People lie for various reasons. The truth is that everyone lies and everyone is lied to. Below you will find the most common reasons that people lie.

• Fear of harm: The easiest reason to understand why we lie is for self protection, including self deception, to prevent harm to ourselves. This harm can be either physical or mental.
  
  
• Fear of conflict: To some degree, we all fear having an argument.
  
  
• Fear of punishment: When growing up, how often did we lie about how well we did in school, or who started a fight? How often do we cover up our mistakes and transgressions?
  
  
• Fear of rejection: Sometimes, our insecurities are the foundation of why we lie to each other, because we want to be remain popular in our relationships. Typically, it is harmless boasting to make ourselves appear more admirable to other people.
  
  
• Fear of loss: This is usually the loss of personal objects, such as money or expensive valuables. Greed is the foundation for this reason and can be found in each of us. We often lie to make ourselves more desirable to other people too. Most common, people lie for fear of losing an opportunity to have sex. Other times, when our self esteem starts to decline, we even lie to ourselves as means to prevent loss of morale.
  
  
• Altruistic Reasons: We often lie to help our friends and loved ones. How often do we flattery someone just to make them feel better? This is the only selfless reason why we lie.

While it is important to understand the different reasons that people lie, it is even more important to know when they are lying. There are proven methods that anyone can learn that will allow them to become a "human lie detector". Once these methods are learned, getting lied to (and not knowing it) becomes a thing of the past.

©2010 Greg Schmidt

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