Before I turned my attention to research and writing on single people and single life, I spent the first few decades of my professional life studying the psychology of lying and detecting lies. I’ve probably written hundreds of thousands of words on the topic. Here, I want to boil down one of the most important things I’ve learned into just four words. If you want to know what someone is thinking when they are telling a lie, what the psychology is behind the lie, a lot of times it comes down to this: Lies are like wishes. When people tell lies, a whole lot of the time, they are telling you what they wish were true. To decode their lies, all you need to do is put the words “I wish” in front of the lie. In the diary studies that my colleagues and I conducted, we asked 77 college students and 70 people from the community to write down all the lies that they told every day for a week. They turned in more than 1,500 lies. In a pair of studies of serious lies , participants told us about hundreds more. Here are some examples of the lies…