Bella DePaulo

University of California, Santa Barbara | UCSB · Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences

Previous studies show that close friends improve at lie detection over time. However, is this improvement due to an increase in the ability to decode the feelings of close friends or a change in how close friends communicate their true and deceptive emotions? In a study of 45 pairs of friends, one friend from each pair (the "sender") was videotaped...

Twenty-first century America has been characterized by a proliferation of choices about such fundamental aspects of life as marital status, parental status, and living arrangements. The option to pursue consensual nonmonogamy may be another such choice. When nonnormative ways of living first enter our cultural conversations, resistance and hostilit...

Although many societies are preoccupied with couples, the number of single people has been growing for decades. Scholarly research has focused overwhelmingly on the painful experience of loneliness; yet when single people can afford to live on their own, they often choose to do so, suggesting that solitude is something they savor. Singles may also...

Highlights ► There are many important questions about deception besides accuracy. ► Lies are not always about crimes or other bad behaviors. ► Curiosity-driven scholarship will broaden and deepen the study of deceit.

This chapter discusses the ethical concerns surrounding providing support for employees’ family demands in a way that is inclusive and does not exclude workers who are single and/or do not have children. Empirical research and public policy issues are discussed which demonstrate ways in which singles workers are perceived poorly or disadvantaged in...

Everyone lies. It would be impossible to prove that definitively, but we believe it to be so. But we also believe that it is truth-telling, rather than deception, that is the human default position. People typically prefer to tell the truth. They want to be honest, they want to see themselves as honest, and they want other people to see them that w...

Over past decades, the demographics of the United States have changed markedly. The proportions of married and single people are changing; so too are the nature and functions of marriage and the family. However, people who are single, and perspectives not based on conventional marriage, remain underrepresented or misrepresented in scholarship and p...

The authors report a meta-analysis of individual differences in detecting deception, confining attention to occasions when people judge strangers' veracity in real-time with no special aids. The authors have developed a statistical technique to correct nominal individual differences for differences introduced by random measurement error. Although r...

C. F. Bond and B. M. DePaulo reported a quantitative synthesis of individual differences in judging deception. Here, the authors respond to a pair of commentaries on this synthesis: a statistical critique by T. D. Pigott and M. J. Wu and a narrative reaction by M. O'Sullivan. In response to suggestions made by Pigott and Wu, the authors conduct sev...

Providing the fi rst empirical evidence of discrimination against singles, participants in multiple experiments favored married couples over various types of singles and failed to recognize such differential treatment as discrimination. In four experiments, undergraduates and rental agents read descriptions of multiple applicants for a rental prope...

Over the past few decades, relationship patterns have become more diverse. Besides classical marriage we find cohabitation, romantic partners living apart, and same-sex couples. Furthermore, single people have become an important and intensely discussed segment of society. Due to the increasing plurality of living arrangements, one might assume tha...

A widespread form of bias has slipped under our cultural and academic radar. People who are single are targets of singlism: negative stereotypes and discrimination. Compared to married or coupled people, who are often described in very positive terms, singles are assumed to be immature, maladjusted, and self-centered. Although the perceived differe...

The structure of skill at decoding nonverbal cues was examined for 150 high school students and 95 college students. An overall principal components analysis yielded four factors differing in the complexity of the message (pure versus mixed) and in the relative importance of the video versus the audio modality. Factor 1 (pure video) was defined by...

We analyze the accuracy of deception judgments, synthesizing research results from 206 documents and 24,483 judges. In relevant studies, people attempt to discriminate lies from truths in real time with no special aids or training. In these circumstances, people achieve an average of 54% correct lie-truth judgments, correctly classifying 47% of lie...

We suggest that single adults in contemporary American society are targets of stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination, a phenomenon we will call singlism. Singlism is an outgrowth of a largely uncontested set of beliefs, the Ideology of Marriage and Family. Its premises include the assumptions that the sexual partnership is the one truly import...

