honesty

Honesty is speaking truth and creating trust in minds of others. This includes all varieties of communication, both verbal and non-verbal. Honesty implies a lack of deceit. A statement can be strictly true and still be dishonest if the intention of the statement is to deceive its audience. Similarly, a falsehood can be spoken honestly if the speaker actually believes it to be true. Conversely, dishonesty can be defined simply as behavior that is performed with intent to deceive. Lying by commission, lying by omission, fraud, and plagiarism are all examples of this sort of behavior. Other examples can be doing one thing and telling the other, as if you are hiding something.

Honesty is typically considered virtuous behavior, and has strong positive connotations in most situations.

Morality

While there are a great many moral systems, generally speaking, honesty is considered moral and dishonesty is considered immoral. There are several exceptions, such as hedonism, which values honesty only insofar as it improves ones own sense of pleasure, and moral nihilism, which denies the existence of objective morality outright. Additionally, even in moral systems which approve in general of honesty over dishonesty, there are situations in which dishonesty may be preferable.

Psychology

Two theories of honesty exist.^[1] First, the ‘‘Will’’ hypothesis in which honesty comes from the active resistance of temptation and links to the controlled cognitive processes that enable delay in regard to reward. Second, the ‘‘Grace’’ hypothesis in which honesty comes from the absence of temptation and links to research upon the presence or absence of automatic processes in determining behavior. Most people tend to favor the Will hypothesis.^[1] However, functional imaging and reaction time research supports the latter hypothesis since individuals that are honest in a situation in which they can lie showed no sign of engaging additional controlled cognitive processes.^[1]

References

See also

• Truth