G: What you’re circling around is actually a fairly active area of research, but the terminology is fragmented enough that it’s hard to search for unless you know the jargon first.

The broad umbrella terms are:

• Prosocial lying — lies told to preserve social harmony, avoid hurt feelings, avoid awkwardness, or smooth interactions.
• Self-presentational deception — excuses or narrative shaping used to manage how others perceive us.
• Social lubricant lies — casual lies that reduce friction in relationships.
• Face-saving behavior — preserving dignity/status for yourself or others.
• Everyday deception — the general study of low-level routine dishonesty in normal life.

Your EV commercial example fits somewhere between:

• prosocial lying (“they don’t need to know that”),
• avoidance excuses (“sorry, can’t make it”),
• and narrative convenience (“the car can’t make the trip”).

What’s interesting is that researchers increasingly suspect these tiny distortions are not edge cases but part of the actual operating system of human social interaction.

A few relevant findings:

• Some studies estimate people lie surprisingly often in ordinary conversation, though most are small or socially functional lies rather than malicious ones. One survey cited in recent literature found lying comprised about 7% of total communication, and nearly 90% of those lies were “little white lies.” citeturn0search9turn0search23
• Research on “prosocial lies” suggests people often trust socially considerate liars more than blunt truth-tellers in certain contexts. citeturn0search0turn0search13turn0search21
• Communication researchers explicitly describe white lies as “social lubricant” behavior — meaning society may partially rely on them to reduce interpersonal friction. citeturn0search15turn0news30turn0news44

But your question goes one level deeper than most studies.

You’re not just asking:

“How often do people tell white lies?”

You’re asking something closer to:

“How much of what becomes accepted anecdotal common knowledge is actually downstream from socially convenient excuses rather than factual reality?”

That’s a subtler sociological question.

For example:

• “My car gets terrible mileage.”
• “I’m busy that night.”
• “The drive is too far.”
• “I don’t really like electric cars because the range is bad.”

Sometimes those statements may begin as socially acceptable cover stories masking:

• avoidance,
• social exhaustion,
• dislike,
• anxiety,
• class signaling,
• fear of obligation,
• or simply “I don’t want to.”

Then, over time, repeated excuses can harden into what feels like genuine cultural wisdom.

That overlaps with research areas like:

• availability heuristics,
• social contagion,
• folk beliefs,
• pluralistic ignorance,
• and narrative propagation.

There are adjacent studies showing that people often rationalize preferences after the fact, then repeat those rationalizations socially until they become normalized beliefs. But I couldn’t find a study directly measuring:

“What percentage of common anecdotal beliefs originated as socially convenient excuses?”

That may simply be extremely difficult to quantify experimentally.

The closest searchable phrases for what you’re trying to investigate are probably:

• “socially functional deception”
• “excuse-making and belief formation”
• “self-presentational lying”
• “prosocial deception”
• “social lubricant lies”
• “motivated reasoning in anecdotal belief”
• “rationalization becoming belief”
• “folk wisdom from repeated social excuses”

And honestly, your intuition here is not weird at all. It brushes up against a real sociological possibility: that portions of “common sense” may emerge less from objective observation and more from repeated socially useful narratives.