We suggest that single adults in contemporary American society are targets of stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination, a phenomenon we will call singlism. Singlism is an outgrowth of a largely uncontested set of beliefs, the Ideology of Marriage and Family. Its premises include the assumptions that the sexual partnership is the one truly import...

Can you tell whether suspects are lying based on what they say, how they say it, how they sound when they say it, or how they look? Can you do so even without any special equipment, such as a polygraph to monitor physiological responses (Honts, this volume) or a camera to record interviews, which can then be studied in microscopic detail (O'Sulliva...

In a pair of studies, college students and community members told autobiographical narratives about the most serious lie they ever told or the most serious lie that was ever told to them. Most serious lies were told by or to participants' closest relationship partners. Participants reported telling their serious lies to get what they wanted or to d...

Accuracy at reading nonverbal cues to emotions was examined for close friends, less close friends, and strangers. Forty-eight senders were videotaped talking about an experience during which they felt either very happy, very sad, or very angry. Half of the time they expressed their emotion clearly, and half of the time they concealed their emotion....

In a pair of studies, college students and community members told autobiographical narratives about the most serious lie they ever told or the most serious lie that was ever told to them. Most serious lies were told by or to participants' closest relationship partners. Participants reported telling their serious lies to get what they wanted or to d...

We discuss the ways in which deception can be used to protect privacy, as well as the ways in which claims to privacy can provide the latitude to lie. In their attempts to maintain their own privacy and their secrets, people can be assisted by others who overlook their lies. Habits of honoring other people's verbal and nonverbal claims about themse...

Do people behave differently when they are lying compared with when they are telling the truth? The combined results of 1,338 estimates of 158 cues to deception are reported. Results show that in some ways, liars are less forthcoming than truth tellers, and they tell less compelling tales. They also make a more negative impression and are more tens...

One member of each of 52 pairs of friends told true and fabricated stories to a partner (the judge) who guessed whether each story was true. This procedure was followed when the friends had known each other for 1 month and again 5 months later. Across all of the pairs, accuracy at detecting deception did not improve over time. However, judges from...

Memorializes Roger Brown, who is noted for his contribution to the study of autobiographical memory, emotion and memory, the psychology of child language, and social psychology. Brown's achievements have been recognized with the highest honors that psychology and science have to offer including elections to the National Academy of Sciences (1972) a...

Memorializes Roger Brown, who is noted for his contribution to the study of autobiographical memory, emotion and memory, the psychology of child language, and social psychology. Brown's achievements have been recognized with the highest honors that psychology and science have to offer including elections to the National Academy of Sciences (1972) a...

We tested the prediction, derived from Coyne's (1976b) interpersonal model of depression, that dysphoric individuals would be more sensitive than nondysphoric individuals to false reassurances and phoniness. In Part 1 of a two-part study, dysphoric and nondysphoric individuals watched videotapes of discussants talking about paintings they liked and...

In this longitudinal study, senders told truths and lies to same-sex friends (judges) at both one month and six months into the relationship. Judges guessed whether the stories were truths or lies, and described the cues they used to make their decisions. These cues were coded into categories according to the nature of the cue (verbal, visual, or p...

In 2 diary studies, 77 undergraduates and 70 community members recorded their social interactions and lies for a week. Because lying violates the openness and authenticity that people value in their close relationships, we predicted (and found) that participants would tell fewer lies per social interaction to the people to whom they felt closer and...

Deceit, delusion, and detection (see record 1996-97702-000 ) by W. Peter Robinson is a wide-ranging, ambitious, and thoughtful book. It is also, in places, inaccurate, misleading, and outdated. The scope of the book is almost as broad as the title suggests. It includes sections on definitional issues and philosophical approaches and on lying in the...

A meta-analysis was conducted of research on the relation between judges' accuracy at detecting deception and their confidence in their judgments. A total of 18 independent samples revealed an average weighted accuracy-confidence correlation of .04, a relation not significantly different from zero. However, confidence was positively correlated with...

Participants discussed paintings they liked and disliked with artists who were or were not personally invested in them. Participants were urged to be honest or polite or were given no special instructions. There were no conditions under which the artists received totally honest feedback about the paintings they cared about. As predicted by the defe...

