9 White Lies Women Tell That You'll Probably Never Catch (Many Are Meant to Spare Your Feelings)

The post 9 White Lies Women Tell That You’ll Probably Never Catch (Many Are Meant to Spare Your Feelings) first appeared in Crafting Your Home.

You catch a lie less than half the time. In a review of 206 studies covering 24,483 people, listeners told truth from lies just 54 percent of the time, and they flagged only 47 percent of the actual lies.

Small, kind fibs slip by most of all. In a classic diary study of everyday lying from 1996, 147 people logged every lie they told for a week. Per conversation, men and women lied about as often. The difference showed up in the type of lie. When women talked with other women, lies told to protect someone’s feelings were as common as self-serving ones. In any pair that included a man, self-serving lies won by two to one or more.

A week later, the tellers knew of fewer than one in four lies that had been found out.

So here are nine white lies drawn from that research. Men tell every one of them too. What the diaries showed is that women’s kind lies cluster in talks with other women, so the person being fooled is often another woman.

Lies about how she feels

1. “I love it.”

Before the diary study, lead researcher Bella DePaulo had people discuss paintings they disliked with the art students who had painted them. Women were more likely than men to hide their real opinion from the artist. With paintings by someone else, the gap vanished. The team read that as care for the artist’s feelings.

2. “These are the best muffins ever.”

That one is close to a real diary entry. Feelings were the top subject of lies in the study: about 37 percent of lies among the college students and about 30 percent among the adults from the wider community.

3. “No, I don’t mind.”

Saying you don’t mind when you do counted as faking a good feeling. About a quarter of all the lies in both groups were of that type. Faking a bad feeling made up 3 percent or less.

4. “It’s your color.”

Asian beautiful women Are buying clothes with a saleswoman

One person in the study wrote down telling a customer just that. Lies about the listener tended to be the kind ones, told for the listener’s sake and not the teller’s.

5. “What a great party.”

The authors raised this exact bind: what does a woman do when she isn’t having a good time at a friend’s party? Their guess, and they called it a guess, was that she doesn’t hunt for a tactful truth. For her, the friend’s feelings outrank the facts.

Lies about where she is and what she’ll do

6. “I’m on my way.”

Cornell researchers named these “butler lies,” after the butlers who once kept unwelcome visitors at the door. In their 2009 field study of 50 instant-message users, senders rated about one in ten of their own messages as lies, and about a fifth of those were polite fibs for starting or ending a chat. The published summary gives no split by gender.

7. “Sorry, I already have plans.”

In research published in 2023, 77 percent of people in a pilot study admitted they had said yes to an invite they didn’t want because they feared the fallout of saying no. Five tests with more than 2,000 people then found that fear was overblown. Those who declined expected more anger and letdown than the inviters felt, even when the stated reason was a plain wish to stay home and relax.

8. “We should get together sometime.”

One diary entry reads, “Said I would go out with him sometime but I won’t.” Lies about actions, plans, and whereabouts made up more than a quarter of the total in both groups.

9. The dating-profile number.

When a research team weighed and measured 80 online daters in New York City for a 2008 study and checked the results against their profiles, women lied more about their weight and men lied more about their height. It’s a fudge more than a white lie, and it has a short shelf life: a first date exposes it.

What to do with this

The diary study has limits. It’s 30 years old, it leaned on people to report their own lies, and it asked only the tellers. The authors noted that the people on the receiving end might see those “kind” lies in a different light. Even the tellers rated talks that included a lie as less pleasant and less close than honest ones.

The most useful finding may be the newest one. People who decline with the truth get a softer landing than they expect. If you’d rather hear “I want to stay in tonight” than a made-up excuse, the surest move is to take the honest answer well the first time you get it.

9 White Lies Women Tell That You’ll Probably Never Catch (Many Are Meant to Spare Your Feelings)