finaldraft

Literature Review

Definition and Theory of Deception

Across almost every culture, the ethics of telling the truth are accepted and held in high esteem. However, because telling the whole truth does not always offer advantages in everyday life, deception is much more prevalent in our lives than is generally understood. In fact, it has been found that most people lie roughly once for every five social interactions they are in. A social interaction is defined here as any instance of communication with another person or groups of persons. For the average person, then, it is common to tell at least one lie for every five times they speak to a telemarketer, call in sick to work, talk to their parents about sex or explain to their children why a man is sleeping on the bench in the park. It becomes hard to classify people who lie as less virtuous than anyone else, since, in fact, we are all 'anyone else' (DePaulo, et. al 1996).

Successful deception is built upon a foundation of previous expectations that are formed from communication and knowledge. When the deceiver concocts a lie that is formed according to the beliefs of the victim, he or she can expand a lie or change the victim's existing convictions. To prevent skepticism in the observer, the deceiver must make story modifications and observe time limits; it is by every account a very cognitive experience. If variations upon the deception continue to evolve, it is possible to continue to hide both the truth and the deception. While it can be intuitively understood that with too much time passing and too many complications evolving, the deception can get out of control for the deceiver, the everyday lies that the average person tells (which are the interest of this study) never reach this level.

The difficulty with developing a thesis which states that lying is bad and telling the truth is good is that they way we act suggests that that is not what we really believe. We think of completely honest people as a social hazard. One of the first lessons that a child is taught is to not lie. However, the lesson that quickly follows is that that same child should tell her aunt how much she enjoyed the disappointing gift or that he should thank his host for a dinner that he did not consider tasty. As for lying in adults, it is becoming clear that we all do it almost all of the time. There is obviously a gulf between what we think we ought to do and what we really do (Mothersill, 1996). Mothersill has taken many examples of public and private lies and strove to come to an understanding of what constitutes a lie and why there is such a difference between what we say we should do and our actions. She defines a lie as the following:

What is it to lie? Let us agree that A lies to B if and only if A utters a sentence S which he believes to be false with the intention that B accept it as true and accept it on A's authority and not, for example, because he happened to read it in the paper. Not every value for S will qualify. Questions and exclamations are out. Only assertions can be lies. There are probably further restrictions. Value judgments and law-like generalizations are problematic; there are many ways of getting you to believe something I thin false that do not involve lying. I say, "Spinach is delicious!" in order to make you think I like it, which I do not, but what I say is not a lie. Nor am I lying if what I whisper in your ear is Boyle's Law of Gases with one of the ratios deliberately reversed.

This is a useful definition that will be the foundation of this thesis. This is also useful to the average person because it allows quite a few escape holes for people who would like to think that all lying is wrong, and so need to justify their own more deceptive behavior. As with saying that spinach is delicious, when in fact you dislike the taste, there are many ways of obtaining the desired result without deceiving. Mothersill concerns herself with two concepts to define lying; belief and intention. Neither concept is a simple one; one can think that they turned in a paper to a professor or be absolutely sure that they did. However, it is intention that makes it a lie. When a student tries to make her professor believe that she turned in a paper when she knows that she did not, that is a lie because she is then trying to make her professor believe something that she does not believe herself.

The polite euphemism, which when taken literally, can also be a form of deception. When a secretary states that her boss is in a meeting, it is understood that he simply does not wish to speak to the caller (unless, of course, it is one of the times when he really is in a meeting). Political rhetoric is full of such euphemisms; they can be deciphered for the truth without too much labor on the part of the listener. Does this constitute a lie? If the truth is known, but tacitly ignored, it can hardly be considered a lie on the part of the speaker.

Early Development of Deception

Kay Bussey (1992) continued this examination of the intenionality of lying when she continued Piaget's work with children. Bussey began by examining the previous research that had been published in the field. She then identified the missing aspects; first, the effect that the deception had on children's judgments. In this study, Bussey investigated children's moral judgments of false statements. Her first aim was to find whether or not children could tell the difference between a lie and a truthful statement and her second aim was to investigate what basis the children had for making such a judgment. Her third, and final, aim was to determine what internal reactions, such as pride or guilt, the children experienced after telling the truth or a falsehood.

Bussey restricted her study to statements concerning misdeeds, which Piaget had excluded from his work because he found that even older children judged the seriousness of the lie based on material consequences. He did find, however, that a child as young as five could be knowledgeable about lies involving misdeeds. Bussey's participants were 72 Caucasian children enrolled in predominantly middle class suburban schools. Twelve boys and 12 girls were randomly drawn from each of three grades: preschool (age range of 4.2-5.3), grade 2 (age range of 7.4-8.8), and grade 5 (age range of 10.3-11.6). The children were presented with four vignettes about each of three different types of misdeeds: broke a rule, took something, or damaged something.

Each of these vignettes had one of six possible different endings. The vignette character said he or she did not commit the misdeed (a lie) and was believed, the character said he or she did not commit the misdeed (a lie) and was not believed and was punished for committing the misdeed, the character said they did not commit the misdeed (a lie), was not believed and was not punished, the character said that he or she committed the misdeed and was punished for committing the misdeed, and finally, the character simply committed the misdeed.

Each participant heard each ending twice in different vignettes. The child was told to be the protagonist in the story while the other characters were played by people they knew, their mother, their father or their friend. Each child was read 12 vignettes and was then questioned on their belief that the character either lied or told the truth and the morality of that decision. Piaget had suggested that younger children found lies to be wrong only because they would be punished for telling them. If punishment were not forthcoming, lies were deemed to be less wrong. For older children, lies could be judged as wrong independently of being punished. Bussey found that even preschoolers could differentiate between lies and truthful statements about misdeeds. Although the second and fifth graders were more accurate in their identification, the preschoolers' correct identifications were significantly greater than chance. Clear evidence of the development of moral standards associated with lying and truth telling was evidenced in all children, regardless of age group. Bussey also found, contrary to Piaget's findings, that children evaluated lies as significantly more negative than misdeeds alone. The presence of punishment affected the moral judgments of the preschoolers, but not the older children (Bussey 1992).

Kay Bussey continued her work with children and lying as she tried to determine a child's ability to categorize statements as intentionally true or intentionally false. She worked with the same age groups as she did in the previous study (1999). She used the same set-up for the experiment, once again preparing for the children twelve vignettes; this time they were concerned with misdeeds, interpersonal and pretend. Antisocial lies were told about misdeeds, small white lies in the interpersonal situation and 'trick' lies were told in the pretense vignette. There were two lies and two truths for each of the vignette types.

The children were then asked to define the situation in terms of whether or not a lie was told and how severe the lies was, by taking into account whether or not the character intended to deceive. The results, as had been predicted, were that: all children saw lie-telling as worse behavior than truth telling and the older the child, the greater the chance that he or she would describe a false statement as a lie and a truthful statement as the truth. Another usual finding was that children seemed to find antisocial lies to be the worst and 'white' lies to be the least serious of the deceptions. The two older groups expected that there would be more self-approval for telling the truth and more self-disapproval for lying, while the youngest set had more difficulty making such a distinction.

This study used Piaget's cognitive developmental theory as background for the study. Piaget had proposed that it is only once a child has reached eleven or twelve that the child can determine the intenionality of a lie. At that age, they are also more likely to judge a lie much more harshly if it was intentional. Younger children, on the other hand, tend to judge a lie only on whether or not it fits the actual truth. Statements such as exaggerations, which are considered a blatant lie, are judged more harshly than intentional, less blatant lies (Piaget, as cited in Bussey, 1999). Bussey's more recent research does not seem to support Piaget. Instead , most of her research suggests that for older children, but not younger children, intenionality is the only basis for determining if the statement is a lie or not and for evaluating its seriousness. But even the youngest of the set can judge the intenionality of a lie at a greater than chance probability.

Keltikangas-Jarvinen and Lindeman (1997) took the assumption that children can understand the difference between lying and telling the truth and attempted to examine the nature of age and gender differences in the evaluation of three immoral behaviors. Previous research has suggested that males and females approach moral issues from two very different perspectives (Gilligan 1982). The males emphasize preserving rights, exercising justice, autonomy and rules. Females seem to base their perspectives more on sensitivity and responsibility to people. It is from this foundation that Keltikangas-Jarvinen and Lindeman begin their research.

It can be understood that motivations for immoral acts may be different; positive (i.e. to help a friend), negative (i.e., to gain personal benefit from the act) or neutral. It is also understood that external influences may be a factor, such as duress or provocation. Constraint is accepted as a mitigating factor when it comes to assigning punishment.

The three immoral behaviors were classified as theft, lying and fighting. Each were expressed both as omissions (not doing one's duty in order to avoid some negative outcome) and commissions (actually committing a harmful act). The commissions were further specified as having positive motives, negative motives, duress or provocation. The study examined three age groups: pre-adolescents (11 year of age), mid-adolescents (14 years of age) and late adolescents (17 years of age).

Previous research has indicated that there seems to be a difference in how 'bad' an omission is judged to be when compared to a commission (Spranca, Minsk, & Baron 1991). This study examined whether children viewed omitting the truth as being as bad as outright lying. Due to the more obvious motivations of commissions, most people regard commissions as more severe than harmful omissions.

All participants were tested in school, in groups of varying sizes. The participants were told to judge each as right or wrong, and how strongly they felt about that judgment. Each was asked to read situations in which lying, theft and fighting were portrayed with various motivations being attributed to each act.

'Significant findings were that, in general, boys accepted all moral acts as being less wrong than the girls did. The middle and late adolescents are characterized as having a more flexible usage of different rationales to explain the immoral behavior. These age groups were more likely to accept various defenses to make an immoral act less wrong, whereas the younger adolescents were more likely to categorize any immoral act as being wrong regardless of the reason.

With each situation presented to the participants they were asked to rate their approval of the action (1 = strongly disagree with, 5 = strongly agree with). The boys were more likely to either approve of the action or have a lower score of disagreeableness. Immoral acts that were perceived to happen less in day to day life were judged harsher than immoral acts that seem to occur more frequently. Theft, for instance, was considered the least frequent act and was judged to be the least acceptable. Lying, on the other hand, was viewed as a very frequent occurrence and thereby was considered the most acceptable act. Omissions were evaluated more moderately than commissions by all age groups and both genders; the one exception was if withholding of truth caused an innocent person in a peer group to be accused of damage. This one instance was considered indefensible.

Deception in Adults

Once it has been established that even children as young as four can begin to define what constitutes a lie, it becomes necessary to differentiate what a lie looks like from the perspectives of the person telling the lie and the person receiving the lie. From the perspective of those trying to detect deception, Ekman (1996) began his research with the assumption that most people are poor lie detectors. When working with demeanor only, most people are completely unable to tell when someone is lying. This study goes on to suggest that it is not due to perfect lying that deception is so hard to detect; rather the lying is flawed, but the detection process is doubly so. This research examines six different theories as to why people are so poor at detecting lies.

Ekman feels that if motivation to deceive effectively is weak for the stimulus persons, it will not replicate the deception found in the real world. Therefore, Ekman sets out in this research to make the lies relevant to the lives of the participants. It is his belief that it is only when the basic factors of a true lie come into effect: fear, guilt, excitement or 'duping effects', that the liar is aroused. This arousal allows strong emotions to leak out as well as to lead to more involved cognitive functioning which would result in weak, fumbling accounts. It can also be said that it is the high stakes lies with which society is concerned. Various people were videotaped either lying or telling the truth. Ekman presented both a reward for telling an effective lie and a punishment for being detected. Each participant who told the truth and was believed by the interrogator was given a cash reward. Stimulus persons who were able to deceive the interrogator were given an even larger reward. Stimuli who were unconvincing were given no compensation. In this way, the liar was aroused cognitively and had the strong feelings of both excitement and fear to motivate her. It is important to note that while this study can be said to have more 'real-life' accountability, the results were very similar to all the previous research.

When the accuracy of the deception detection was measured, most of the participants who watched the video were at chance levels accurate, or just above chance. Ekman attributed this in large part to the fact that the participants watching the videotape received no reward for being more accurate, nor were they punished for lack of accuracy. It was also suggested that if the subjects were able to ask questions, rather than sit back as passive observers, they might have been better able to detect deceit. However, it is thought that the cognitive functioning required to formulate questions might detract from the ability to observe the deceiver.

The importance of this study on the current thesis is twofold. First, had Ekman's theory that the motivations of the deceiver have a great effect on how effective the deception is been correct, his results should have shown that the participants had a less than chance accuracy rate. Since his results showed that the participants of his study had similar results to participants in other deception studies that did not manipulate the deceiver's motivation, there is the implication that the motivation of the deceiver is a less important variable. Second, the theory that more cognitive functioning would lower the chances a participant has to accurately detect deception is one that will be tested during the second part of this study.

Ekman and O'Sullivan (1991) found that Secret Service agents were much more accurate than average in determining deception. The primary purpose of this study was to determine whether or not other occupational groups could also have a higher than average rates of accuracy. They looked at various law enforcement agencies as well as groups of psychologists.

The second purpose was to generalize their previous findings (Ekman & O'Sullivan 1991) found that very accurate judgments are possible when stimulus persons lie about emotions--i.e., claim positive emotions when they are experiencing negative emotions) and show that high accuracy was also possible when the stimulus persons discussed strongly held opinions.

Twenty males (aged 18-28) were asked to discuss their opinions on various social questions. The opinion that the participants felt most strongly about was the one that the participant was asked to discuss with the interviewer (in this study, the researcher). Some were told to give a true representation of their opinions; others were told to falsely claim that they believed the opposite. Those telling the truth who were believed by the interviewer received a $10 bonus; believable liars received a $50 bonus. Stimulus persons who were not believed received no compensation. Only ten of these men were included in the final tape. The ten chosen were included so that a pro and con for each question was presented, independent of whether the participants on the tape were lying or telling the truth. Half were telling the truth and half were lying.

The videotape showed face and shoulder close-ups and had full audio. Observers of the video were told all of this information and were told that between one-fourth and three-fourths of the men on the tape were lying. This was done to alleviate the tendency to over-guess towards either truth or deception. The participants made their judgments during a ten-second pause after each interview.

For the most accurate groups, where the groups are separated by occupation, performance was slightly more accurate in judging lies than in judging truths. This difference is not apparent in the less accurate groups. Overall, the most accurate occupation was the Federal officers with Sheriffs as almost accurate. The least accurate groups were the Academic psychologists and the Regular clinical psychologists ('regular' defined as not having a strong interest in the field of deception detection). An analysis of variance in which the dependent variables were accuracy in judging the truth and accuracy in judging lies was significant.

The research of Anne Gordan and Arthur Miller (2000) examined the differences in perspectives of lying from the view point of the one telling the lie, the one being lied to, and an uninvolved observer. Their participants were 72 female and 72 male undergraduates from introductory psychology courses who received credit toward a course requirement. Twelve females and twelve males were randomly assigned to each condition. Participants were told that the purpose of the study was to examine the dynamics of interpersonal relationships and that they would be reading a scenario and answering questions about a couple involved in a dating relationship. The scenarios portrayed one member of a committed relationship being seen by his or her partner leaving a restaurant with a former love interest after having stated that no such meeting would occur. The deception was furthered when this person did not acknowledge the meeting when given an opportunity to do so. The scenarios clearly portrayed one person as a lie teller and one as a lie receiver but also contained sufficient ambiguity to allow for multiple construes of what led up to the situation. Each of the participants were assigned to the perspective of lie teller, lie receiver, or observer. Those who were to be an active participant were told to imagine themselves in that situation and really imagine how they would feel. To enhance their involvement, the word 'you' was placed into the scenario. Observers were told to imagine themselves as someone who would have to give a fair judgment of the situation. The results of this study found that taking a certain perspective greatly influenced the participants' judgments regarding the deception and each of the other roles.

This study hopes to explain how with such a prevailing theme of thinking that lying is bad, there is such a prevalence of lying in society. It is believed that it is due to the difference between role perspectives that allows a self-proclaimed 'honest' person to tell a lie and not feel a great deal of remorse of distress. In this way, a lie-teller can view their lie as altruistic rather than self-serving and therefore, feel justified in their actions or even that they had done was not really a lie. However, when the perspective changes, the person who was deceived does not have the same motivation to construe the lie as altruistic and would therefore judge it more harshly. The observers were less likely to get emotionally involved and could speculate on both points of view (Gordon & Miller, 2000).

It has become clear that it is one's perspective that determines whether statement is an intentional lie or a justified attempt to not hurt someone's feelings, so it becomes an interesting question of just how often people feel justified in lying. The research team of DePaulo, Kirkendole, Kashy, Wyer and Epstein (1999) came together to conduct diary studies with college students to determine the frequency of lying in everyday life. Participants in the study were 30 male and 47 female undergraduates. They ranged in age from 17 to 22. There was a second group of participants run at the same time comprised of 30 men and 40 women who were recruited from a local community college. They ranged in age from 18 to 71. The study 1 participants and the participants from Study 2 were told that the study was one in which they would keep records of their social interactions and communications for seven days. They were told to indicated each social interaction (anytime they spoke with another person that lasts ten minutes or more) and any lies that they told. They were told that a lie was anytime that they intentionally tried to mislead someone. Both the intent and the lie must be there for it to count. They were urged to record all lies, no matter how small or large.

The researchers found that college students reported telling two lies a day, while the community members told one. As a rule, a participant told more self-centered lies than other-oriented lies (defined as lies told not to help oneself, but to protect the feelings of someone else). The exception is in a dyad involving only women, in which case other-oriented lies were as common as self-serving lies. Participants told more other-oriented lies to women and more self-serving lies to men. The results were consistent with other work in that the participants, even when admitting to lying, said that they did not feel that their lies were serious, they were not planned and that they did not worry about getting caught. It was found, though, that social interactions in which no lies were told were considered more pleasant than ones in which lies had been told, based on the entries in the diary regarding their feelings about each interaction.

It was found that many of the same motivations that compel people to tell the truth also compel people to tell a lie. These include making themselves look good, seeking others' support in these identities, and exchanging supportive emotions, preferences and opinions. When the truth is pleasant, people feel they can attain their benevolent goals non-deceptively; however, when the situation is less ideal, the urge to lie is tempting. If it can be assumed that lies are a fact of social life, then this research team goes on to infer that they are of only minor cognitive and emotional significance to the lie-tellers, that they require little planning and that they would have little desire to undo the lies if they could. They also found that the people telling lies felt little distress before and after telling the lie. It should be noted that while lying is a commonplace occurrence, it still occurs less frequently than non-deceptive behavior (DePaulo et al., 1996).

DePaulo and Kashy (1998) continued this work with the prediction that people would be less likely to lie per social interaction to people that they felt close to. This was based on the assumption that lying would violate the openness and honesty that people value in their close relationships. They also predicted that people would be more uncomfortable when they did tell a lie to someone who was close to them. They also predicted that because close relationships were based on helping and caring for another person that any lies told would be altruistic lies rather than self-serving lies. They also hypothesized that the opposite would be true for strangers and acquaintances.

Each of these predictions was found to be true within this study. It was also found that consistently, lies told in closer relationships were more often discovered. The study was set up by following the same set up and procedure (they even recruited in the same manner) as the previous research. The differences came only in what they did with the data; instead of counting all lies, they divided them up into categories of involving close friends or lovers, and those involving strangers or acquaintances (DePaulo & Kashy, 1998).

As the previous research has shown us, very early in life people learn the difference between telling the truth and telling a lie and they learn to accept that telling the truth is better. However, research also shows us that almost everyone lies quite a few times a day, with little to no anxiety about the act or about the chances of getting caught. While we lie a great deal in everyday life, we are less likely to lie to those we care the most about and be more concerned with being caught. If we do lie to those we love, we are more likely to tell other-oriented lies in order to spare their feelings. We are also more likely to tell other-oriented lies when we are dealing with women, we are more likely to tell self-serving lies when dealing with strangers or especially men.

The overall point of compiling the data from all of these studies is to begin to understand the differences between men and women's ability to detect deceit, the differences in their motivations and to determine if their is a differences in their effectiveness in lying.

Levine, McCornack and Avery's research showed that men and women have fundamental differences in how they react to being lied to and what they define as a lie. Overall, women are more sensitive to being lied to. They react more intensely to deception and are more likely to feel betrayed when they are lied to.

Battista's results showing that a familiar lie yields lower arousal rates (which makes it harder to detect the deception) becomes interesting when combined with the results of DePaulo and Kashy's 1998 study which showed that there is a difference in what types of lies people tell. Men were found to be more likely to tell self-serving lies (which according to Battista would yield a higher arousal rate and be more likely to be detected) while women tell more other-oriented lies (which conversely, have a lower arousal rate and therefore, less likely to be detected). This would suggest that in most day to day interactions, women are more likely to be telling like and getting away with it, because they are more likely to be telling a familiar lie.

Henrich and Borkenau's study is of interest because the ideas of how important verbal and auditory cues are to the detection of deception. With greater familiarity , it becomes more accurate to match personality traits with cutes that would indicate possible deceit. If we are naturally more attentive to these cues with people of our own gender due to a greater degree of familiarity, that may indicate a natural tendency to be more accurate in detecting deception in our own gender.