Do people lie more to people they like than to people they dislike? Forty-eight female participants were experimentally induced to like or dislike an art student who had painted one of the paintings that participants liked and one that they disliked. According to their own self-reports and objective measures of the content of the discussions, parti...

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 prediction...

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. Participants told relatively more self-centered lies to men and...

Art students reacted to criticism and praise of their own work and other artists' work in face-to-face conversations with partners who were not confederates. The consistency vs self-enhancement debate led us to look for ways in which artists differing in self-esteem would be differentially positive about theirownwork relative to other artists' work...

In this ambitious, interdisciplinary work, Loyal D. Rue reassesses the value of deception in nature, and in human society, asserting that myths are essential to the health, and even survival, of a culture as a whole. Advancing his theory of the Noble Lie, he maintains that we urgently require a new myth to replace the religious beliefs rejected by...

In this study we explored how individuals' private expressions are interpreted by the self, same-sex friends, and strangers. Videotapes were made of participants as they watched pleasant, unpleasant, and unusual slides. Approximately a year later, the tapes were shown to the participant, a same-sex friend, another participant, and the other partici...

On the basis of information-processing models of the relationship between anxiety and performance, as well as the literature on the self-presentational strategies of the socially anxious, we predicted that socially anxious subjects would be worse at discriminating truth from deception than would nonanxious subjects. Fifty subjects low in social anx...

We tested the hypothesis that the importance of the topic of research can make people overlook methodological flaws in the research. Two samples of scientists, faculty at a major medical school and research psychologists, evaluated the methodological rigor and publishability of brief descriptions of flawed research studies. Two versions of each stu...

Meta-accuracy is the extent to which people know how others see them. Following D.A. Kenny and L. Albright (1987), we show how the social relations model (SRM) can be used to investigate meta-accuracy. The results from 8 SRM studies involving 569 subjects are reviewed. We argue that people determine how others view them not from the feedback that t...

Allport (1937) had a very strong opinion about where to look in order to figure out the content and structure of people’s personalities: Look at their expressive movements. That is, look not only at what people are doing, but how they are doing it; listen not only to what they are communicating, but also the manner in which they are communicating i...

Dispositionally expressive and unexpressive male subjects told truths and lies under low and high scrutiny. Subjects acted expressive, inhibited, and naturally. Judges rated subjects' performances. Subjects were able to regulate their expressiveness deliberately, but they were less successful when more highly scrutinized. Dispositionally expressive...

Because of special characteristics of nonverbal behaviors (e.g., they can be difficult to suppress, they are more accessible to the people who observe them than to the people who produce them), the intention to produce a particular nonverbal expression for self-presentational purposes cannot always be successfully translated into the actual product...

When people are motivated to tell an effective lie, they are less successful when others can observe their nonverbal cues. It was predicted that expectations for success would moderate this motivational impairment effect, such that it would occur primarily when expectations were low. Ninety-six women who thought of themselves as very independent to...

We predicted that socially anxious people who are faced with the prospect of an interpersonal evaluation will act in an inhibited and withdrawn way. Subjects who scored low or high on a measure of social anxiety told four stories about themselves to an interviewer. In the anticipated-evaluation condition, the subjects learned that after they had to...

provide a theoretical framework for help-seeking and to show the linkage to factors that encourage versus discourage help-seeking behavior / focus is on the types of problems (depression, anxiety, achievement difficulties) typically confronted by mental health professionals / present a framework of help-seeking motivation and discuss how it may app...

Experiments on behavioral lie detection have indicated that observers can detect a communicator's lies with above-chance accuracy, and that detection accuracy may be enhanced when observers pay special attention to certain vocal and body-movement cues. The present experiment asked whether deception in (simulated) sales communications by retail sale...

Examined the help-seeking behaviors of shy and not-shy men and women. In Study 1, Ss worked on an impossible task in the presence of a male or female confederate whom they were told had just successfully completed the task. Shy Ss asked for help no less frequently than did not-shy Ss overall, but they did seek help less frequently from opposite-sex...

