Diary Study on Japanese University Students’ Suspicions of Being Deceived in Everyday Life

ABSTRACT

How do people “suspect” lies? We conducted a study on Japanese university students using the diary method to investigate situations in which people are deceived. We also created a taxonomy of sources of suspicion and examined whether behavioral cues or non-behavioral evidence were more frequently used to develop suspicions about being deceived. Participants were instructed to record their suspicions of being deceived for one week using a voice recorder. Results indicated that the mean number of perceived lies was 1.52 per day. A total of 244 episodes of subjectively perceived lies were classified into ten categories. The results indicated that, rather than behavioral cues, non-behavioral evidence (i.e., “Prior Knowledge about a Specific Person,” “Decisive Evidence,” “Suggestive Evidence”) is more likely to trigger suspicion. Further analysis revealed that behavioral cues were often used with other categories.

KEYWORDS:

• Lies
• deception
• taxonomy
• diary method
• behavioral cues
• Truth Default Theory

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. There was a difference in the usage of “Prior Knowledge” from Park et al. (2002). We used the term to refer to prior knowledge of a specific person, while Park et al. (2002) used it as prior knowledge contradicting what was said. In our study, the prior knowledge used in Park et al.’s study (2002) was mostly categorized as suggestive evidence.

2. In the second coding, we calculated Krippendorff’s alpha in addition to the basic match rate for each category: “Prior Knowledge about a Specific Person (α = .751),” “Decisive Evidence (α = .433),” “Suggestive Evidence (α = .234),” “Common Sense (α = .591),” “Typical Expressions (α = .696),” “Behavioral Cues (α = .563),” “Baseless Speculation (α = 1),” “Third-Party Information (α = 0),” “Confessions (α = 1),” and “Other (α = −.013).” Low-frequency categories (i.e., categories rarely seen in the episodes) yielded extremely erratic results because extremely low or high frequencies result in a bias for Krippendorff’s alpha. Therefore, they should only be used as reference information.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 20730405.

Notes on contributors

Jun’ichiro Murai

Jun’ichiro Murai is a professor in the Faculty of Human Studies at Bunkyo Gakuin University, Japan. His research focuses on lies and deception.

Yasuhiro Daiku

Yasuhiro Daiku is an invited researcher at Osaka University, Japan. His research focuses on lies and deception. He is also interested in addressing the problem of scams in Japan and occasionally gives public lectures on scam prevention.