Honesty may be the best policy – but that doesn’t mean we always stick to it. Yudhijit Bhattacharjee joins us to talk about how humans are actually wired to occasionally venture from the truth. His story “Why We Lie” appears in the June issue of National Geographic magazine.

Yudhijit Bhattacharjee on … 

… how humans have developed a system for our deception:

“There’s kind of a social compact. We’ve arrived at some kind of unwritten consensus about how much lying is acceptable. How much exaggeration is acceptable. You can’t spend a week away from work saying that you’re sick if you really aren’t sick. But you might be able to get away with an afternoon or maybe even two.”