Second and fourth graders (8- and 10-year-olds) were tutored by children in the same grade as themselves or 2 grades older. It was predicted that help would be self-threatening in dyads in which the children were similar to each other in both age and achievement. In those dyads, the high achieving tutees (and their tutors) should respond to the thr...

Past research (e.g., DePaulo & Kirkendol, in press) has documented a motivational impairment effect in the communication of deception, whereby people who are more highly motivated to get away with their lies (relative to those who are less highly motivated) are less successful at doing so whenever observers can see or hear any of their nonverbal cu...

The verbal and nonverbal communication of warmth was examined in a study in which undergraduate women taught a block design task to a listener who was either a six-year-old child, a retarded adult, a peer who spoke English as a second language (foreigner), or a peer who was a native speaker of English. The degree of warmth conveyed by the speakers...

Are physically attractive people more skilled than unattractive people at distinguishing truth from deception? To address this question, we showed videotapes of truthful and deceptive messages to 102 males and females classified as low, medium, or high in attractiveness. The speakers shown on the tapes were telling truths and lies to attractive or...

Do people know what kinds of impressions they convey to other people during particular social interactions? In a study designed to answer this question, subjects interacted individually with three partners on each of four different tasks. After each interaction, participants reported their impressions of the other person's likability and competence...

Speech addressed to different categories of listeners was examined in a study in which undergraduate women taught a block design task to either a 6-year-old child, a retarded adult, a peer who spoke English as a second language (foreigner), or a peer who was an unimpaired native speaker of English. The speech addressed to children differed from the...

The role of on-the-job experience in fostering skill at detecting deception was examined. A deception-detection test was administered to three samples of more than 100 subjects each: a group of undergraduates with no special experiences at detecting deceit; a group of new recruits to a federal law enforcement training program, who had some limited...

Male and female "senders" described their opinions on four controversial issues to target persons. Each sender expressed sincere agreement with the target on one of the issues and sincere disagreement on another (truthful messages), and also pretended to agree with the partner on one of the issues (an ingratiating lie) and pretended to disagree on...

36 undergraduate "interviewers" each interviewed an introverted and an extraverted "applicant," as assessed by the Eysenck Personality Inventory. One of the applicants acted honestly, the other dishonestly (i.e., extraverts presented themselves as introverts and introverts presented themselves as extraverts). Interviewers were either naive or prime...

By the hundreds of studies they have already conducted on altruism, psychologists have amply demonstrated their concern that people in need of help should obtain the necessary and appropriate resources. However, this research has focused almost exclusively on help that is initiated by someone eise. In contrast, the process whereby people actively s...

In 2 studies, 124 female undergraduates working on a series of problems received help on either all or none of the problems, only those for which help really was needed (appropriate help), or only those problems for which help was not needed (inappropriate help). Ss reported their affective and evaluative responses and were given an opportunity to...

Hypothesized that senders who are highly motivated to lie successfully (vs those who are less highly motivated) would be more successful at controlling the verbal aspects of their communications but less successful at controlling the nonverbal aspects. In Study 1, 32 senders (16 male and 16 female undergraduates) randomly assigned to high vs low mo...

Previous research has shown both that speech can reliably reveal whether or not deception is occurring and that perceivers are often strongly influenced by speech in their judgments about deceit. Nonetheless, there are relatively few studies of verbal cues to deceit. In the present study, we examined specific verbal and paralinguistic cues that mig...

The decoding of deceptive and mixed messages from verbal and nonverbal cues was examined. Forty senders described people they liked and people they disliked (“pure” messages); and people they felt ambivalent about and people they felt indifferent toward (mixed messages). They also described the people they liked, pretending to dislike them and they...

Androgynous, sex-typed, and undifferentiated subjects predicted the responses of androgynous, sex-typed, and undifferentiated others to masculine, feminine, and neutral situations. The self-report criterion data replicated the findings of Helmreich, Spence, & Holahan (1979). In accordance with Cronbach's (1955) suggestion, separate correlational me...

