How would you experience getting your preference to be lied to without thereby knowing the unpleasant truth that you wanted to avoid?
It’s not usually (though it is sometimes) a preference to be lied to in this particular instance—it’s a preference to be told a nice thing regardless of whether that nice thing is factually true. Being told nice things can feel good even if it doesn’t cause you to update your beliefs—and sometimes even if you believe the nice statement is false.
How would you safely determine that someone prefers to be lied to, without exposing them to the truth they might not want?
There are a few ways someone can express that preference.
1) In some circumstances this is the normal expected social default. “How did you like my play?” to a friend is usually not a question that gets answered with perfect honesty if the play was not good. People who want an unusual answer from normal people need to ask the question in an unusual way (which is not very hard—you can say something like “If I were to work on doing something better next time, what would you recommend?” or “do you think it’s ready to bring to off-Broadway, or should I spend some time improving it?”, or “could you honestly recommend this to your friends?”, or some other question that implies that an honest adverse answer would be valuable, or makes a lie more costly).
2) If you’re friends with someone, you already have a track record. If they’ve said things you wish they hadn’t said, you’ve had plenty of opportunities to tell them so. If they want to be a good friend to you, they will pay attention and try to change their behavior.
3) Just like in situations where a white lie would be expected there are ways to ask that get around that, in a situation where a white lie would not be expected there are ways to imply that you expect a nice answer. “Don’t you think that was great?” or “I’m so happy my play came off well! What did you think?” is asking for affirmation, not objective evaluation. This feels harder than the unusual asking in (1), but that might just be because I’ve never had occasion to develop this social skill.
if you lie to someone who doesn’t prefer it, I hope we can agree that’s worse than the other way round.
I personally dislike the former more than the latter, but I am not sure this is true in literally every case. For example, if someone has an ugly baby I don’t think I harm them very much by saying “aww how cute!”, but I am reasonably likely to harm the friendship if I state my honest opinion. However I do think it’s best to err on the side of honesty if you’re not sure which way is best, and it’s valuable to develop an ability to give polite evasions when necessary instead of lying. That might just be my personal aesthetic preference for truth-telling, though—I couldn’t give you a lot of examples where everyone was better off when I gave a polite evasion than if I’d just told a white lie instead.
It’s not usually (though it is sometimes) a preference to be lied to in this particular instance—it’s a preference to be told a nice thing regardless of whether that nice thing is factually true. Being told nice things can feel good even if it doesn’t cause you to update your beliefs—and sometimes even if you believe the nice statement is false.
There are a few ways someone can express that preference.
1) In some circumstances this is the normal expected social default. “How did you like my play?” to a friend is usually not a question that gets answered with perfect honesty if the play was not good. People who want an unusual answer from normal people need to ask the question in an unusual way (which is not very hard—you can say something like “If I were to work on doing something better next time, what would you recommend?” or “do you think it’s ready to bring to off-Broadway, or should I spend some time improving it?”, or “could you honestly recommend this to your friends?”, or some other question that implies that an honest adverse answer would be valuable, or makes a lie more costly).
2) If you’re friends with someone, you already have a track record. If they’ve said things you wish they hadn’t said, you’ve had plenty of opportunities to tell them so. If they want to be a good friend to you, they will pay attention and try to change their behavior.
3) Just like in situations where a white lie would be expected there are ways to ask that get around that, in a situation where a white lie would not be expected there are ways to imply that you expect a nice answer. “Don’t you think that was great?” or “I’m so happy my play came off well! What did you think?” is asking for affirmation, not objective evaluation. This feels harder than the unusual asking in (1), but that might just be because I’ve never had occasion to develop this social skill.
I personally dislike the former more than the latter, but I am not sure this is true in literally every case. For example, if someone has an ugly baby I don’t think I harm them very much by saying “aww how cute!”, but I am reasonably likely to harm the friendship if I state my honest opinion. However I do think it’s best to err on the side of honesty if you’re not sure which way is best, and it’s valuable to develop an ability to give polite evasions when necessary instead of lying. That might just be my personal aesthetic preference for truth-telling, though—I couldn’t give you a lot of examples where everyone was better off when I gave a polite evasion than if I’d just told a white lie instead.