Are Most People Liars?

Here’s a question: How many lies have you told in the past 24 hours? Got the answer? Now here's a follow-up question: Is your answer higher, lower, or about on par with what you think other people will say about their own lying behavior?

Enter a new study by Serota, Timothy Levine, and Tony Docan-Morgan, published in 2021 in the journal Communication Monographs.

What did they find?

A lot, and indeed far too much to report here. But these are some of the highlights:

First, and consistent with the previous studies, the overall mean was 2.03 lies per day. The lowest number of lies in a day was zero, of course, but the highest reported number was 200. (How is that even possible? Was this person lying about their number of lies?) In addition, only two participants said that they never lied once during the three months. (Were they lying about not lying?)

But what was the benefit of tracking this group of people over time? Well, Serota and his colleagues were able to divide the participants into three groups:

· Honest people: 0-2 lies per day.

· Intermediate liars: 3-5 lies per day.

· Prolific liars: 6 or more lies per day.

How many participants in the study belonged to each of these groups over the course of the three months? Once again, we see a big skew:

· Honest people: 74.7 percent of participants, and 65.8 percent of the total days the survey was administered.

· Intermediate liars: 19.6 percent of participants, and 10.0 percent of the total days the survey was administered.

· Prolific liars: 5.7 percent of participants, and 4.0 percent of the total days the survey was administered.

It would seem that most people are not prolific liars after all, and that a significant degree of honest behavior is a consistent pattern in their lives that spans months of time.

Now here is a further question: Are people in the "honest people" category telling 0-2 lies every day? Similarly, are people in the "prolific liars" category telling 6-plus lies every day?

By tracking the same people over time, Serota could answer these questions. The answer was no. For instance, among prolific liars, on 5 percent of their days, they told 0-2 lies. So on those days, they were quite honest. And on 25 percent of their days, they told 3-5 lies.

The implication is that how much we lie fluctuates from day to day. Hence, just learning about how much someone lies on a given day can give an incomplete and potentially distorted picture of how honest they tend to be in general. On some days (albeit rarely), a prolific liar can resemble an honest person. And vice versa, albeit even less frequently: People in the honest group told 6-plus lies on less than 1 percent of the days they were surveyed. As Serota writes, “On any given day not all high-frequency liars are prolific, and those who are prolific do not always exhibit prolific lying. Observations of extensive lying on a single day only indicate a prolific liar about one time out of four.”

Serota and his colleagues take their findings to support some important conclusions, which they summarize in their own words as follows:

· Lying is infrequent relative to honest communication.

· Most people are honest.

· The distribution of lying is positively skewed.

· Most lies are told by a few prolific liars.

· The telling of specific lies is situationally determined.

Nevertheless, results like these emerging from the psychological research on deception are fascinating. It appears for now that our default assumption can be that strangers we meet for the first time are usually telling the truth. The challenge then becomes being able to pick the rare prolific liar out from the crowd.

Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/questions-character/202211/are-most-people-liars

Conclusion

• Previous research found the average rate of lying to be around 1-2 lies per day.

• Recent research has found that the distribution of lying is highly skewed.

• Only 5.7 percent of the participants in a recent study were prolific liars.

What are some good reasons (apart from those mentioned in the article) to still believe in people?

#Lies #Humanity #Research