How Often Do People Actually Lie?

Here’s a surprising fact: Most people don’t lie most of the time. Contrary to the impression you might get from social media or the news, lying is very much the exception, not the rule.

Researchers on lying have known this for quite a while now, at least with respect to American participants in their studies. For instance, in one important study, Michigan State University researcher Kim Serota and colleagues surveyed 1,000 Americans about their lying behavior over the previous 24 hours. What they found is that 59.9% reported not telling a single lie. For those who admitted to lying, they tended to tell only 1 to 3 lies. Indeed, while 1,646 lies was the total number from this group, incredibly half of all these lies came from only 5.3% of the participants.

That was a study with Americans. Does this pattern hold up cross-culturally? While there have been a few studies looking into this issue, nothing has yet been attempted of the same magnitude as a forthcoming paper by Serota and four other researchers in the Journal of Communication. They surveyed hundreds of people in each of following locations: China, Germany, Mexico, Israel (Jewish participants), Israel (Muslim participants), Kenya, Russia, and Brazil. The main question participants were asked was:

“Think about where you were and what you were doing during the past 24 hours, from this time yesterday until right now. Please write in the number of times you lied.”

Did the results show the same skewed distribution, with a few prolific liars and most people either not lying at all or telling very few lies? They did indeed.

Here, for example, were some of the results for China: The average number of lies told among all 547 participants was 1.92. This could suggest that maybe lying is commonplace in China. But averages can cover up differences: 39% of Chinese participants reported telling zero lies. At the same time, 5% of the group told 6 or more lies, and contributed 38% of the total number of lies. The overall pattern in this data is strikingly similar to the American sample.

Admittedly, there were some differences between the different locations. For instance, Kenyan participants shifted a bit more in the direction of frequent lying: Only 19% of that sample claimed not to have lied in the previous 24 hours, while 23% told 6 or more lies, accounting for 68% of the total lies.

As a smaller part of the study, Serota also asked participants in some of the countries about whether their lies were little ones or big ones. There was a consistent pattern in the data here too. In Keyna, for example, the number of little lies was double the number of big ones. In Russia, it was 23% big lies and 61% little lies. Interestingly, 75% of the big lies were told by the people in Russia who lied a lot (6 or more lies). Nearly identical results were found in Brazil. To sum up, when they do lie, people tend to tell little lies rather than big ones. But those who do tell big lies also tend to be prolific liars.

Of course, to buy the accuracy of Serota and his colleagues' research, you also have to accept that participants are being pretty honest in their reporting about whether they lie or not. If they are dishonest about their own dishonesty, then we shouldn’t have any confidence in the data. Fortunately, Serota cites a variety of additional studies which give us some reason to trust the honesty of participants’ reports about their own lying.

Serota’s study is another important piece of evidence supporting the idea that truth-speaking is our default mode of communication. We can be confident that most people are telling the truth most of the time. With the news seemingly awash with stories about lying, this is indeed a welcome result.

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