Passage 2
1 At the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, psychology professor Bella DePaulo got 77 students and 70 townspeople to volunteer for an unusual project. All kept diaries for a week, recording the numbers and details of the lies they told.
2 One student and six Charlottesville residents professed to have told no falsehoods. The other 140 participants told 1,535.
3 The lies were most often not what most of us would call earth-shattering. Someone would pretend to be more positive or supportive of a spouse or friend than he or she really was, or feign agreement with a relative‘s opinion. According to DePaulo, women in their interactions with other women lied mostly to spare others’ feelings. Men lied to other men generally for self-promoting reasons