Evaluation and Deceit Signalscake and ice cream you eat that makes you look fat.'
if you told everyone the complete truth all the time, you'd
not only end up lonely, you might even finish up in hospital or
prison. Lying is the oil that greases our interactions with others
and lets us maintain friendly social relationships. These are
called White Lies because their goal is to make others feel com-
fortable instead of telling them the cold, hard truth. Research
shows that social liars are more popular than those who con-
tinually tell the truth, even though we know the social liar is
lying to us. Malicious Lies, however, are where one person
deliberately sets out to deceive another for personal benefit.Lying ResearchThe least dependable signs of lying are the ones over which a
person has the most control, such as words, because a person
can rehearse their lies. The most reliable clues to lying are the
gestures a person makes automatically, because they have little
or no control over them. These responses are most likely to
happen during lies because they are emotionally the most
important things to the liar.
Robert Feldman at the University of Massachusetts in
Amherst studied 121 couples as they had a conversation with
a third person. One third of the participants were told to
appear likeable, while another third were instructed to seem
competent, and the rest were asked just to be themselves. All
Participants were then asked to watch the video of themselves
and identify any lies they had told during the conversation no
matter how big or small. Some lies were white lies, such as
saying they liked someone when they really didn't, while other
lies were more extreme, such as falsely claiming to be the star
of a rock band. Overall, Feldman found that 62% of his par-
ticipants told an average of two to three lies every ten minutes.
James Patterson, author of The Day America told The Truth,
interviewed over 2000 Americans and found that 91% lied reg-
ularly both at home and at work.