Lying

Lying

DEMOGRAPHY OF DECEIT

DECEPTIVE BEHAVIORS

VERACITY JUDGMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

People who are lying are trying to mislead others. If an attempt to mislead is conscious, entails misstatement of fact, and promises a payoff, it is usually considered a lie. Alongside its denotative meaning, lying is a pejorative term. In one investigation, college students rated the social desirability of 555 one-word descriptions of a person. According to these ratings, the most negative thing one can say about a person is not that the person is greedy, incompetent, prejudiced, or cruel. The most negative thing one can say is that the person is a liar.

Lying is related to other phenomena. Like deception, lying involves false communication. However, deception is a broader concept. Biologists have discussed deception by fireflies, possums, and plants, but few would claim that plants can lie. As lying is one type of deception, so are there many types of lies: lies of omission and commission, white lies, and high-stakes lies.

Lying has intrigued scholars for thousands of years. Theologians have debated the morality of deceit, and epistemologists have puzzled over apposite logical problems like the liar’s paradox. Lying has been a recurrent literary theme. Novelists have dazzled their readers with fictional deception and counterdeception; playwrights have captivated audiences with both dramatic and comic lies.

Social scientists’ interest in lying grew from a practical concern, the need to detect lies. In a 1917 Journal of Experimental Psychology article, Harvard doctoral student John Marston described his efforts to construct a lie detection technology, based on the premise that lying is accompanied by changes in blood pressure. Marston’s work gave rise to the polygraph, an apparatus that monitors several indices of autonomic functioning. Once polygraphs came to be used in examinations for truthfulness, the accuracy of this lie detector became a matter of scientific debate. Reviewing evidence on both sides of this controversy, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences concluded in 2003 that the polygraph detects lies at rates that are better than chance but imperfect. In the National Academy’s view, polygraph examinations are poorly suited for screening large populations of people that include only a small percentage of liars.

Soon after Marston’s psychophysiological venture, Hugh Hartshorne and Mark May developed methods for measuring character. In their 1928 book Studies in Deceit, Hartshorne and May reported many character tests, including a test for lying in children. This written self-report instrument asked children about conduct that is socially approved but rare. Thus, the child was asked, “Do you always obey your parents cheerfully and promptly?” Across thirty-six such items, some children claimed that they were always good and never bad. The authors maintained that these children were lying, while acknowledging that some might get high “lie scores” because they were exceedingly conventional. Hartshorne and May’s clever test inspired the inclusion of “Lie scales” on subsequent self-report instruments. These seek to identify individuals who are falsifying their self reports.

Inspired by these pioneering efforts, social scientists have illuminated several aspects of lying: the demography of deceit, deceptive behavior, and veracity judgments.

DEMOGRAPHY OF DECEIT

Lying is most likely universal. It has been found in all cultures ever studied. In a 2003 investigation, Lawrence Sugiyama and associates reported some relevant cross-cultural evidence: that farmers in a preliterate culture perform as well as Harvard students on difficult reasoning problems, so long as the reasoning would prevent them from being duped in a social exchange. These results suggest that cheating is a pan-cultural component of social life. Indeed, evolutionists have attributed the large size of the human brain to selection pressures imposed by the ever-escalating Machiavellian intelligence of our ancestors’ scheming peers.

Psychologists have ventured estimates of the frequency of lying in everyday life. In one investigation, college students logged all the lies they told over a period of several weeks. Their records imply that the average student lies once or twice per day, once in every three to five social interactions. In another study, thousands of people from around the world were asked how many lies the typical person tells in a week. Their estimates varied widely, but the median estimate was that typical person lies seven times a week, or once a day.

Social scientists have analyzed deception at the institutional level. Historians have revisited large-scale military deceptions, like the Allies’ duping of Nazi Germany before the Normandy landing in 1944. Political scientists have described constraints on the use of duplicity by the intelligence services of democracies. Financial analysts have noted international differences in institutional corruption. According to Transparency International, an anticorruption organization based in Berlin, the most corrupt countries in the world in 2005 were Bangladesh and Chad. The least corrupt were Iceland, Finland, and New Zealand. Economic factors help explain international differences in corruption. Highly corrupt countries are poor and pay their civil servants poorly by local standards. Psychological factors may also play a role. Controlling for differences in income, countries are more corrupt if they feature a collective culture, rather than an individualistic culture.

Researchers have documented socioeconomic, racial, and family differences in lying. Armed with the character tests they developed, Hartshorne and May reported in 1928 that students from a low socioeconomic background are more likely to cheat than those from a higher background. In 2002 sociologists Judith Blau and Elizabeth Stearns reported a discrepant finding: that white students of high socioeconomic status are most likely and black students are least likely to condone cheating. Perhaps socioeconomic differences in cheating have changed over the years. In any case, there are family influences on deception. In 1982, a team of investigators measured 54 different personality traits on each member of 415 families in Hawaii. The researchers found that family members resemble one another in personality. This was expected. However, the researchers also found that family members resemble one another in the tendency to lie. Indeed, family similarities proved to be stronger on Lie Scales embedded within the investigators’ personality tests than on any of the other traits measured.

Social scientists have explored sex differences in lying. Although some have maintained that the sexes differ in the propensity to lie, it appears that a larger difference is in motives for deception. Women are more likely to lie to spare others’ feelings, while men more often lie out of self-interest. Relative to women, men are more suspicious of what they hear. Although there is little evidence that the sexes differ in the ability to discriminate lies from truths, women are more willing than men to accept politely what others say. Perhaps these sex differences reflect differential socialization experiences.

