Journal of personality and social psychology
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Seventy-seven undergraduates and 70 demographically diverse members of the community completed 12 individual differences measures hypothesized to predict lie-telling in everyday life and then kept a diary every day for a week of all of their social interactions and all of the lies that they told during those interactions. Consistent with predictions, the people who told more lies were more manipulative, more concerned with self-presentation, and more sociable. People who told fewer lies were more highly socialized and reported higher quality same-sex relationships. Manipulative people, less highly socialized people, and people with less gratifying same-sex relationships also told especially more self-serving lies, whereas people with higher quality same-sex relationships told relatively more other oriented lies.
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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. ⋯ 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.