I find it much more convenient to, instead of lying, simply using ambiguous phrases to plant the false idea into someone else’s mind. The important part is to make the phrase ambiguous in such a way that it can be plausibly interpreted truthfully. Say you don’t want someone to know you went up the stairs, then you say “I didn’t walk up the stairs” because you in fact ran up the stairs. Even if your lie is found out, this reduces the social cost since, if you are political enough, you can convince others that you didn’t actually lie. And if you are very good at it, you can tailor the deception so that only a minority of people (which includes the addressee) would interpret it falsely; and you can then let the majority construe it as misunderstanding on behalf of the deceived.
I find it much more convenient to, instead of lying, simply using ambiguous phrases to plant the false idea into someone else’s mind. The important part is to make the phrase ambiguous in such a way that it can be plausibly interpreted truthfully. Say you don’t want someone to know you went up the stairs, then you say “I didn’t walk up the stairs” because you in fact ran up the stairs. Even if your lie is found out, this reduces the social cost since, if you are political enough, you can convince others that you didn’t actually lie. And if you are very good at it, you can tailor the deception so that only a minority of people (which includes the addressee) would interpret it falsely; and you can then let the majority construe it as misunderstanding on behalf of the deceived.