Are you an honest Aspie or not?

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That sounds like me. I will lie to get out of social situations or conflict. I will also lie to keep people from figuring out I am different. I will make up stories about friends that don't even exist when asked about high school so people won't know I spent most of my days without speaking to anyone. It sounds kind of creepy and pathetic when I type it out like that, but I doubt I will stop anytime soon.

That sounds like me. I will lie to get out of social situations or conflict. I will also lie to keep people from figuring out I am different. I will make up stories about friends that don't even exist when asked about high school so people won't know I spent most of my days without speaking to anyone. It sounds kind of creepy and pathetic when I type it out like that, but I doubt I will stop anytime soon.

I enjoy being direct and honest in situations where most NT people will skirt round very important issues. I like being able to do that.

However, I do lie and I would lie to protect myself.
But I do find lying very hard, in certain scenarios. I just so often need to be honest, need to be real.

I have no guile; I am incapable of it. Sometimes I have to lie just to compensate for that.


I remember Rudy Simone (of Aspergirls fame), talking about ''the gift of perfect honesty'', and there's something in that.

NTs BS too much. It's tedious.

I find it incredibly difficult to lie to someone, especially people that I know. It's distasteful, cynical.

Although I'd like to claim a halo for honesty, I admit that I avoid lying mainly because I have a strong sense that I couldn't get away with it. However, there is also a moral component to my honesty; it's not pure fear.

What I find disturbing about the world is it seems there's no inherent discredit or disgrace to lying. Sure, some liars will be called out as liars, but it's a very selective thing. You can probably name a few liars that are condemned and others that are lauded. So when I think of lying as a practical art, I realize the social problem isn't with the lie, but with the broader issue of social acceptance. You will be loved or hated, accepted or rejected, regardless of the veracity of your words. As much as we ("we" meaning the culture) employ the language of moral standards, in fact we often merely rationalize our prejudices. Welcome to the real world.

As a social outsider, I figure I'm implicitly condemned, but I can move with greater ease if I don't give the world an excuse to execute the sentence against me. Others can get away with stuff; I cannot. I don't know why, and I'm not whining about this odd state of affairs; that's just the way it is. It makes no sense, but maybe it's a good thing, in that I'm induced to be a better person. My lament is not that I'm held to a high standard, but rather that it seems to me too many people are held to low standards. Anyway, here I am, here we are, and the framework isn't going to change.

We know we're living in a flawed world, a fallen world. My final reconciliation is it's neither possible nor necessarily desirable to please our fellow humans. God is the ultimate Judge; if we please Him, then we've done well, and our lives are not wasted. (Obviously the question of what specific acts are pleasing or displeasing to God is a huge topic in itself, and I won't try to delve into it here. But I think we're all different, and we all have are tasks.)

Yes I am honest, but not if it may hurt someone's feelings. For example, if a friend says do you like this cake I made and I really dislike it I will fib and say yes.

I do not lie well and do not lie well when I have to think fast about a lie unless I have thought it over ahead of time. For example, I know there is a good chance so and so will ask me to go to do something and I know I do not want to go because I dislike the place or am not into the person, etc.

Attwood seriously thinks that Aspies lie because they're not aware of the impact of lying on others?

The only times I've seen lying being related to AS is when the person has a vivid imagination and lies because it's entertaining and he's kind of experimenting with it. Then there's confabulation... When speech and communication aren't too securely connected, you can end up just saying whatever fits into the conversation, which may or may not actually be true--complicated by the fact that NTs do similar things, like the "How are you? Fine" exchange that takes place even when they aren't fine. If you don't pay attention you could say something you don't even mean, because your speech is just pattern-matching and not communication at all.

I don't think a lack of ability to know that lying hurts others would cause lying, though. In order to lie, you have to simultaneously think about the other person's state of mind and think up something they would believe. So you have to have empathy even to make up a reasonable lie; you have to be able to think about their state of mind. Once you have enough empathy to lie, you also have enough to be aware of the other person's perspective as unique to them and distinct from yours. Theory of mind is a prerequisite for lying--lying is not a result of deficient theory of mind.

More likely is the situation where you try to lie and you're just so horrible at it that you're immediately detected. But even that requires theory of mind.

