Some Interactions Were More Prone To Deception Than Others

Extraordinary liars may attract the most attention, but an accurate portrait of deceit reveals that most of the liars in our lives, and the lies they tell, are characterized mainly by how commonplace they really are. It is probably comforting to believe that we encounter few liars in our daily lives. Perhaps someone with a Machiavellian bent or with psychological problems like Amanda’s might lie repeatedly to our face. Ordinary people, though, are less likely to do so. Or, at least, that’s what we’d like to think. This assumption turns out to be wrong. A wealth of psychological research has for decades provided evidence that it’s not only the atypically immoral who lie frequently. Indeed, my own research into deception, which has spanned more than four decades now, has repeatedly shown lying to be far more common in daily life than we think. The setup of the study was fairly simple. Two at a time, I had participants meet, and I asked these unacquainted individuals to spend ten minutes getting to know each other. I didn’t tell the participants, though, that I was conducting a study of lying. Instead, I said I was interested in investigating how people interact when they meet someone new.

It's What You Value

Something else I didn’t mention was that each pair’s entire conversation would be secretly videotaped. I then asked one of each pair to review the video with me. Most studies of lying, many of my own included, involve a fairly artificial setup. For example, a participant might be asked to watch a series of short video clips of people describing their upbringing and then identify in which clips participants had been told by the experimenter to lie. That sort of thing doesn’t usually happen in real life. However, we meet new people all the time. Whatever other conditions my study introduced, at its heart it did seem to reproduce a typical, everyday experience. I hoped, then, that the data I gleaned would be particularly relevant to an exploration of deception in ordinary life. I did, though, introduce one other twist into the basic structure of the experiment. I wanted to know if the frequency of lying might change with the specifics of the conversation. Perhaps some social interactions were more prone to deception than others. To try to find out, I told some of the participants to attempt to come off as very likable.

Forgive Yourself

In other cases, I told one of the participants to convince the other that he or she was very competent. Everyone else I instructed simply to get to know the other person. I reasoned that while assigning goals to certain people did introduce a slightly greater degree of artificiality into the experiment, social situations in which one person is trying to demonstrate his or her charm or poise to another are very common. As far as the pairs of strangers were concerned, deception had no relevance whatsoever to the study. One conversation between a man and a woman I’ll call Tim and Allison was fairly typical. Once he and Allison had gotten a little bit acquainted, he told her about his band. We just signed to a record company, actually. Yeah, I’m the lead singer. Another participant, Natasha, also discussed with her partner her musical background, talking about how she entered competitions as a pianist and toured the country with a chamber group. She also managed to weave into the conversation that she’d been a member of her honor society in high school. What makes all of the above examples remarkable is that they are all lies. Natasha never toured the country, and never quite managed to be inducted into the honor society.

When You're Alone

Tim’s band didn’t sign with Epitaph. In fact, there’s no band at all. Tim’s musical expertise is limited to, in his words, a couple chords. And these are only a few examples of what I found to be an extraordinary pattern. The lying was hardly limited to the participants to whom I had given a directive to appear likable or competent. These people lied with greater frequency, but even those with no specific agenda lied regularly. Some lied as many as twelve times. Bear in mind, too, that after the fact, participants might have been reluctant to confess to their inaccuracies. This would only lead to an underreporting of the incidences of deception, though. In other words, it’s possible that the frequency of lies was even higher than three lies per conversation. I was often asked whether my results could be explained by some circumstance unrelated to how people actually lie in the real world. Or one might reason that some factor in my study induced people to lie far more than they normally would. But my later research on conversations between unacquainted strangers has shown, fairly consistently, that they lie to each other about three times every ten minutes, both inside and outside the lab. With apologies to the media outlets that shined a spotlight on my work, the results of this study really weren’t extraordinary. The extraordinary thing is how much, it turns out, people lie to each other. High rates of lying are common even outside conversations between strangers, who are unlikely to encounter each other in the future. We might be able to accept that new acquaintances lie to each other with regularity, but we’d think that people with any sort of established social bond would not. Yet this is not the case. Lies occur regularly in all such contexts. The exact frequency is difficult to measure. A study like mine works fine to examine interactions between people who are meeting for the first time, but it’s not as if this setup lends itself to, say, conversations between a husband and wife in bed. However, diary research studies, in which participants are asked to record their daily social interactions and indicate which contained lies, show that lying occurs regularly even in the most intimate relationships. No relationship has been found to be immune to dishonesty.