Arthur C. Brooks breaks down three types of lies: self-centered exaggerations to look good, other-oriented lies to spare feelings, and altruistic lies to protect someone else. In close relationships, people mostly tell the second and third kinds, prioritizing protection over truth.
Psychologists writing in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships talked about the big 3 types of lies. Number 1 are self-centered lies to influence others or to make a good impression. A self-burnishing lie, that's lifting yourself up. Exaggeration falls into that particular category to make yourself actually look better. The second type of lie are other-oriented lies to protect the feelings of a person you're lying to. So, you know, people say to me, it's like, you haven't aged a day. It's like, yeah, really? You need to get your eyes checked. You're kidding me. You're not going to say you have lost a lot of hair because it's sort of not polite, or they think that it's going to actually be a problem for the relationship. Now, with me, it's actually not going to hurt my feelings very much because the truth is the truth, to be sure. But people do that all the time. Number 3 is altruistic lies to protect a third party. That would go into the kind of category of, "She was with me all night, officer." In other words, to create an alibi or something where you lie to protect somebody. Now, here's the interesting part about that. With close friends and romantic partners, we're most likely to tell other-oriented and altruistic lies because we love them and we think that we're actually being better with them by doing those things, by lying to them so that we won't hurt their feelings and lying to protect them.