DECEPTIVE BEHAVIORS

Do people act in distinctive ways when they are lying? Are there behavioral signatures from which lying can be inferred?

Certain behaviors appear to accompany deceit on certain occasions. Medical researchers Alan Hirsch and Charles Wolf analyzed a videotape of Bill Clinton during Clinton’s August 17, 1998, appearance before a federal grand jury. While giving testimony that a judge later found to be false, Clinton displayed 20 of 23 putative signs of deception. Clinton, for example, made more speech errors when denying a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky than when answering perfunctory questions. While testifying about Lewinsky, Clinton showed a tendency to touch his nose—which the authors dubbed a “Pinocchio phenomenon.”

Although Hirsch and Wolf’s videotape analysis is certainly provocative, it reflects a single case. One wonders if the 20 behaviors that accompanied Clinton’s suspect testimony accompany most lies. To address this issue, psychologist Bella DePaulo and colleagues analyzed research data on 158 potential deception cues from 120 independent samples of lie-and truth-tellers. They considered facial cues, bodily cues, vocal cues, and verbal cues, organizing the evidence around a series of questions.

None of the 158 behaviors these reviewers examined is a perfect indicator of deception, always displayed when a person is lying and never otherwise displayed. Even so, some cues bear a statistical relationship to deception. Compared to truth-tellers, liars are less forthcoming. They sound distant, appear tense, and convey a negative impression. Invariably actuarial, cues to deception vary to a considerable extent across situations, across liars, and across lies. Attempts to conceal fear may, for instance, be exposed by inadvertent signs of fear.

For lie detection, it is best to assemble evidence from multiple cues. German psychologist Gunter Kohnken has advocated a multicue approach for assessing the truthfulness of statements. This so-called Statement Validity Analysis has been used in Europe to evaluate legal testimony, particularly the testimony of children who allege sexual abuse. As a component of Statement Validity Analysis, the witness’s account of an event is checked against nineteen criteria presumed to be indicative of truthfulness. Criterion-Based Content Analysis (CBCA) deems as truthful, for example, witnesses who spontaneously correct themselves, admit a lack of memory, and recount events in a nonchronological order. Research studies corroborate the value of this content-based system, suggesting that CBCA can discriminate lies from truths with an accuracy of about 70 percent.

VERACITY JUDGMENTS

Alongside these research efforts are lay attempts to uncover deceit. Nonscientists make judgments of deception every day, and these judgments have consequences. Some business negotiations succeed and others fail because of the negotiators’ judgments of one another’s truthfulness. Some marriages end in a month and others last fifty years because of the partners’ beliefs about one another’s veracity. Lay judgments of deception have special significance in U.S. courtrooms, where jurors are the only lie detectors. Whenever witnesses give conflicting testimony, jurors must decide who is telling the truth. Thus under American law a defendant’s fate can hinge on her (or his) demeanor, and those who appear guilty are often found guilty.

Social scientists have investigated lay theories of lying. As they have discovered, people share beliefs about behaviors that accompany deceit. In a 2006 investigation a global deception research team found that the most common stereotype in the world about deception is that liars avoid eye contact. Residents of 75 countries said that liars avoid eye contact, expressing this belief in 42 different languages. In response to the open-ended question “How can you tell that others are lying?” two-thirds of the respondents worldwide mentioned that liars avert gaze, and when they mentioned more than one way to tell when others are lying, they mentioned gaze aversion first.

Do people in fact avoid eye contact when lying? There is not much evidence to support this belief. In the findings reviewed by DePaulo and colleagues, people who are telling small lies show no tendency to avert gaze, and those who are telling bigger lies show only a weak gaze aversion. Even if there is a kernel of truth to the stereotype of the gaze-aversive liar, this belief is overdrawn. In a study by communications scholar Timothy Levine, college students were asked to rate the eye contact of peers they saw on videotape. When informed that the peers were lying, students perceived them to be averting gaze.

Apologists for the American legal system contend that jurors are good at spotting deception. Unfortunately, research suggests that they are not. In 2006 psychologists Charles Bond and Bella DePaulo reviewed results from hundreds of experiments on people’s attempts to detect lies in real time with no special aids. Under these circumstances, people average 54 percent correct lie-or-truth judgments when 50 percent would be expected by chance. Although lie detection rates vary from study to study, much of the variation appears to be artifactual, and the highest accuracy achieved by any group to date barely exceeds 70 percent. People usually presume that their acquaintances are telling the truth. Most people appear honest even when they are lying, and a few appear dishonest even when they are telling the truth. Individual differences in social competence may underlie differences in apparent honesty, psychologist Robert Feldman has found. Although skills at feigning honesty continue to develop through middle childhood, even three-year-olds can dupe adults, researcher Michael Lewis reports.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bond, Charles F., Jr., and Bella M. DePaulo. 2006. Accuracy of Deception Judgments. Personality and Social Psychology Review 10 (3): 214–234.

DePaulo, Bella, et al. 2003. Cues to Deception. Psychological Bulletin 129: 74–118.

Godson, Roy, and James J. Wirtz, eds. 2002. Strategic Denial and Deception: The Twenty-First Century Challenge. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

Lewis, Michael, and Carolyn Saarni, eds. 1993. Lying and Deception in Everyday Life. New York: Guilford.

Rogers, Richard. 1997. Clinical Assessment of Malingering and Deception. 2nd ed. New York: Guilford.

Vrij, Aldert. 2000. Detecting Lies and Deceit: The Psychology of Lying and the Implications for Professional Practice. Chichester, U.K.: Wiley.

Charles F. Bond Jr.