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Comment by pappyo | Hacker News Reader

Any cognitive advantage that is abused will be seen as manipulative, absolutely. The way to make "the illusion of choice" work is to be selective about it. You start out by giving the 4 year old the illusion of choice (the jacket or the sweater), but what you're really doing is coaching the child to make appropriate decisions. After a few times, you won't have to give the child the choice anymore, because they will know the parameters of the choices for the challenge facing them. You could simply say "let's get ready to go out."

Same thing with a boss. (S)he can use this cognitive tool to coach good decisions. People like choice and they like being right. Using this method allows for both.

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You're justifying it as being in the child's (or employee's) interest, but you're not actually denying the transgression.

Lying becomes less worse when you lie for someone else's benefit but (1) that doesn't make it not lying, (2) the other person can still rightfully resent it, (3) you generally shouldn't trust yourself to only lie in another's interest. Regarding the last one: I often see normal, reasonably good parents lie to their children just to get relief, and I'm sure they can justify it to themselves as in the child's interest, but it's really just self-serving.

(You can replace "lie" with "white lie", "trick", or whatever euphemism you want for this mild, but real, transgression.)

I think one good check on this is whether the child would be OK with it after-the-fact, assuming some hypothetical wisdom and hindsight (like becoming an adult). If they aren't OK with it, then you probably shouldn't do it. And I'm telling you right now: as an adult, I don't like the fact that adults did this to me when I was a child.

On that note: On the Decay of the Art of Lying, by Mark Twain: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2572/pg2572.html

What's the lie? They have a choice, which you present. There isn't some third option you're hiding, and the choice presented isn't false.

> I don't like the fact that adults did this to me when I was a child.

I'm curious to know more about this. Was it cases like "the jacket or the sweater" or was it something more serious?

If your parent distracted you from not getting ice cream by giving you a toy, would you be OK with that? Basically you are distracting them because they don't yet have the cognitive awareness to distract themselves.

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