Bohong adalah Baik

Banyak orang mengaku bahwa mereka menghargai kejujuran.
Namun ternyata pada kenyataannya orang itu lebih suka mendengar apa yg
ingin didengarnya daripada kejujuran yg pahit didengar.

Bohong juga memberikan dampak psikologis yg baik pada diri sendiri. Dari surver ternyata orang-orang depresi itu adalah orang-orang yg lebih jujur pada dirinya sendiri dibandingkan dengan orang yg optimis yg cenderung membohongi dirinya sendiri. Dan seorang mulai sembuh dari depresi ketika dia mulai bisa membohongi dirinya lagi dan mulai tidak jujur pada dirinya sendiri.

Intinya, walaupun kita menghargai kejujuran, namun kita juga
menghargai kebohongan. Hanya saja, supaya tetap tampak konsisten,
kadang kita menamai bohong itu dengan nama lain seperti "basa basi"
atau "sopan santun".

Lengkapnya bisa dibaca pada artikel yang dipublikasikan oleh Forbes
pada link di bawah.

Bagaimana menurut pendapat teman-teman ?

salam,

-bank al-

Note: Tulisan ini didapat dari postingan Santo di milis Psikologi 

Dikutip dari: http://www.forbes.com/2005/10/19/lying-dishonesty-psychology_cx_lr_comm05_1024lie.html

Lying Is Good For You
Lacey Rose, 10.24.05, 9:00 AM ET

If I told you lying was good for you, you probably wouldn't believe me. But
trust me--I'm not lying.

Simply put, we lie because it works. When we do it well, we get what we
want.

We lie to avoid awkwardness or punishment. We lie to maintain relationships
and please others. And, of course, most of all we lie to please ourselves.
Whether we're embellishing our credentials or strengthening our stories, we
often tell untruths to make ourselves appear and feel better.

What's more, we lie all the time. In 2002, Robert Feldman, a psychology
professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, conducted a study
in which he secretly videotaped student's conversations with strangers.
After the fact, he had the students examine the videotapes and identify the
untruths. On average, they claim to have told three lies per ten minutes of
conversation.

And that number is likely far too low. First, we're likely to underreport
the number of lies we tell (we lie about lying, that is). And Feldman's
study only accounted for lies of the verbal variety, ignoring other
deceptive behavior--misleading body language or facial expressions, for
example.

In fact, we lie so readily that the dishonesty becomes automatic. Most of
the time, we're not even aware of the lies we tell, explains David Smith,
director of the New England Institute at the University of New England and
author of Why We Lie. He says we lie best when we don't know we're lying.
"We don't have the nervousness or broadcast the tell-tale signs of unease
that the intentional liar can barely help," he explains. "Self-deception is
the handmaiden of deceit--in hiding the truth from ourselves, we're able to
hide it more fully from others."

But why are we so dishonest so often? Isn't honesty always the best policy?
In fact, no. Nobody wants to hear that they look heavier or less attractive.
In truth, we consider those who are too honest to be blunt, antisocial and
even pathological. A recent study found that adolescents who are most
popular with their peers were the ones that were the best at being
deceptive.

And lying has proven psychological benefits. For instance, there's
scientific evidence showing that depressive people are more honest with
themselves than nondepressive, or mentally healthy, people. When people
recover from their depressions, they become less honest.

Strangely enough, despite the frequency with which we lie, we are pretty bad
at it. Lying--at least the intentional kind--isn't easy. "It takes more work
to tell a lie than it does to tell the truth," says Maureen O'Sullivan,
professor of psychology at the University of San Francisco. "You have to not
only make up something, but also watch me to make sure I'm believing you."

But don't worry too much. People are easily fooled. "There is no Pinocchio's
nose," explains Paul Ekman, professor emeritus of psychology at the
University of California, San Francisco. "There's no sign that is always
present when someone lies and always absent when someone is truthful." As a
result, research shows that we're only slightly better than chance level at
detecting deception.

"Our default assumption is that people are telling the truth," says Feldman.
And often, we don't actually want to hear the truth. If we hear what we want
to hear, we accept it, true or not.

Take the example of evaluating a colleague's work. When we ask a friend if
we did a good job, we want the response to be yes, regardless of its
legitimacy. Once we hear it, we're unmotivated to probe further.

"So while we'd like to say we value honesty, we also value dishonesty," says
the University of New England's Smith. After all, we've been taught the
importance of lying from a very early age. The catch is, we don't call it
lying, we call it tact or social grace.