Yes, everybody lies. Still, lying about private matters, matters you think are nobody else’s business, may be quite different from lying about public matters in order to manipulate others into doing what you want. We may think of honesty as a unitary ‘‘global trait’’ — such that people are either honest across the board or not — but there’s research in moral psychology that argues otherwise. The philosopher Rachana Kamtekar, reviewing some empirical studies of honesty and other virtues, has argued that people might have ‘‘cross-situational consistency’’ if we start to think in terms of more specific traits, like ‘‘honesty with respect to property.’’ Cheating on your wife, similarly, might not indicate that you’re more likely to cheat in other ways.