Winking at the truth

Headlines from the past few months suggest that Americans wince when they think their heroes are lying to them.

News reports plead for honesty: Did the Bush administration lie about an Iraqi weapons program? Did John Kerry lie about throwing away his Vietnam War medals? Did Pentagon brass lie about orders given to torture Iraqi prisoners?

Though the public expects truth and bristles when the feds lie, wider trends indicate those same outraged Americans are increasingly telling lies of their own to get ahead in school, business and relationships — and apparently feel OK about it. For example:

• 74 percent of high school students, in a 2002 survey of 12,000 respondents, said they had cheated on an exam at least once in the past year, according to the Josephson Institute of Ethics. In 1992, 61 percent of students reported having cheated. The latest craze is to use cellular phones to photograph exams and show friends in the following class.

• After doing 3.8 million background checks, Automatic Data Processing Inc. announced in April that 52 percent of job applicants had lied on their resumes.

• The list of corporate executives accused of lying to defraud investors now includes those of Tyco, Enron, WorldCom and Parmalat.

In the high-pressure, high-stakes environment of 21st- century America, lying has for many apparently become a way of life, even among those whose faith demands truth-telling. People may know it's wrong to lie in theory, researchers say, but in practice they feel the success they want will be out of reach if they admit their flaws and sins along the way.

"They think, 'If I'm playing by rules that no one else plays by, then I'm disadvantaging myself in a way that's apt to play out over a lifetime,' " says David Callahan, author of "The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead." "When various pressures come together, it's enough to push aside those other strictures people follow with regard to honesty."

In today's religious smorgasbord, where more than 80 percent of Americans pray regularly, most traditions still regard honesty as a core virtue. From the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments, which prohibit the bearing of false witness, to the Zoroastrian belief that lying destroys holy order, the faiths that guide Americans almost universally insist on truth-telling as a necessity for respectable living.

This professed code, however, seems to be holding little sway against what some call "pressures" and others call "temptations." Explanations for today's lying crisis vary according to the implications.