Since early childhood, a person is taught that a lie in any shape or form is a bad human quality and it should be excluded regardless of the situation. A child perceives the surrounding reality in its simplest form without taking into consideration different aspects of social life. It has been well said that truth comes out from the mouths of babes. However, in a process of growing up a person begins to realize that society is more complicated, the world cannot be subdivided into black and white and the variety of lies is very broad.
Such notion as a white lie may be viewed from several aspects. In situations of interpersonal communication a lie is entirely permissible and in several cases even necessary.
Sometimes a lie is necessary when the life of a person is at stake. For instance, when a person is seriously ill it is better to keep the truth away from him in order not to distress the patient. Sometimes the necessity of a lie is stipulated in case of criminal investigation. In certain cases, a lie can save family relations and insure a person from grief or even from a psychological trauma. In these particular cases, a lie serves noble purposes and it may be called as a noble lie. Though the moral aspects of it are rather disputable, it differs greatly from white lie telling in situations of everyday communication.
In this situation, white lies are used as the generalized norms of comity. In most cultures, this type of a lie is viewed as a natural occurrence that is predetermined by communicative situations in which “the truth may be trivial or even hurtful to its recipient” (Talwar, Murphy, & Lee, 2007, p.1). For instance there is hardly a person who expresses his dissatisfaction with an undesirable gift or tells the truth concerning somebodys corporal defects. From this point of view, everyone may be considered as a liar.
Talwar et al. (2007) suggest that this ability to distinguish between the different aspects of lies depending on a situation may be observed in early childhood. On order to confirm this suggestion they have conducted an experiment, in which children have been given undesirable gifts and they have been asked to express their emotions towards it. During the experiment, the prevailing number of children preferred not to express their true thought, but to resort to white lie telling. Moreover, there was a distinct dependence between the ability to tell a white lie and the age of the participants.
It is possible to conclude that being a social creature every individual is highly dependent upon the existing norms. Since early childhood, a person faces with an obvious contradiction between the necessity to tell the truth and the social standards. As aged increased a persons ability to white lite telling increases correspondently.
At the same time, it is possible to distinguish between a noble lie, which is necessary in situations of emergency, and a white lie, which is predetermined by the existing social standards. Taking into consideration the moral aspects of a noble lie, it is possible to conclude that the decision whether to lie or not is made by each person individually in accordance with a situation. However, a white lie as an integrated part of sociocultural norms practically cannot be avoided.
Reference List
Talwar, V., Murphy, S., & Lee, K. (2007). White lie-telling children for politeness purposes. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 31(1), 1-11. Web.