Subjects, 22 males and 22 females, observed a videotape of 6 males and 6females who were sometimes lying and sometimes telling the truth. Subjects were instructed to pay special attention to the tone of voice, the words, or the visual cues of the senders, or were given no special attentional instructions (control condition). Subjects told to pay pa...

The development of the ability to detect deception was investigated. Subjects were sixth graders, eighth graders, tenth graders, twelfth graders, and college students who watched or listened to a videotape of 4 males and 4 females, each describing someone they liked and someone they disliked (honest messages) and pretending to like the disliked per...

Administered a videotaped nonverbal discrepancy test to children 9–15 yrs old. The test measured (a) decoding accuracy—the extent to which Ss were able to identify affects (positivity and dominance) from video (facial and body) cues and audio (content filtered and random spliced) cues; (b) discrepancy accuracy—the extent to which Ss recognized the...

This study tested the hypothesis that judges who suspect deception would be less influenced by controllable channels (facial expresions) relative to leaky channels (voice and body) than judges who do not suspect deception. The Nonverbal Discrepancy Test, comprised of video (face or body) cues paired with audio cues, was administered to subjects wit...

Infants’ and children’s initial attempts to decipher the true nature of their interpersonal and physical worlds mark the beginning of a scientific enterprise that will last a lifetime. Such an awesome undertaking requires sophisticated privately-owned equipment (for example, developing cognitive structures and sensory capabilities) and dependable e...

Explored the interactive effects of aid, situational "demandingness" (i.e., task difficulty and threatening aspects of the helper's behavior), and help-recipients' self-esteem on recipients' postaid task performance. Based on the threat-to-self-esteem model of reactions to help (J. D. Fisher, in press), and past research (H. Sigall and R. Gould; se...

Examined the developmental acquisition of females' superiority in decoding nonverbal cues. Three age groups (121 male and 129 female 9–15 yr olds, 46 male and 63 female high school students, and 32 male and 49 female undergraduates) were examined cross-sectionally, and 24 male and 24 female 11–24 yr olds were examined longitudinally. Decoding of 4...

Lying and lie detection are the two components that, together, make up the exchange called as the “communication of deception.” Deception is an act that is intended to foster in another person a belief or understanding that the deceiver considers false. This chapter presents a primarily psychological point of view and a relatively microanalysis of...

Ninety-one high school students watched, heard, and/or read communications addressed to children, adults, foreigners, or mentally retarded adults, and rated the speakers along 10 dimensions, including friendliness, concern, competence, and dominance. Stimulus materials portrayed only the speakers; hence, subjects had no information about the type o...

This study explored the relationship between help-seeking and sensitivity to covert and overt nonverbal cues of emotion. In a help-seeking context, covert cues (cues one is trying to hide) would often include signs of annoyance and inconvenience expressed by a potential helper, while overt cues (cues one is trying to convey) would include polite si...

An expanded analysis that permits generalization to populations of both encoders and decoders is described and illustrated. It is shown that treating encoders as a between-subjects factor and decoders as a within-subjects factor can yield tests of significance that differ markedly from those obtained from analyses regarding decoders as a between-su...

Friends are believed to be more similar to each other than are strangers along a variety of dimensions. In previous research, interest has focused on such variables as demographic characteristics, intelligence, personality, attitudes, and values (see Berscheid & Walster, 1978, for a review). Resemblances in attitudes and values suggest that friends...

This study explored the hypothesis that siblings display a tendency for family resemblance in nonverbal decoding skills. Thirty-seven sibling pairs between the ages of 9 and 15 were administered the videotaped Nonverbal Discrepancy Test. This audiovisual test assesses (1) decoding accuracy—the extent to which subjects are able to identify affects (...

Examined developmental changes in responses to consistent and discrepant video and audio nonverbal cues. A videotaped Nonverbal Discrepancy Test was administered to 121 males and 129 females aged 9–15 yrs. The discrepancy test measured (a) decoding accuracy—the extent to which Ss are able to identify affects (positivity and dominance) from visual (...