My son, Ed, has been a high school English teacher for 27 years. In the late 1990s, he told me the story of an assignment he received from a student that looked suspicious.
Ed noticed that the typeface in the student’s paper was inconsistent, but also that a URL for a webpage was at the bottom of the last page. When Ed went to the URL on his computer, he found that the majority of the student’s paper had been cut and pasted from the website into a Word document, an original introduction had been written (thus the different typeface), and the student handed in the paper as their own work.
The student received a zero for the assignment and was asked to meet with his teacher. When Ed called up the webpage from which the paper had been lifted word for word, the student’s response was: “How did my paper get on the internet?”
Ed’s story came to mind as I was exploring how people respond to getting caught in a lie or misdeed. Sadly, a natural response to getting caught is to deny the action and, if confronted, to double down, insist on innocence, or to tell more lies to cover up the original lie.
I’ve told the story before of how as a 12-year-old, I found a pinball machine at a local arcade that had free games on it before I deposited any money and that kept offering more free games no matter how long I’d played, regardless of my score. When the arcade operator came over and asked if I had paid for the games, my initial response was to say “yes.” After his eyes went to the coin slot that was covered by tape, I knew I had been caught in a lie. He let me leave without comment, but the shame of getting caught stuck with me.
But for many, when the tape is not on the coin slot, the temptation is to go from fear of getting caught to shame of getting caught to panic that if you don’t embrace the lie with vigor, all is lost.
Such behavior is in common view not only among us common folk, but also in high relief among politicians, celebrities and others in the news. Often when the high-profile person is caught, their top-notch handlers go into action and concoct a sincere statement of contrition. It’s rare but sadly not uncommon for some to show no remorse and go on to engage in more lies.
It’s not always a lie. Sometimes it’s getting caught laughing at a joke told at someone else’s expense, recognizing that such behavior was wrong, and then doing something to compensate for our original inappropriateness but doing something far worse.
Most of us don’t have the luxury of high-priced handlers to do damage control. The right thing, of course, is to avoid lying or engaging in acts we know to be wrong before we do them. But when caught, the ethical response is to acknowledge the wrong, to avoid casting blame or excuses, and to apologize.
Sure, doing so might result in undesirable consequences. But more often than not, it’s not only the original lie we tell that wreaks havoc on our and sometimes others’ lives, but also the lies we tell to cover the lies we told.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.
Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.
Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.
(c) 2022 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.
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