Who lies?

Abstract

Seventy-seven undergraduates and 70 demographically diverse members of the community completed 12 individual differences measures hypothesized to predict lie-telling in everyday life and then kept a diary every day for a week of all of their social interactions and all of the lies that they told during those interactions. Consistent with predictions, the people who told more lies were more manipulative, more concerned with self-presentation, and more sociable. People who told fewer lies were more highly socialized and reported higher quality same-sex relationships. Manipulative people, less highly socialized people, and people with less gratifying same-sex relationships also told especially more self-serving lies, whereas people with higher quality same-sex relationships told relatively more other oriented lies.