In a May editorial in The New York Times, columnist Bob Herbert quotes Scott McClellan's description of a "culture of deception" that has poisoned our national politics and government. According to Mr. McClellan, our leaders play "a game of endless politicking based on the manipulation of shades of truth, partial truths, twisting of the truth, and spin" – to which Mr. Herbert responds, "Forget that this is supposed to be a government of, by and for the people, and that the truth is supposed to matter."

Unfortunately, the culture of deception that has so damaged our nation has its very roots in We, the People. In two studies carried out in 1996 by deception researchers Bella DePaulo and Deborah Kashy, 77 U.S. college students and 70 community members were asked to keep track of how often they deliberately attempted to mislead someone over the course of one week. Only 7 out of 147 participants – one student and six community members – claimed not to have lied at all; the rest admitted to collectively telling 1,535 lies in seven days. The students lied an average of two times a day, in one out of every three of social interactions lasting longer than ten minutes, and community members told one lie a day, in one out of every five interactions. Participants also reported that they did not regard their lies as serious, and claimed that both their targets and they would have felt worse if the truth had been told.

In other words, Americans see lying as normal and harmless -- so long as we're the ones doing it. That belief is so deeply ingrained that current deception research simply explores better ways to identify when someone is lying, rather than studying the prevalence of lying and its effects are over time.

And that's why we can't expect truth from our government. Our leaders are just like us; they're doing pretty much what you and I would do if we carried the future of democracy, the safety of the United States, and the lives of 300 million fellow Americans on our shoulders.

That doesn’t make lying right, of course. It just means that if we really want honest leaders, we’re going to have to raise our national standards – starting with ourselves. America has a choice to make: we can accept lying as a valid solution to inconvenient, painful, or threatening situations, or we can build our nation on truth and face the risks, hard work, and change the truth demands.

If we choose lying as our national way of life, we can continue to lie outright or only tell a small portion of the truth when it suits us. We can divert attention from the truth by sandwiching it between two lies, remain silent when we disagree, and pretend to have emotions we don't really feel. We can equivocate -- deliberately choosing words we know our listeners will misinterpret -- and use truthiness, saying what we wish were true, not what is. We'll pay a price for this luxury, though, since lies tend to erode trust in personal and business relationships and delay or even prevent effective solutions. Lies also tends to disconnect us from reality, because, as deception researcher Paul Ekman, Ph.D., points out, "someone who initially knows he is lying may over time come to believe his own lies."

If we choose a national culture of truth, however, there'll be hard work ahead. As individuals, each one of us will have to confront facts we may not like and learn to manage the messy, scary situations the truth can create. As a nation, we'll have to craft our foreign policy around what's real and true for other nations, not just for America. But if We the People truly want honest leaders, becoming a nation of truth-tellers is our only hope -- since honest leaders are far more likely to arise from a citizenry that is itself fundamentally honest.