Deceivers Case Study

1.3 Other factors that may affect deceivers

At the beginning of the chapter, the purpose of deception has been discussed. A considerable amount of everyday lies is altruistic lies to tune others’ feelings. And for the serious lies, they are more caring about themselves. It seems that the different targets also are the factors affecting the on-going deceiving process. Deceivers usually pay more attention on self-serving lies; some (Littlejohn & Foss, 2008) claimed that the lie for personal advantages would take sender a harder time to hide, comparing with the altruistic purposes. As an illustration, for deceivers, a lie to make a friend out of an embarrass situation would be easier than to hide a romantic affair in front of the spouse. The

But this statement has never been confirmed. There is only a study about salespeople of DePaulo and DePaulo (1989) to consult, the study shows experienced salespeople could convince the customers to believe that the product is the best choice even tough the salespeople know it is not. However, it is difficult to conclude the successful deception of salespeople is definitely with the reason of the lying experiences, the sales techniques and other conditions for consumers may involve in the process. In addition, there is also a factor both influencing the process of deception detection; it is the conversational demand (Littlejohn & Foss, 2008). If people want to concentrate their attention on deceiving or detecting, the conversational demand should be high, or the impersonal conditions generate distractions from deception detection. The last factor that may affect the process of deception is the preparation of lies. It is an intuitive prediction that if a man plan and rehearse a lie in advance, the more successful chances he would have. Nonetheless, Tornqvist et al. (2001) argued that the effects of planning are still a controversial issue, though some (Ibid: 279) has confirmed the noticeable effect of