Do people behave differently when they are lying compared with when they are telling the truth? The combined results of 1,338 estimates of 158 cues to deception are reported. Results show that in some ways, liars are less forthcoming than truth tellers, and they tell less compelling tales. They also make a more negative impression and are more tense. Their stories include fewer ordinary imperfections and unusual contents. However, many behaviors showed no discernible links, or only weak links, to deceit. Cues to deception were more pronounced when people were motivated to succeed, especially when the motivations were identity relevant rather than monetary or material. Cues to deception were also stronger when lies were about transgressions.

We analyze the accuracy of deception judgments, synthesizing research results from 206 documents and 24,483 judges. In relevant studies, people attempt to discriminate lies from truths in real time with no special aids or training. In these circumstances, people achieve an average of 54% correct lie-truth judgments, correctly classifying 47% of lies as deceptive and 61% of truths as nondeceptive. Relative to cross-judge differences in accuracy, mean lie-truth discrimination abilities are nontrivial, with a mean accuracy d of roughly .40. This produces an effect that is at roughly the 60th percentile in size, relative to others that have been meta-analyzed by social psychologists. Alternative indexes of lie-truth discrimination accuracy correlate highly with percentage correct, and rates of lie detection vary little from study to study. Our meta-analyses reveal that people are more accurate in judging audible than visible lies, that people appear deceptive when motivated to be believed, and that individuals regard their interaction partners as honest. We propose that people judge others' deceptions more harshly than their own and that this double standard in evaluating deceit can explain much of the accumulated literature.

In 2 diary studies of lying, 77 college students reported telling 2 lies a day, and 70 community members told 1. Participants told more self-centered lies than other-oriented lies, except in dyads involving only women, in which other-oriented lies were as common as self-centered ones. Participants told relatively more self-centered lies to men and relatively more other-oriented lies to women. Consistent with the view of lying as an everyday social interaction process, participants said that they did not regard their lies as serious and did not plan them much or worry about being caught. Still, social interactions in which lies were told were less pleasant and less intimate than those in which no lies were told. Although psychologists of many orientations have had. much to say about lying (DePaulo, Stone, & Lassiter, 1985; Ford, King, & Hollender, 1988; Lewis & Saarni, 1993), the topic is hardly their exclusive domain. Interest in lying transcends most disciplinary, cultural, and historical boundaries. Analyses of lying appear in religious treatises, staid textbooks, and irreverent tabloids. Perspectives on lying are as diverse as their sources. Lying has been described as a threat to the moral fabric of society (Bok, 1978), a predictor of dire life outcomes (Stouthamer-Loeber, 1986), asocial skill (DePaulo & Jordan, 1982;Nyberg, 1993), and an important developmental milestone (deVilliers &deVilliers, 1978). Pronouncements about deceit are staggeringly varied not only because of the nature of the beast, but also because the debate on deceit has in some important ways proceeded virtually unconstrained by data. Many perspectives on deceit rest on assumptions about patterns of lying in everyday life. However, some of the most fundamental questions about everyday lies

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Meta-accuracy is the extent to which people know how others see them. Following D.A. Kenny and L. Albright (1987), we show how the social relations model (SRM) can be used to investigate meta-accuracy. The results from 8 SRM studies involving 569 subjects are reviewed. We argue that people determine how others view them not from the feedback that they receive from others but from their own self-perceptions. Consistent with this argument are the findings that (a) people overestimate the degree of consistency in the ways that different targets view them and (b) people are better at understanding how others generally view them than how they are uniquely viewed by specific individuals.