THE WHOLE TRUTH
Honesty is more rewarding than we think. Done right, frank conversations can bring us closer to friends, family and work colleagues.
Done right, honest conversations can bring us closer to our friends and family.
When Dhanishka’s* six-year-old daughter was playing with a friend, Dhanishka was shocked to overhear the young girl say, “Our family don’t like brown people.”
Dhanishka is Indian, and she had never imagined that her friends might be racist. She had two choices – either let the comment slide, or confront her friends about it. Despite feeling “really awkward and uncomfortable”, Dhanishka chose the latter. Having the hard conversation revealed the girl had mistaken her parents’ warning about tanning as a dislike for all “brown” people. Both parties were relieved when the truth came out.
New research has shown that people can often afford to be more honest than they think. The 2018 study, conducted at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and then published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, found that people significantly overestimate the costs of honest conversations.
A researcher on the study, Assistant Professor Emma Levine, explains that honest conversations are more enjoyable than communicators anticipate, and the listeners react less negatively than expected. Levine says that people actually appreciate such conversations. “They were indeed uncomfortable, and they did induce conflict,” she says. “For example, there were fights within close relationships and within the workplace as a result of practicing complete honesty.
“However, participants did really seem to appreciate the conversations after they occurred and were grateful for the experience.”
This was the case for Dhanishka, who felt “so relieved” after speaking up. “I felt a lot better about myself and I’m glad I did it,” she states.
Our brains are wired to anticipate negative consequences over positive ones – including those of honesty, says counselling psychotherapist Dr Karen Phillip. She says this happens because our parents repeatedly warned us about the potential for harm as a consequence of our behaviour, such as falling if we climb too high or getting burned by a hotplate.
“This primes our brains throughout childhood to look to the negative – at the protection mechanism – and we take that into adulthood,” Phillip says.
Rachel Service is the founder and director of Happiness Concierge, a corporate training company. She says people often “freak out” about having difficult conversations because they’ve “had an awful experience – like getting fired or being broken up with”.
This can mean we go into a “fight, flight or freeze” response when anticipating honest conversations, she says. “Unfortunately, this closes us off from possibilities and opportunities that having constructive and mutually respectful conversations can present.”
Fear is a key reason that people don’t speak the truth, agrees Elly Johnson, a truth and deception communication specialist. “You weigh up the consequences, and when you’ve got a whole lot of unknown quantities – particularly if you’re new in a relationship [or] job – you really don’t know what’s going to happen next and you think it’s best that I don’t say anything.”
Johnson, a former police officer for 17 years, has seen her share of dishonesty. She says: “When people choose to hide the truth or to lie, it’s either to avoid a pain or to make a gain.” Johnson knows firsthand one benefit of honesty – avoiding regret. While doing the test for her police driver’s licence, her senior sergeant took her down a dirt road.
“When we stopped, the next thing he’s unzipped his pants and told me, ‘Hey can you help me out here?’ I’m 22, I needed my police driver’s license – but I thought, ‘There’s no way I’m going there.’ He said, ‘Do you want your licence or not?’ and I said, ‘I’d like to get back to the station’.” Flustered, Johnson went through a stop sign and failed the test.
“I was stuck in this truth dilemma, thinking I need to speak up about this inappropriate behaviour … but I have only just started my police career … and what’s going to happen to me if I’m honest? I didn’t tell anyone for my whole police career and I regret that,” she says.
Dr Phillip explains that the transparency in honest disclosures is usually regarded as positive, even if we are initially offended at what has been said. She says once people get over the initial shock, they can “validate what the person has said because it’s come from an honest perspective – not a mean, nasty or untruthful perspective”. Dr Phillip says this process may take a few days, but once our defensive reactions and emotions settle, we can rationally evaluate what was said.
Service explains that we learn the most from honest conversations – both in our work and personal lives. Honest communication helps us to achieve our personal and professional goals, she says. “Reminding people of what their goals are – and giving them breadcrumbs to get closer to that – is one of the most helpful ways to influence positive behaviour. Being given the chance to receive feedback and learn in a safe and supported way makes you feel heard and more likely to commit to improving.”
