Toward a Deeper Understanding of Prolific Lying: Building a Profile of Situation-Level and Individual-Level Characteristics

Abstract

Prior work suggests those who lie prolifically tend to be younger and self-identify as male compared to those who engage in everyday lying, but little research has developed an understanding of prolific lying beyond demographics. Study 1 ( N = 775) replicated the prior demographic effects and assessed prolific lying through situation-level (e.g., opportunistic cheating) and individual-level characteristics (e.g., dispositional traits, general communication patterns) for white and big lies. For these two lie types, prolific lying associated with more opportunistic cheating, the use of fewer adjectives, and being high on psychopathy compared to everyday lying. Study 2 ( N = 1,022) replicated these results and observed a deception consensus effect reported in other studies: the more that people deceived, the more they believed that others deceived as well. This piece develops a deeper theoretical understanding of prolific lying for white and big lies, combining evidence of situational, dispositional, and communication characteristics.

Analytic Thinking as Revealed by Function Words: What Does Language Really Measure?

“…Participants writing about friends discussed at least two friends that they liked and told stories about them. Both writing prompts were selected because they are validated writing exercises, they have been used in prior academic research (Markowitz, 2022b;Markowitz & Griffin, 2020;Newman et al, 2003;Pennebaker, 2011), and they solicit different psychological experiences (e.g., writing about a bottle is a relatively neutral task compared to writing about friends, which is affectively positive). Using two writing tasks also facilitated a critical robustness check.…”

Contextual considerations for deception production and detection in forensic interviews

“…What links these problematic personality traits is arguably manipulation and deceptive intent, with a recent study demonstrating that manipulativeness and dishonesty were some of the key characteristics defining psychopathy (Crego and Widiger, 2022). People who are high on such aversive personality traits tend to display more cheating behavior in some settings (Jones and Paulhus, 2017), and report higher-than-average lying selfreported lying rates than those who are low on such aversive personality traits (Daiku et al, 2021;Markowitz, 2022). Deception studies may control for individual differences, but they might serve as key moderators for lie production or detection.…”

“…However, a small segment of the population engages in prolific lying, defined as greater-than-average lying during a one-time task. Prolific lying, with skewed prevalence distributions where most people are honest and a few people have above-average lying rates, has been established in US settings ( Serota et al, 2010 ; Levine et al, 2013 ; Markowitz and Hancock, 2018 ; Markowitz, 2022 ), Japan ( Daiku et al, 2021 ), South Korea ( Park et al, 2021 ), and other locations. Therefore, a critical contextual and situational moderator of deception is lie-truth base-rates.…”

“…It is important to note that prolific lying and identifying prolific liars are not the same empirical task. Prolific lying considers deception tendencies during a single opportunity for gain ( Serota et al, 2010 ; Levine et al, 2013 ; Daiku et al, 2021 ; Markowitz, 2022 ). Prolific liars are individuals who demonstrate a repeated proclivity for taking up the opportunity for deception ( Serota et al, 2021 ).…”

“…First, prior work suggest interpersonal perceptions of dishonesty are correlated in online ( Markowitz and Hancock, 2018 ) and offline settings ( Markowitz, 2022 ). For example, Markowitz and Hancock (2018) coined the deception consensus effect , an idea that suggests one’s lying rate is positively correlated with their perceptions of dishonesty for a given setting.…”