Teenagers Lie a Lot: A Further Investigation into the Prevalence of Lying

Abstract

Although it is commonly believed that lying is ubiquitous, recent findings show large, individual differences in lying, and that the proclivity to lie varies by age. This research surveyed 58 high school students, who were asked how often they had lied in the past 24 hr. It was predicted that high school students would report lying with greater frequency than previous surveys with college student and adult samples, but that the distribution of reported lies by high school students would exhibit a strongly and positively skewed distribution similar to that observed with college student and adult samples. The data were consistent with both predictions. High school students in the sample reported telling, on average, 4.1 lies in the past 24 hr—a rate that is 75% higher than that reported by college students and 150% higher than that reported by a nationwide sample of adults. The data were also skewed, replicating the “few prolific liar” effect previously documented in college student and adult samples.

Keywords:

• Deception
• Lying
• Prevalence Of Lies
• Teenagers

Notes

To fit a power function, it is necessary to exclude those participants who told no lies, as a power curve requires all positive values of x. Therefore, the prevalence curves are plotted for liars only. In this research, there are a small number of high school students who reported telling one lie; relative to the mean of 4.1 lies, this is nearly the equivalent of telling no lies at all. To improve the goodness of fit, those telling one lie were treated as non-liars. For the reported power function, r ² = .900, indicating a strong fit. More important, if those who told one lie are included, the data still show a pattern, with the majority of lies being told by a few prolific liars; however, the goodness of fit is weaker, r ² = .426.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Timothy R. Levine

Timothy R. Levine (PhD, Michigan State University, 1992) is a professor in the School of Media and Communication at Korea University, Seoul, Republic of Korea.

Kim B. Serota

Kim B. Serota (PhD, Michigan State University, 2011) is a visiting professor in the Department of Management and Marketing at Oakland University.

Frankie Carey

Frankie Carey is an undergraduate student at the University of Miami.

Doug Messer

Doug Messer is an undergraduate student at Syracuse University.