The Quiet Cost of Assuming Everyone Is Lying

Suspicion comes too easily

You listen to someone’s story, and after a few sentences, a warning light goes on in your head: something does not add up. The person is not avoiding eye contact, not stammering, not visibly nervous, and yet the suspicion of deception is already at work. Perhaps our inner lie detector is set too sensitively.

We like to think that we judge people soberly: a little trust, a little caution, no naivety. Research by scientists from the Norwegian School of Economics suggests, however, that this caution is often exaggerated. People regularly overestimate the scale of others’ dishonesty. In other words, the world may be less full of lies than we think.

How often do people lie? This is where we get it wrong

The researchers tested this claim in a series of experiments in which participants could lie anonymously or behave dishonestly in order to gain financially. The researchers were interested not only in how many people would actually cheat, but also in how many cheaters others expected to see. This is where they noticed the most important difference between real behavior and our image of other people’s dishonesty.

According to the article published in the scientific journal Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, only 25.4 percent of participants underestimated the level of dishonesty among other people. The rest believed that cheating happened far more often than it actually did.

Companies fall into the trap too

The results of the first series of tests became the starting point for another study. This one showed that the false belief that cheating is widespread can lower our trust in others. When we learn the real scale of the problem, however, our perception of people clearly improves. One important question still remained: can such a change in beliefs influence real decisions and actions? That was the focus of the third experiment.

It involved 285 high-ranking company representatives whose work included designing rules, procedures, and control systems in businesses. Among other things, they assessed how common six of the most frequent dishonest behaviors in the workplace were, as well as how many people actually cheat a company and how many would admit to it in an anonymous survey. They, too, clearly overestimated the scale of the problem. They believed that about 55 percent of respondents would lie. That was as much as 25 percentage points higher than the actual level of cheating.

The price of life without trust

People convinced that dishonesty was widespread more often proposed strict measures designed to prevent cheating. They suggested installing surveillance systems, increasing supervision, and monitoring employees more closely.

About 30 percent of participants in our studies cheated when they had the opportunity. Our main finding is that people believe this percentage is much higher than it really is,

– said Dr. Jareef Martuza, one of the study’s authors, in an interview with PsyPost.

The results of all the experiments on lying in interpersonal relationships suggest that we often see others as less honest than they really are. That, in turn, can translate into lower levels of social trust and less satisfaction in our relationships with other people.

The question, then, is not only how often do people lie, but how much damage we do when we assume too quickly that they do.

Read this article in Polish: Ludzie kłamią rzadziej niż myślisz. Problemem jest nasza podejrzliwość