The lying game: truth the first casualty in battle of the sexes

In her book, 101 Lies Men Tell Women (Harper Perennial), Dory Hollander says academics have debated the frequency, type and intent of men's lies compared with women's - and one in five people can't get through a day without lying.

'There's an epidemic of lies and, like it or not, we're caught in it,' Hollander wrote in the 1997 self-help book.

'Surrounded by public dramas, we find it hard not to take sides. Fascinated, we watch as the facts unfold and are endlessly reinterpreted for us. We struggle to make sense of how people we expected to trust could disappoint us like this,' she says.

Hollander's book was written for women who felt duped and shocked by a lie or lies told to them by men.

According to Hollander, men and women lie differently. 'For many men, the lie is just another tool, a convenient way to get from here to there,' she says. 'But for many women, the lie lingers as evidence of serious betrayal of trust and failure to connect. For him, it's the truth - what he calls brutal honesty - that causes problems.'

For Helen N.T. Poon, a counsellor at Hong Kong's Resource the Counselling Centre and a clinical psychologist at OT&P, it's not so much about gender differences but how we justify it to ourselves. She says both sexes are equally capable of justifying a lie to themselves.