Lance Armstrong may have been branded liar and cheat of the month, but experts say he's not as different from the rest of us as we'd like to believe.

Lying, they say, is part of the human condition, something most people do every day. And that's reflected in the cavalcade of celebrities cowed into confession after their deceptions were exposed – from Richard Nixon's denial of the Watergate break-in to Bill Clinton's denial of an affair with an intern, from drug-abusing baseball players to fraudulent Wall Street executives.

"The world is rife with great liars," says Robert Feldman, a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts who studies lying and deception. "Nothing about the Lance Armstrong case is shocking. We all lie every day. We live in a culture where lying is quite acceptable."