May 11, 2021 Katie Hafner THE WASHINGTON POST – Every day we tell many small untruths, lies uttered by mutual consent that keep societal interactions civil. We say “How are you today?” when we don’t really care to know, or “That was a lovely dinner” when the meal tasted terrible. Parents reproach their children for failing to supply a polite answer instead of the real one. Then there are the lies we tell ourselves. Researchers have found that patients with an optimistic outlook in the face of a terminal medical prognosis will outlive those with a realistic sense of their disease. “If you think of benevolent deception and optimistic self-deception not as vice and weakness, but as adaptive responses to difficult circumstances,” Shankar Vedantam wrote in his powerful new book,