David Smith quoted in Washington Post and other national media on Lance Armstrong's lies

David Livingstone Smith, Ph.D., UNE associate professor of philosophy, was quoted in an Associated Press story on famed cyclist Lance Armstrong's lies about performance enhancement drugs.

The story was picked up by the Washington Post, Huffington Post, Sacramento Bee, the Denver Post and more than 40 other media outlets.

Smith, the author of Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind, explains in the AP story that lying "'is as automatic and unconscious as sweating.' He points out that parents teach children at an early age that 'it’s OK to lie, just not to me.' Kids are told to pretend to be grateful for a Christmas gift they don’t want. And they witness their parents lying — about the tooth fairy, and the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus."

Smith was recently named winner of the Cleveland Foundation's 77th Annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction for his book Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others.