Medical News Today (MNT) reports on how liars are truly honest at lying.
Human Communication Research recently published a paper that many people are honest about their lying and most individuals tend to lie quite a lot. 527 people were surveyed in the project; reserachers Bruno Verschuere, Shaul Shalvi and Rony Halevy aksed them, ‘how often they had lied over the past 24 hours.’ 41% of the participants indicated that they had not lied at all, which could quite possibly be a lie. It turned out that 5% of the individuals were accountable for 40% of all the lies told.
The researchers delved further by testing how honest the participants would be about the frequency of their lying. Participants were asked to roll dice and received a sum of money depending on the number they reported having rolled. Because the researchers were unable to see the actual numbers rolled, participants were free to cheat and report higher numbers.
Participants who had already admitted to lying more frequently also had higher winnings in this dice test, indicating that participants, who said they lie often, did indeed lie often. Statistically, their scores were so implausible that they are likely to have lied about the numbers they rolled, rather than enjoying a series of lucky rolls.
“The fact that participants who indicated lying often actually did lie more often in the dice test demonstrates that they were honest about their dishonesty,“ said Verschuere. “It may be that frequent liars show more psychopathic traits; therefore have no trouble admitting to lying frequently.“
Previous studies found that, on average, survey participants admitted to lying twice a day. According to this study, this does not permit the conclusion that everyone lies because this is an average, it gives a distorted picture of individual differences in lying behavior.
It is important to note, however, that there were a whopping 41% who said that they did not lie at all…not even a white lie?