
But most lying in the office is not egregious, and tends to fall in the white lie category.
If you're concerned a coworker is lying to you, Taylor suggests treading carefully. In her book, she recommends allowing people the opportunity to save face without going on the attack: "Get them to clarify their position. Ask them, 'Did you mean X or Y?'"
If they're a repeat offender, discuss it diplomatically, and be friendly with the stated goal of improving the relationship.
Taylor also suggests considering how serious the deception is: "Is the confrontation worth winning a battle and potentially losing a war? You don't want to ignore lies, as that will create unwarranted stress for you, but you don't want to hammer people with questions, either."
To help you identify when you're being lied to, we asked Taylor to share some of the most common white lies people tell in the office: