By michael - January, 26th 2014

Telling the truth is not always easy. Keeping your mouth closed or telling a “white lie” may often seem the better choice in the short term. However, maintaining a policy of always telling the truth at work has its own advantages that will by far surpass the shorter path. Often, the advantages of telling the truth at work are not evident until you consider the unspoken alternative: that you have developed a reputation for lying and can't always be trusted.

OK, just come clean already: A new study shows that telling only part of the truth will make you feel worse than telling the whole truth or not confessing at all.

“Confessing to only part of one's transgressions is attractive to a lot of people because they expect the confession to be more believable and guilt-relieving than not confessing,” study researcher Eyal Pe'er, Ph.D., said in a statement. “But our findings show just the opposite is true.” Pe'er, who is currently at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, conducted the study while at Carnegie Mellon University.

For the study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers analyzed data from a series of experiments. In one experiment, 2,113 people participated in a virtual coin-tossing test, where they had to predict the outcome of 10 coin tosses, and then say how many times they were correct (they received a financial incentive for correct guesses).

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