Bella M. DePaulo

Lying in everyday life.

In 2 diary studies of lying, 77 college students reported telling 2 lies a day, and 70 community members told 1. Participants told more self-centered lies than other-oriented lies, except in dyads involving only women, in which other-oriented lies were as common as self-centered ones. Participants told relatively more self-centered lies to men and relatively more other-oriented lies to women. Consistent with the view of lying as an everyday social interaction process, participants said that they did not regard their lies as serious and did not plan them much or worry about being caught. Still, social interactions in which lies were told were less pleasant and less intimate than those in which no lies were told.

Nonverbal behavior and self-presentation.

Because of special characteristics of nonverbal behaviors (e.g., they can be difficult to suppress, they are more accessible to the people who observe them than to the people who produce them), the intention to produce a particular nonverbal expression for self-presentational purposes cannot always be successfully translated into the actual production of that expression. The literatures on peoples skills at using their nonverbal behaviors to feign internal states and to deceive are reviewed as they pertain to the question of whether people can overcome the many constraints on the translation of their intentions into expressions. The issue of whether peoples deliberate attempts to regulate their nonverbal behaviors can be detected by others is also considered.

Everyday lies in close and casual relationships.

In 2 diary studies, 77 undergraduates and 70 community members recorded their social interactions and lies for a week. Because lying violates the openness and authenticity that people value in their close relationships, we predicted (and found) that participants would tell fewer lies per social interaction to the people to whom they felt closer and would feel more uncomfortable when they did lie to those people. Because altruistic lies can communicate caring, we also predicted (and found) that relatively more of the lies told to best friends and friends would be altruistic than self-serving, whereas the reverse would be true of lies told to acquaintances and strangers. Also consistent with predictions, lies told to closer partners were more often discovered.

THE MOTIVATIONAL IMPAIRMENT EFFECT IN THE COMMUNICATION OF DECEPTION

In the communication of deception, there is a “motivational impairment” effect: people who are more highly motivated to succeed with their lies (compared to those who are less motivated) are less successful at doing so whenever observers can see or hear their nonverbal behaviors. The impairment may be a consequence of the liars deliberate attempts to control their expressive behaviors which result in performances that appear overcontrolled and inhibited. Variables such as confidence, experience at deceiving and physical attractiveness can moderate the impairment effect.

Truth and investment: Lies are told to those who care.

Participants discussed paintings they liked and disliked with artists who were or were not personally invested in them. Participants were urged to be honest or polite or were given no special instructions. There were no conditions under which the artists received totally honest feedback about the paintings they cared about. As predicted by the defensibility postulate, participants stonewalled, amassed misleading evidence, and conveyed positive evaluations by implications. They also told some outright lies. But the participants also communicated clearly their relative degrees of liking for the different special paintings. The results provide new answers to the question of why beliefs about other peoples appraisals do not always correspond well with their actual appraisals.

The motivational impairment effect in the communication of deception: Replications and extensions

Past research (e.g., DePaulo & Kirkendol, in press) has documented a “motivational impairment effect” in the communication of deception, whereby people who are more highly motivated to get away with their lies (relative to those who are less highly motivated) are less successful at doing so whenever observers can see or hear any of their nonverbal cues. In the present study, we report a conceptual replication of the effect: Subjects who told ingratiating lies under conditions in which they thought that the ability to convey particular impressions was an important skill (high “competence-relevance”) were less successful at getting away with those lies when judges could observe their nonverbal behaviors. We also report a conceptual replication of an unpredicted finding from an earlier study (DePaulo, Stone, & Lassiter, 1985b): Under the same conditions (ingratiating lies, high competence relevance), women were more likely to show the motivational impairment effect than were men. We predicted in this study that more attractive speakers would be less susceptible to the motivational impairment effect than less attractive speakers. Consistent with this prediction, under high motivational conditions (ingratiating lies, high competence-relevance), more attractive speakers were less likely to show the impairment than were less attractive speakers. Finally, we report suggestive evidence that the motivational impairment effect may occur when subjects are trying deliberately to control simultaneously all of their verbal and nonverbal behaviors.

Accuracy of person perception: do people know what kinds of impressions they convey?

Do people know what kinds of impressions they convey to other people during particular social interactions? In a study designed to answer this question, subjects interacted individually with three partners on each of four different tasks. After each interaction, participants reported their impressions of the other persons likability and competence. They also postdicted the impressions they believed they conveyed to the other person along the same dimensions. Accuracy was computed as recommended by Cronbach (1955) and by Kennys (1981) Social Relations Model. Subjects could tell to a significant degree how the impressions they conveyed to their partners changed over time (time accuracy) and how they changed over time in different ways with different partners (differential accuracy). They could also tell how their competence was differentially perceived by different partners (dyadic accuracy). However, they were not very accurate at discerning which partners perceived them as most competent or most likable across all interactions (person accuracy). Subjects believed that they conveyed similar impressions of themselves to all of their partners, although actually partners evidenced little agreement with each other in their impressions of a given subject. The implications of these findings for symbolic-interactionist theories of the development of the self and impression-management perspectives on social behavior are described.

TARGET ARTICLE: Singles in Society and in Science

We suggest that single adults in contemporary American society are targets of stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination, a phenomenon we will call singlism. Singlism is an outgrowth of a largely uncontested set of beliefs, the Ideology of Marriage and Family. Its premises include the assumptions that the sexual partnership is the one truly important peer relationship and that people who have such partnerships are happier and more fulfilled than those who do not. We use published claims about the greater happiness of married people to illustrate how the scientific enterprise seems to be influenced by the ideology. We propose that people who are single-particularly women who have always been single-fare better than the ideology would predict because they do have positive, enduring, and important interpersonal relationships. The persistence of singlism is especially puzzling considering that actual differences based on civil (marital) status seem to be qualified and small, the number of singles is growing, and sensitivity to other varieties of prejudice is acute. By way of explanation, we consider arguments from evolutionary psychology, attachment theory, a social problems perspective, the growth of the cult of the couple, and the appeal of an ideology that offers a simple and compelling worldview.

The Unrecognized Stereotyping and Discrimination Against Singles

A widespread form of bias has slipped under our cultural and academic radar. People who are single are targets of singlism: negative stereotypes and discrimination. Compared to married or coupled people, who are often described in very positive terms, singles are assumed to be immature, maladjusted, and self-centered. Although the perceived differences between people who have and have not married are large, the actual differences are not. Moreover, there is currently scant recognition that singlism exists, and when singlism is acknowledged, it is often accepted as legitimate.

Age Changes in Deceiving and Detecting Deceit

Infants’ and children’s initial attempts to decipher the true nature of their interpersonal and physical worlds mark the beginning of a scientific enterprise that will last a lifetime. Such an awesome undertaking requires sophisticated privately-owned equipment (for example, developing cognitive structures and sensory capabilities) and dependable external sources of support (for example, the existence of discernible invariances in the real world). Another tremendously rich source of data consists of information that is conveyed by other people. Much of this information that is conveyed to infants and children is sensible and useful. For example, adults often try to convey to children the names of people and things, the meanings of words, and some notion of the currently acceptable standards of conduct and systems of values. On other occasions, however, adults tell children about verbally fluent bears and pigs; about wolves who dress up like grandmothers; black-clad women who travel by broomstick; and cows that jump over the moon. The child’s world is punctuated with other types of verbal oddities as well. For example, when Junior smashes a priceless antique in his haste to escape to the great outdoors, his father remarks, “That’s just great.” Curiously, his father uttered the exact same words one day when Junior had picked up all of his toys.