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Total honesty ends friendships
The case for honesty
Radical honesty is a trend with a loud advocate: psychotherapist Brad Blanton argues for living out loud, with nothing guarded, careful, or afraid of being found out. Hard times come now and then, but they get cleaned up because everybody tells the truth.
Why friendships need tact
Friendships, romances, and working relationships between supervisors and the people they supervise rest on a tacit assumption of mutual respect and generosity. Blurting out that a friend's comment was stupid chips at it. Without it, there would be no long-term, stable relationships of cooperation.
The seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal put the same idea this way: if everyone said what was on their mind, there would not be four friends in the world. Picture a hidden microphone in a dining room, recording the unguarded talk with family and close friends, printed the next day in The New York Times. A person who has broken no laws would still be in deep trouble.
In the movie Tootsie, Jessica Lange's character wishes a man would just walk up and say he finds her interesting and would like to make love with her. Later, Dustin Hoffman's character, no longer in disguise, walks up to her at a cocktail party and says it, and she throws a glass of wine in his face.
How often do people actually lie?
In 1996, psychologist Bella DePaulo and colleagues published diary studies in which participants recorded every lie they told over a week. College students reported about two lies a day and community members about one. Most were small, such as saying they liked a gift or hiding minor feelings. Participants also rated these everyday lies as carrying little seriousness.
How does politeness hold relationships together?
Sociologist Erving Goffman described in 1955 how people perform face-work, small actions that protect their own and others' public self-image. He argued that most social encounters run on an unspoken agreement to avoid exposing each other. Pretending not to notice an embarrassing slip is one of his examples. His essay On Face-Work remains a foundation for later theories of politeness.
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