Honesty may be the best policy, but new research from the University of Sydney suggests that consumers feel more satisfied if they lie and get what they want than if they tell the truth.

The study, to be published in the Journal of Consumer Research by Dr Christina Anthony and Professor Elizabeth Cowley of the University of Sydney Business School, found that people who lie during a service encounter have more extreme reactions to the outcome than their honest peers.

The research raises interesting questions about the way marketers and businesses respond to dishonest customers and train their staff, particularly given the volume of lies people tell every day – previous research shows that people tell on average one to two lies a day, which equates to about 42,000 lies before the age of 60.

“Lying is hard work. When people lie, they’re so preoccupied with telling the lie and not revealing the truth that they aren’t able to monitor cues from the listener, which are important for updating expectations about the likely outcome of the conversation. This means that they are more surprised by the outcome and so have a stronger reaction to it,” says Dr Anthony.

“So when you lie to get a refund or to file an insurance claim and get away with it, you will have a much more polarised reaction than if you had told the truth. People who lie are more satisfied than truth tellers if they get a favourable outcome and more dissatisfied if they get an unfavourable outcome.” [continue reading…]

Sending a text message leads people to lie more often than in other forms of communication, according to new research by David Xu, assistant professor in the W. Frank Barton School of Business at Wichita State University.

Xu is lead author of the paper, which compares the level of deceit people will use in a variety of media, from text messages to face-to-face interactions.

The study will appear in the March edition of the Journal of Business Ethics. The other co-authors are professor Karl Aquino and associate professor Ronald Cenfetelli with the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia.

How the study worked
The study involved 170 students from the Sauder School performing mock stock transactions in one of four ways: face-to-face, or by video, audio or text chatting.

Researchers promised cash awards of up to $50 to increase participants’ involvement in the role play. “Brokers” were promised increased cash rewards for more stock sales, while “buyers” were told their cash reward would depend on the yet-to-be-determined value of the stock.

The brokers were given inside knowledge that the stock was rigged to lose half of its value. Buyers were only informed of this fact after the mock sales transaction and were asked to report whether the brokers had employed deceit to sell their stock.

The authors then analyzed which forms of communication led to more deception. They found that buyers who received information via text messages were 95 percent more likely to report deception than if they had interacted via video, 31 percent more likely to report deception when compared to face-to-face, and 18 percent more likely if the interaction was via audio chat.

The fact that people were less likely to lie via video than in person was surprising, Xu said, but makes sense given the so-called “spotlight” effect, where a person feels they’re being watched more closely on video than face-to-face.

Xu said this kind of research has implications for consumers to avoid problems such as online fraud, and for businesses looking to promote trust and build a good image, Xu said.

Source:Wichita State University

A new study by University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers finds that communication using computers for instant messaging and e-mail increases lying compared to face-to-face conversations, and that e-mail messages are most likely to contain lies. The findings, by Robert S. Feldman, professor of psychology and dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and Mattityahu Zimbler, a graduate student, are published in the October issue of the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.

The research paper, titled “Liar, Liar, Hard Drive on Fire: How Media Context Affects Lying Behavior,” looked at 110 same-sex pairs of college students who engaged in 15 minute conversations either face-to-face, using e-mail, or using instant messaging. The results were then analyzed for inaccuracies.

What Feldman and Zimbler found was that while there is some degree of deception present in all three forms of communication, it was increased in both instant messaging and e-mail, with e-mail messages the most likely to contain lies. Underlying this was the concept of deindividualization, where as people grow psychologically and physically further from the person they are in communication with, there is a higher likelihood of lying, they say. [continue reading…]