Service says honesty is about mutual respect, and deepening connections with people you care about – whether that’s a family member, friend or colleague. She adds that the benefits of learning how to give and how to receive honest feedback are worth the risk.
“When it is delivered in the right way, with the right intentions, then both sides have the chance to walk away from the conversation feeling clear on what is expected of them … and more capable at this crucial life and work skill of having constructive conversations,” she states.
Levine does note that complete honesty can have its downsides, too. “Relational partners may not always be prepared for complete honesty, and acquaintances and co-workers may not trust a communicator’s motives enough to appreciate difficult conversations,” she says.
Johnson describes one scenario that may not end well. She knows a married man who has a five-year- old child to another woman. “He doesn’t know how to tell his wife. It’s like watching a train wreck unfold.”
She tells another story about William and Sarah, who met when she was 25 and he was 37. Worried she would “run away” if she knew his age, he told her he was 32. The relationship blossomed – and as it did so, William found it increasingly hard to own up as the weeks stretched into years.
After three years of deception – celebrating the wrong birthdays and hiding any documents with his birth date – William was “considerably stressed most of the time,” Johnson says. When he confessed, “They broke up for a couple of weeks and then she went crying back to her parents.”
“He was devastated, but he was glad he told her the truth because he couldn’t hide it anymore,” Johnson says. “After two or three weeks they started talking again. He explained it all and she forgave him.” They have now been married for years.
Service agrees that it can be a challenge to tell the truth and hear the truth. “It doesn’t feel great to tell someone they disappointed you or are not reaching expectations.”
She adds that “delivering feedback without care may cause the person hearing it to believe you aren’t genuine, don’t care about their success, or know better than them” – leading to a loss of respect.
“Getting clear on what you want to say, why you want to say it and how you’re going to deliver it in an open and respectful way is crucial if we want to improve future behaviour,” Service says.
For example, a boss who needs to have a frank conversation with an employee who isn’t meeting targets must remember they “care about this person and want to see them succeed … You are both invested in them being the best they can be”.
So, how do you decide whether to have that honest conversation? Johnson says that after weighing up the pros and cons, it all comes down to how much importance you place on that honesty and truthfulness.
Service uses the concept of “truth circles” to help people make informed choices (see breakout box, left).
It also depends on how important the issue is. As Philip notes, not every little thing needs to be said. “If what you’re saying to a person is not going to aid them in any way or achieve an outcome, then it’s often best not to be said at all,” she says.
For example, if a loved one gets a “horrific” haircut, you don’t have to say you love or hate it. “We can say, ‘Wow, that is so unusual’,” Dr Phillip says. “In that case, being honest will not serve the person well and there’s no real purpose to it except to vent our personal opinion.”
With her work in family mediation, Dr Phillip has regular “conversations [that] can be incredibly confronting and difficult”. She highly recommends people approach any sort of “disclosure or conversation … with respect, honesty and kindness”.
One effective method is the ‘sandwich technique’ which “enables us to process faster without feeling attacked”. Starting and finishing a conversation with something positive (the ‘bread’), makes the more difficult ‘filling’ easier to swallow. Never join them with ‘ but’, though – it negates anything positive you’ve said.
Dr Phillip also says not to “sit there and discuss and unpack the problem – which is what [we] tend to naturally do”. Instead, try to move quickly toward a solution. For the person initiating the conversation, she advises coming armed with a couple of potential solutions, and allowing the other person to decide which way to go. This helps people take ownership of a situation and makes them more likely to work towards that solution than if they were told what to do or how to do it. She says this works particularly well with teenagers.
Levine says that although we should be cautious about adopting complete honesty as a general strategy, the key message is that honesty is more rewarding than you think. “If you have something to say that you believe would make others better off, then you should know that your fears about speaking up are likely exaggerated.”
“Your fears about speaking up are likely exaggerated.” PROFESSOR EMMA LEVINE