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On January 2, David Livingstone Smith, Ph.D., professor of philosophy, was interviewed on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s CBC Radio One for a program about lying.

Smith discussed the pervasiveness of lying among humans, noting that we most often lie about things that will affect the way that others perceive us. His conception of lying, he explained, is broad and includes such things as dressing to minimize what we believe are figure flaws and to accentuate complementary bodily features.

Lying is so widespread among humans, said Smith, that “deception saturates our social lives.” But, he stated, “Lying is a necessity…It’s an element of social intelligence; it’s an element of social skill.” In fact, he explained, lying is crucial to our ability to function as a social animal. “If you pictured a world in which people did not engage in these sorts of deceptive practices,” he said, “it would be a really, really disastrous world.”

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