Lezing
SG-activity – Cheating: Lying in Everyday Life
We all agree that lying is wrong. Nevertheless most of us do it every day. Why do we lie, even though we think it's wrong?
Social psychologist Wolfgang Steinel expounds the simple perception of lying as the result of a cost-benefit calculation. He shows that whether we lie or not depends on the importance of the goals we want to achieve, in relation to the means we have at our disposition. Lying being only one of those means.
Complementing this instrumental view on deception, Steinel presents a perspective which basically claims that the temptation to lie and cheat is an integral part of being a thinking, feeling human. Is all we need a justification for our lies?
Dr. Wolfgang Steinel graduated from Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, and received his PhD from the University of Amsterdam, for his dissertation on misleading in social decision making. Wolfgang Steinel is working as an assistant professor at Leiden University, where is teaching various courses in the bachelor and the master program, including ‘Negotiation and Social Decision Making’, ‘Cooperation & Conflict’, and supervises bachelor and master theses.
Within his broader research interest, the interplay between motivational and strategic determinants of conflict and negotiation behavior, his research focuses on two areas, namely information exchange in interdependent decision-making, and representative negotiation.