When Liars Fool Themselves
My doctoral work demonstrating how motivation influences lying and memory
How to study motivated lying in the laboratory?
I wanted to know how liars can fool themselves into their own lies about their past attitudes, but it was challenging to come up with a way to experimentally test that in the laboratory.
Replicating a real-world scenario in the laboratory
Let's say that you meet a date for the first time and you find out that they are in favor of a proposal that you hate. They ask you about it and you lie and tell them it's great.
If this prospective romantic partner is attractive, you'll be motivated to impress them and more likely to lie. But if they are not attractive, you won't be as motivated.
If you know they like something that you hate, you might lie about your attitudes. But if you don't know how they feel, then you won't lie to them when given the opportunity.
Experimental Method
Experimental design involved prescreening for single college students who were strongly against mandatory comprehensive exams.
Two-6 weeks later, participants came into the laboratory and expected to meet a different-sex partner who was also single.
Some participants knew their partner liked mandatory exams ahead of time by reading their partner's profile first (knowledge condition).
Some participants didn't know their partner's attitude and instead relayed to their partner their attitude first (dotted line below; no-knowledge condition).
Some participants expected to meet an attractive partner (attractive condition).
Some participants expected to meet an unattractive partner (unattractive condition).
Measuring Lying and Memory
Depending upon their condition, participants told their partner how they felt about mandatory exams (opportunity to lie) either before or after learning that their partner liked mandatory exams.
The measurement of lying was on the same 11-point scale.
Then participants completed a filler task for 10 minutes before being told that they were not actually going to meet any partner and the profiles were fictitious (this was to remove any motivation to continue pretending to like mandatory comprehensive exams).
To measure their memory of their past attitude, participants were given a memory test of 10 items of the original prescreen survey that they completed at the beginning of the semester.
Key Findings
Participants who lied to attractive partners remembered having a more positive initial attitude (analysis done was a factorial ANOVA).
The more participants lied, the more they misremembered how they originally felt (analysis done was a mediation analysis).
Takeaway: The more motivated people were to lie about their past attitudes, the more they misremembered how they originally felt.
Impact
Topic Contributions
First study to establish causal evidence for self-deception
Challenged established social psychological theories
Contributes to social cognition and communication theories
Potential Applications
Could be used in expert witness testimony to explain why false confessors could believe their own lies.
Could be used in counseling therapies to help clients discover their own self-deceptions.
Could explain why satisfaction surveys may not indicate people's true attitudes if people regularly lie about their attitudes.
To read the published article see Brady and Lord (2013):
Copy of Brady & Lord, 2013.pdf