12-time Olympic medalist Ryan Lochte’s robbery scandal has circulated among various news outlets for a few days now, and it has received a lot of negative attention.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the 32-year-old swimmer confessed last week to lying about being held at gunpoint at a Rio gas station until he and his friends were forced to give up their money. In truth, Lochte and his friends went out for drinks that night and ended up vandalizing the gas station’s bathroom before having a run-in with security.

This seems like such an avoidable circumstance. Had Lochte and his fellow athletes simply been honest, they could’ve avoided all of the drama and spared their country the embarrassment. This poses the question: why do people lie?

In an interview with Taylor Kubota from Live Science, William Earnest, co-author of the book Lying and Deception in Human Interaction, states that “the number one reason people lie, still, is to avoid punishment and embarrassment.”

That seems like a pretty simple answer, but lying goes a bit deeper, especially in a social setting like Lochte’s case.

“One study, published in the journal Proceeding of the Royal Society B in 2014, found that unselfish lies can bring people together,” Kubota mentioned in her article “Lotche’s Lies: How Science Explains Fibbers.”

Kubota also explains that people who tell lies for their own benefit see their social circles crumble over time while lying for the good of a group promotes acceptance and connection between people. So in the moment, the athletes may have genuinely thought that fabricating a story would be the best option.

This is not to say that what Lochte and the other athletes did was okay, or even understandable. The athletes may have just been feeling invincible. Earnest stated in his interview that the men might have lied because of their status as Olympians.

“At that level of celebrity, there’s an immunity or an insulation from reality,” Earnest said. “You feel like you’re operating at a different sphere, where the rules aren’t necessarily the same for you.”

Given the fact that these men are well-disciplined athletes and Rio is not the safest place at all times, they were most likely thinking that nobody would question their story.

According to Simon Romero of The New York Times, many Brazilians still feel as though Lotche’s apology was not good enough, including Rodrigo Mattos, a sports commentator for one of Brazil’s largest networks, UOL.

“Lochte apologizes but doesn’t admit lying. He’s still portraying himself as a victim. So much arrogance,” Mattos stated in his interview with The New York Times.

Unfortunately, the basic rules of being a decent human don’t always bend within our culture, even for celebrities.