Ericsson: Ten Types Of Lying

1. According to Ericsson, we all lie because we want to avoid confrontation, spare people’s feelings, and to get out of particular situations. To avoid confrontations, sometimes it is necessary to lie, for example, if you were talking about someone behind their back and they hear about it, you are going to deny that you ever talked bad about that person to avoid getting into an alteration. If someone is wearing an ugly outfit that they are real proud of, you are most likely going to lie to them by telling that someone that you love their outfit just to avoid hurting their feelings. Lastly, we lie to get out of situations because we sometimes we have other things to do. An example of a lie to get out of a situation would be calling in sick to …show more content…
The ten types of lies Ericsson talks about are the white lie, façades, ignoring the plain facts, deflecting, omission, stereotypes and clichés, groupthink, out-and-out lies, dismissal, and delusion. A white lie is a lie we tell in order to prevent more harm than good if we were to have told the truth. Façades are the way that we present ourselves to make it seems as we are better than we actually are. What ignoring the plain facts means is that even if you know someone or something is problematic and you continue to use their services because it will somehow benefit you. Deflecting is a method of lying that some people use to shift the focus of a lie off of them and onto someone else. Omission is purposely leaving out details in a lie that might get you into trouble. Stereotypes and clichés are considered a form of lying because they do not allow us to think for ourselves as to what is the truth. A groupthink lie occurs when something bad could have been prevented by a group of people but said group claims they knew nothing about the occurrence. Out-and-out lies are absurd lies you tell someone and they know automatically that you are lying. Dismissal lies are told when we do not want to deal with someone else’s problems. The last lie that Ericsson talks about is delusion and that is when we use “excuses as …show more content…
Some of the consequences of lying that Ericsson refers to in the beginning of her essay are the destruction of trust and someone else receiving a punishment for your lie. When someone takes advantage of your trust in them that is when trust is destroyed. I once lost all trust in one of my acquaintances in middle school when I entrusted her with the duty of bringing a flash drive that contained our presentation on it the next day. She failed to bring the flash drive and we received a zero on our presentation and because of that, I did not trust her with any of my work from that point on. There have been many instances between my sister and I where we put the blame on the other person, when in fact it was one of our faults, which would result in one of us getting a punishment that we did not deserve. Sometimes we would feel guilty about getting each other in trouble but we quickly got over