The New York Times reported a recent study by Brock University of 451 adults, aged 20 to 82. The study found that thirty-four percent of COVID-19-positive participants said that they had denied having symptoms when asked by others, and fifty-five percent reported some level of concealment of their symptoms.

The Times article is terrible. It cites a study on lying from 1996, and randomly interviews several psychologists, one of whom thinks that people typically tell three lies within the first ten minutes of meeting each other. This only illustrates how loosely lying is defined by many psychologists.

The Washington Post did better. It published a link to the study and interviewed Angela Evans, the psychology professor at Brock who conducted the study. It also interviewed people about their behavior during the pandemic. One man in Alaska, Mark Plimpton, has flown to Northern Virginia to see his brother three times during the pandemic but has not shared photos after he got some “judgmental comments” on social media about his first trip. “These people,” Mark said, “they live with their families or they have family in the local area around them. I don’t, and the only way I can see my family is by getting on an airplane and traveling to the East Coast.” As the article notes, correctly, “He didn’t lie, per se, but he went out of his way not to advertise what he was doing.”

The same can be said about Emily (she did not want her full name to be given), who is “hosting a Thanksgiving celebration for about 25 people” for the sake of her grandmother. Her grandmother has dementia, and “cut off from her church community and unfamiliar with technology” she has “felt depressed this year.” Despite Emily’s plan to “get together outdoors, wear masks when they’re preparing the meal, leave windows open in the bathroom and serve food in small groups,” she is “not comfortable telling her friends, who sometimes seem to try to one-up each other with who’s being the most cautious about the virus.”

Emily, as the author of the Post‘s article, Marisa Iati, might have made clearer to readers, is keeping a secret from her friends, not lying to them. For more on the distinction between keeping a secret and lying, see my  “Secrets vs. Lies: Is There a Moral Asymmetry?” For a summary of the Brock University study, see here.

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