Although different cultures have different attitudes towards lies (or compliments) and the extent to which lies are told, there should be no controversy about the prevalence of lies in different cultures. In many cases, lies improve the liar's fitness, but excessive lying reduces social trust and increases social costs, so the proportion of lies or liars in the population should have a range. The size of this range has an impact on the degree of civilization of the society, and the society must have certain norms to restrain excessive lies, which will be a complex issue.
Another question here is, from the perspective of human evolution and the development of human behavior, how did the lie come about as part of language?
I think this should start from the social tendency of human beings, that is, people must first care about other people's evaluation of themselves, care about the evaluation of themselves in society, because this evaluation will affect their fitness in the crowd. When a person develops self-awareness, he also develops his mental imagination. Those who can better understand the intentions of others and cooperate with others will inevitably obtain more social resources and improve their status in the population and the probability of reproduction. And that would make this behavior genetically reinforced. With the beginning of this competition, a mechanism will gradually develop in the brain to make judgments on the evaluation or reaction of others to oneself. The behaviors that others think are good will be motivated and strengthened in the brain, and the behaviors that others think are bad will be stimulated and strengthened in the brain. It will be suppressed and rejected in the brain. And it is this brain mechanism that provides the material basis for lying or being willing to listen to other people's compliments.
In addition, this process can also be verified from the behavioral development of young children. How children begin to lie should not be much different from the early stages of human development. Children lie or say compliments in order to gain resources or avoid punishment from adults. Of course this requires more evidence.
A question that should also be considered is what is the relationship between the proportion and extent of lies across cultures and contexts? Is it related to the scarcity of social resources, such as the size of the competition pressure between people and so on? Could the more modesty and flattery in the Chinese language have something to do with this?
In the competition of different cultures, which culture (or what attitude towards lies) prevails in the end, and what determines it?
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