I don't try to deceive people, but I do "lie", in a way. Most of the time when I "lie", it's me pattern-matching a conversation, unaware that what I'm saying isn't true because I'm not saying it to communicate to begin with. It's talking on autopilot. The lies are not self-serving; they're just factually incorrect. Usually they are simpler statements than the actual truth, because I can't think fast enough to put the more complex things into words. If I slow down and think, that doesn't happen. For example, I may say "I already ate lunch" when the actual truth is "I didn't eat any lunch because I woke up at five o'clock and couldn't go back to sleep, and had a decent breakfast for a change, and took a nap after I got back from class and slept straight through lunch, so I wasn't hungry when I woke up and I'm not hungry now, so don't worry about feeding me." If I were thinking quickly enough I'd just say "I'm not hungry right now," but it's likely enough that I won't be thinking quickly, and may just say I already ate, even though I hadn't, even though it's inconsequential, because things are just coming at me so fast that I don't have time to fact-check everything.

Niether... I am capable of lying, but it tends to be transparent unless I convince myself that what I am saying is at least partially truth, the lie is unintentional, or the lie is premeditated.

I suck at lying, I suck at telling white lies, it feels morally wrong to tell down right lies. Well it also feels morally wrong to tell white lies. Of course NTs consistently need to sugarcoat the truth to maintain the harmony within society which equates to tact apparently. I'm too honest. I had to learn to eliminate unpleasant details and sugarcoat the truth when deemed necessary. I ended up in a psych ward against my will because I couldn't lie.

This reminds me of something I do which leads to inadvertent lying.

When people ask me questions phrased in certain ways, I tend to give false answers. Not because I am trying to lie, but because I can't connect what they're asking to the actual answer. This is something I usually notice well after the fact, but I am getting better at noticing when it might be happening and suggesting that people try asking the same question in different ways.

One example that I can recall is when a psychologist asked me if I had a problem with people. My answer to that was "no," as I do not have a problem with people as a general category. However, if she asked what kind of problems I might have with people, I could provide a long list of things that annoy me, but none of these is generally something that all people do, and thus wouldn't register in the first case.

One more recent example was when my therapist asked me if I find anything relaxing, and I said "No" but then suggested she try different questions to see if I could answer more accurately. She asked me if there were any visual things I find relaxing (No), or any music (Yes). But for some reason, due to how I categorize things, there was nothing that I had explicitly tagged as "relaxing" but when asked about music I like, I could think about how I felt when I hear that music and say that it is relaxing.

I also have issues when asked about things that I haven't really written about or otherwise worked out in advance, in that I can't provide an accurate answer because I have no relevant scripts. Or if I'm distracted and can't access the correct scripts and say the wrong thing although it may sound like the right thing.

A frustrating aspect to this is in therapy, I make a point of saying that I may say things that I do not actually agree with or want to say because of these sorts of issues, and when I express frustration after I do fail to say things I want to say, I am told that I did just fine because they understood what I was saying, without consideration for whether that is what I wanted to say or felt I should have said.

Actually, this is an example. I wouldn't have thought of these things as lies, unintentional or otherwise, without seeing someone else make the connection first.

Naturally very honest but was put in a situation as a teenager where I literally had to lie to survive. Now, I am probably around NT average. I sometimes catch myself lying as an automatic habit where I don't need to do it; I don't know why. Very much like this:

I'm painfully honest when i am thinking straight, however I have lied unintentionally during social conversations with friends or people in my daily life (bad combination of words) due to poor communication skills on my part.

Generally, I despise lying and would avoid it whenever I can.

I hate lying and only do it when absolutely necessary or when I can see the person doesn't want the truth.

I'm capable of lying but there's a limit:

NT: Does this pants makes me fat?

Me: Not at all. Looks good on you.

NT: Is that true?

Me: No.

the data i report is immaculate.
and the people who think they see...

what i am trying to say to them,
do not know a thing about me.

I lie but it's not the white lie type of things I lie about, I lie about liking things and such.
As in, I claim I don't like something I like because I'm afraid the other person would despise me if they knew.
Or I lie to my parents because I'm afraid of them judging me even though they're nice, unjudgemental people. (Also I'm 22 already...I shouldn't care about their opinions, or anyone else's for that matter)
A very recent example...I was at the cinema today, something I've never done before for this very reason.
When I came home they wondered where I'd been for so long, I lied that I'd been at the library reading magazines because I was afraid they would judge my choice of movie.

Just thought of another way I lie - the "immediate answer" lie. Sometimes my brain doesn't function the way I want it to and I either give a non-sensical answer or even no answer at all. On occasion, I will give a "false" answer to a question that just kind of comes out. The other day in the store the counter woman asked me if it was foggy out; At that current moment, it wasn't, but earlier it had been quite foggy, and I answered "yeah, it's pretty bad out." I can even catch myself doing it mid-way through the answer, but instead of correcting myself I usually just leave my answer as is. This can be a bad thing if the answer is more necessary/critical.