STORY BY

Liz Bennett

There’s a riveting scene in the new movie, “Closer,” when a journalist turns to his live-in girlfriend, a stripper, and pleads: “Please tell me the truth, because without it, we are animals.”

“Closer” is a parade of prevarication among the four superficial characters. It’s a morality tale of sorts, hammering home, among other things, the importance of truth in our relationships.

But in real life, the truth may sometimes hurt more than help. There are times when it seems absolutely necessary to come up with the Little White Lie— when you show up late for an important appointment, for example, or totally forget a good friend’s birthday. It’s certainly easier to shade the truth a bit in such situations than to be entirely honest. And isn’t it also kinder?

Not necessarily, believes ethicist Stanley J. Reiser of The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.

Here’s an example we asked him to discuss: You’re having dinner with a friend who spent all afternoon in the beauty shop getting her hair colored. The result is an unnatural Chinese-New-Year red that makes her look slightly anemic, if not alien. She turns to you, pats her hair and asks, “How do I look?”

If ever a time called for a Little White Lie, this would seem to be it. After all, how do you tell someone who’s spent all that time and money that it just didn’t work? Why not just lie and say it’s terrific and get on with your meal?

That’s the easy way out, agrees Reiser, the Griff T. Ross Professor of Humanities and Technology in Health Care at the health science center. But what about trying to be a truly good friend and talk to your dinner companion honestly—but kindly— about her hair?

Easy Way Out

The Little White Lie can “block all discussion that can be helpful to a person,” he suggests. “It prevents you from the opportunity to help because it closes off dialogue. You can tell the truth and still be kind, saying perhaps: ‘I think you look better in a lighter shade, but the important thing is how YOU feel about it.’”

By giving a truthful answer, you’re opening up the subject for discussion and providing an opportunity to help, Reiser points out. And the easy, quick fib can become a bad habit “that doesn’t lead to human growth,” he adds. “I would suggest the lie is bad because it doesn’t challenge you as a person to learn how to deal with ambiguous situations in a way that lets you say something that’s both truthful and not harmful.”

When you do resort to the Little White Lie, you should feel “some smidgen of discomfort,” believes Rabbi Samuel E. Karff, associate director of the John P. McGovern Center for Health, Humanities and the Human Spirit at the UT Medical School at Houston. “You can justify it to yourself for something higher, like kindness, but you don’t want to lapse into a complacent posture of lying.”

Who Are You Really Protecting?

Chronic reliance on the Little White Lie may have less to do with not wanting to hurt others. It may mean that we have a deeper fear of confrontation or disapproval. Feigning praise instead of authentic appraisal (when asked, that is) limits our own growth as compassionate communicators and certainly shows little confidence in our loved ones’ abilities to hear a truthful response.

It is especially important for couples to avoid Little White Lies, adds Karff. “Part of the gift of intimacy is that you can trust what the other person is saying. It doesn’t mean you have to tell it all— to let it all hang out. But normally it’s very important for there to be an absence of deception— for trust to exist in a successful intimate relationship.”

In short, the way we communicate is remembered far longer than what we communicate.

White Lies and White Coats

But while there’s “too little esteem for the truth” in some circles, in our medical culture there’s sometimes “too much reverence for the raw truth— too glib a commitment to tell it like it is,” adds Karff.

He talks about the patient who has only a few months to live. That stark projection can be relayed as the equivalent of a death sentence “or it may be relayed in a way that does not totally snuff out all hope. Shading the physician’s view of the truth could help the patient endure the rigors of chemotherapy and find more satisfaction in the time remaining,” Karff says.

“We’ve known people who’ve lived for years after they were initially given only a few months,” Karff points out. “There’s a mystery to healing, and we need to have some respect for that. I feel that there’s a higher truth at times than telling it like it is on the surface. A physician may choose to tell a patient that ’only 10 percent of persons with your disease survive for more than six months.’ And the physician might add, ’I hope that you will be among that 10 percent.’”

To Save a Life

It’s also acceptable to “give up the truth” in the face of grave danger, Reiser believes. He recalls this famous example from German philosopher Immanuel Kant: It’s night and you’re standing by a lamppost when a man runs up, looks in several directions and then takes off down the street. Shortly afterwards, a second man with a weapon shows up in hot pursuit and demands: “Which way did he go?”

Are you going to point in the right direction?

“In that case I would not because I would sacrifice the value of truth to prevent the grave harm of assault or death,” Reiser explains. “In ethics, you have to look at the values at stake to see where you’re going to go.”

In everyday situations, however, it’s harder to justify lying, even seemingly harmless Little White Lies. And for those of us who employ them too often, Karff has this warning: “You don’t want to get into the habit of doing it when it’s not necessary. If you find yourself doing it constantly, you need to question what impact it has on the credibility of your word and what it represent in terms of your character.”

Last Updated: 1-03-2005

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