Unpacking variation in lie prevalence: Prolific liars, bad lie days, or both?

ABSTRACT

Testing truth-default theory, individual-level variation in lie frequency was parsed from within-individual day-to-day variation (good/bad lie days) by examining 116,366 lies told by 632 participants over 91 days. As predicted and consistent with prior findings, the distribution was positively skewed. Most participants lied infrequently and most lies were told by a few prolific liars. Approximately three-quarters of participants were consistently low-frequency liars. Across participants, lying comprised 7% of total communication and almost 90% of all lies were little white lies. About 58% of the variance was explained by stable individual differences with approximately 42% of the variance attributable to within-person day-to-day variability. The data were consistent with both the existence of a few prolific liars and good/bad lie days.

KEYWORDS:

• Deception
• lies
• lying over time
• prevalence
• prolific liars
• truth-default theory
• TDT

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Hee Sun Park (Korea University) for assistance with the HLM analysis, the technical support staff of Qualtrics for design and implementation guidance, the faculty of the Department of Communication Studies, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse for participating in the recruitment of subjects and for providing course credit as an incentive, Christopher J. Carpenter (Western Illinois University) for review of data, and the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback and guidance.

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

The data underlying this article will be shared on reasonable request to the corresponding author.

Notes

1 We recognize that false and misleading statements are not isomorphic with lies. False statements are not lies if the sender believes them. Similarly, not all lies can be fact checked. Nevertheless, considering false and misleading statements as a proxy for lies leads to insights of potential theoretical importance that motivated the current study.

2 Serota et al. (2010) and Serota and Levine (2015) created rules for identifying the breakpoint for prolific lying based on fitting data to Poisson and Pareto distributions. Although the scree test was originally developed for identifying significant eigenvalues in a factor structure, it can be used to delineate the “elbow” in any power law distribution. While subjective, the scree test is more efficient than applying the Poisson/Pareto rules and typically yields a similar result.