Lean Back, Smile, Lie

In settings like sports or reality TV, strategic deception is encouraged. Does mutual expectation make lying morally permissible?

Picture this: you’re taking your seat in your regular poker game, you’re dealt a seemingly average hand, say a suited seven and ten. Not bad, you may think, as you decide to ante into the hand. Play proceeds around the table until the dealer places down the flop, and the three cards appear one by one: an eight, a nine, and then a three. You try your best to hide a smirk, knowing a straight could be in your midst. Your eyes scan across the room; nobody else seems confident, so you increase the bet tenfold. Two other players match and the hand continues. Then the fourth card appears, a second three, a card which helps you in no way. At this point, you and everybody else in the pot have already bet so much money that folding is not an option. Hence, you decide to do one thing universally accepted in poker—lie. You pretend to muffle a laugh and then lean back in your chair, appearing relaxed, when in reality that card did nothing for you. The other players seem nervous—you must have a good hand: trip threes, a full house, maybe even four threes. The truth, of course, is that you don’t; you are sitting on no more than a straight draw with one chance left. But this doesn’t matter; you play up the antics even more come the river, an eight, which kills any chance of getting a straight. However, you pose with confidence and make a snide comment: “Are you sure any of you want to stay in?” and then increase the bet twofold. Your friends, now sure you must be holding trip threes at least, decide to fold, and you win the hand. A massive pot, and yet you had nothing. You lied, and you walked away a whole lot richer for it. And here’s the strangest part: nobody sitting around you thinks you did anything wrong. The very same act—looking someone in the eye and selling them a falsehood—would end a friendship if you attempted it at school or a party. Yet, at the poker table, it’s just good play.

That contradiction is precisely what Albert Carr set out not to resolve, but to defend. An economic adviser to Franklin Roosevelt and a special consultant to Harry Truman before he turned to writing full-time, Carr argued in his 1968 Harvard Business Review essay “Is Business Bluffing Ethical?” that the logic of the card table doesn’t stop in the casino. Business itself, he claimed, is in essence a game. Like poker, it runs on bluffs that would be condemned anywhere else. The honest player, the one who insists on telling the whole truth, ends up losing and misunderstands the game he plays in, while the liar is simply the one who used the tools at his disposal well, and walks away richer.

So far poker and, in turn, the business world have handed us an answer: deception in these specific environments is acceptable, expected, and, quite frankly, necessary to get ahead. So now let’s revisit the prior example. Suppose one of the two players you just bluffed out of that pot wasn’t a stranger, it was your best friend, someone you’ve known for fifteen years. Suppose you also know his mother is in the hospital, and that the money you just raked across the table was money he needed for her bills. Nothing about the game has changed. The rules are identical, the deception is still expected, and every player still sat down knowing they might be lied to. Yet now something feels unmistakably different. You weren’t trying to hurt your friend, but of course you did, indirectly, with a lie. The expectation that made your bluff feel clean a moment ago hasn’t gone anywhere; it simply no longer feels like enough.

With that example explained, let’s rewrite our prior claim that attempted to show that lying, when expected, is acceptable. In reality, expectation does some real moral work, but far less than we’ve credited it with. When deception is expected, it becomes more socially acceptable: much less shocking, less blameworthy, and easier to forgive, because the person who was lied to has in some way or another signed up for the possibility. But social acceptability is far from moral permission. Expectation lowers our direct outrage, however it absolutely does not dissolve the harm. The lie is still a lie, and the damage it does is still done, especially when combined with things like trust, friendship, or respect which go hand in hand with something being morally impermissible. Deception is more forgivable when expected but this does not mean it is morally correct, especially when emotions and feelings become involved.

Both poker and business highlight this discrepancy between social acceptability and moral permissibility, and I will call to your attention the best example of this same issue: the TV show Survivor. You may be a little surprised to hear that an article that before seemed serious and morally questioning is shifting focus to a reality television show set on an island. However, if you’re familiar with the show, which is widely regarded as the single greatest social experiment, this shift shouldn’t be surprising at all. For the many of you who are not familiar with the show, I’ll set the stage. Survivor strands a group of strangers in a remote, harsh environment (think Africa, Indonesia, or Brazil), and asks them to vote each other out, one by one, until a single player remains to claim the lustrous prize of one million dollars. Though starvation and fire-building are essential, true survival depends on one’s ability to persuade opponents, build alliances, and time betrayals perfectly. To last, you must get people to trust you; to win, you must break that trust at the right moment. The genius of the show, and the reason it has run for so long, lies in the jury: the people you blindside become the very people who decide whether your deception was brilliant gameplay or unforgivable treachery. The betrayed get the last word.

To analyze the power of lies in this game, let’s take the relationship between Lex van den Berghe and Rob Mariano. Both seasoned competitors on Survivor, competing in seasons three and four respectively, the two men were well versed in the deception the game calls for. A shared affinity for the game and their time in the Survivor community eventually made the two men close friends outside it. But this friendship would not last, as they were called back to play Survivor a second time, on the show’s eighth season, Survivor: All Stars. As the season progressed Rob forged a close relationship with fellow contestant Amber, the woman who eventually became his wife. At one point, Amber was in danger of getting voted out, something Rob strategically and emotionally couldn’t handle. So he called on his other closest friend, Lex, to protect Amber and in turn Rob promised that he, Lex and Amber would get to the end of the game together. Lex, who honored the two’s real-life friendship that existed outside of the game, did just that. He protected Amber, though it wasn’t in his best interest, and expected Rob to stay true to his word.

A few days later, Rob realized Lex was a threat to win, and single-handedly engineered his voting out despite the promise and the friendship. Lex, understandably, was distraught and bitter. Lex not only refused to vote for Rob but also convinced other jurors to withhold their votes. Amber ended up winning Survivor: All Stars, and Rob left a million dollars short, having also lost one of his closest friends. Rob had expected that the jury would grant him a pass for the deception, because that’s how the game works. However, the added moral and emotional aspect of Rob and Lex’s friendship muddied the waters and made his lying, usually acceptable by Survivor standards, morally wrong. He paid the price.

Now you’ve seen three specific and controlled environments where we carefully examine the difference between social acceptability and moral permissibility which should help you come to a conclusion of your own on this incredibly murky ethical dilemma. Every time, the lie was fine, right up until someone really got hurt. That’s the whole thing. Not whether you were expected to lie, or “allowed to”, or good at it. Whether someone who trusted you, loved you, or respected you, paid for it.

So I give you the moral thumbs up to tell your friend the hat looks great on them when it really doesn’t. It’s small. It’s kind. Nobody gets hurt. But put something real on the table, and it becomes a whole new game. Strip away the poker table, Wall Street, or the island, every place that ever told you it was okay to lie, and you’re left with the only thing that ever actually mattered.

Not the lie, but who believed it.