Deciding How to Deceive: Differences in Communication and Detection Between Good and Bad Liars

Abstract

To study deception, participants were randomly assigned the role of allocator or recipient in an ultimatum negotiation game. Allocators “earned” 7 dollars and divided the money between themselves and recipient and communicated the decision either face-to-face or through text chat. Recipients were unaware the amount the allocator had, and therefore, allocators could deceive. Most allocators used deception. We hypothesized that participants who self-identified as good liars would communicate more face-to-face than through text chat when deceiving, and this was supported for deceptive omission but not fabrications. Good liars were more likely to have their truths correctly detected than bad liars.

Keywords:

• Deception
• Detection
• Lie
• Negativity Bias
• Online
• Truth Bias

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Shawna Rivedal, Lillian Childress, Jacinta Tian, Olivia Tane, Hannah Klein, Dara Wolf, Amanda Smerlinski, Corrina Jones, and August Brulla for help running the experiment, transcribing interactions, and coding the interactions.

Funding

This research was supported by a grant from the Hamel Family Foundation.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a grant from the Hamel Family Foundation.