rel intime si minciuna

Deception in romanticrelationships: Subjective

estimates of success at deceivingand attitudes toward deception

Susan D. BoonUniversity of Calgary

Beverly A. McLeodMount Royal College

ABSTRACTParticipants (N = 97) completed a questionnaire about decep-tive communication in romantic relationships. Responsesindicated that people generally believe that they are fairly suc-cessful in their efforts to deceive their partners and, moreover,that they believe they are more successful in deceiving theirpartners than their partners are at deceiving them. Resultsalso suggest that attitudes toward dishonesty in romanticrelationships are neither as simple nor straightforward as thecosts associated with discovery might lead one to expect. Inaddition, participants beliefs about the importance of honestyin romantic relationships and their perceptions regarding theirown and their partners success at deceiving one another pre-dicted their use of certain modes of deception (i.e., falsifica-tion), as well as their responses to suspected deception (bothhow they responded when they suspected their partner maybe lying and how they reacted to a partners suspicions thatthey had been dishonest).

KEY WORDS: attitudes towards deception deception success atdeceiving

This article discusses research on two aspects of deceptive communicationthat at present lie largely as uncharted territory within the relationships

Journal of Social and Personal Relationships Copyright 2001 SAGE Publications (London,Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), Vol. 18(4): 463476. [02654075 (200108) 18:4; 018204]

Portions of this article were presented at the meeting of the International Network on PersonalRelationships in Louisville, Kentucky, 2529 June 1999. The authors would like to thank twoanonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier draft of this article. All correspondence con-cerning this article should be addressed to Susan D. Boon, Department of Psychology, Uni-versity of Calgary, 2500 University Dr. NW, Calgary, Alberta T2N 1N4, Canada. [E-mail:[email protected]]. Dan Canary was the Action Editor on this article.

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literature. Our goal is to inspire others to broaden their research intereststo include investigations in these areas.

Subjective estimates of success at deceivingIn a recent review of the literature on deceptive communication, Mc-Cornack (1997) argued that scholars should direct their inquiries towardfour observable characteristics of naturalistic deception. Central amongthese is the successful nature of most deceptive discourse. Yet it is the accu-racy of detection not success at deceiving that has most often attractedresearchers attention.

Not surprisingly, this emphasis on detection is evident in the literature ondeception in interpersonal relationships as well. Consistent with the broadertradition of research on deception, many of the studies examining decep-tion in close relationships have focused on issues surrounding accuracy ofdetection (e.g., Burgoon, Buller, Ebesu, & Rockwell, 1984; Kalbfleisch,1992; McCornack & Levine, 1990b; McCornack & Parks, 1986). Generallyspeaking, these studies have found that people in romantic relationships arequite confident in their ability to detect when their partners are deceivingthem (Levine & McCornack, 1992; McCornack & Parks, 1986). However,these same studies also show that partners confidence in this regard isunwarranted. In actuality, partners in romantic relationships are no moreaccurate at judging when the others message is deceptive than are peoplein general accurate at detecting when a strangers message is deceptive. Ineither case, accuracy rates hover slightly above chance (DePaulo, Stone, &Lassiter, 1985; Zuckerman, DePaulo, & Rosenthal, 1981), dispelling thenotion that romantic partners greater familiarity might translate intoenhanced accuracy of detection (e.g., Knapp, 1984, cited in McCornack &Parks, 1986).

Given that low accuracy of detection suggests high levels of successfuldeception, it seems surprising to us that researchers have, for the most part,overlooked questions concerning intimates perceptions of how often theirefforts to deceive a partner meet with success. DePaulo and Kashy (1998)report that their participants believed that lies told to close others weremore likely to have been discovered than lies told to less intimate others.However, a number of important questions concerning partners perceptionof the success of deceptive messages remain unexplored at this time. Forexample, how confident are people that they can deceive a romantic partnerwithout raising his or her suspicions? How successful do people believe theirromantic partners are at deceiving them? And is peoples faith in theirability to deceive a romantic partner related to their beliefs regarding theirpartners ability to deceive them?

To explore some of these issues, this investigation posed the followingresearch question:

RQ1: To what extent do romantic partners believe they and their part-ners are successful at deceiving one another?

464 Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 18(4)

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Attitudes about deception in romantic relationshipsThe nature of peoples general attitudes towards dishonesty in romanticrelationships constitutes a second important, but largely neglected, area ofinquiry in the relationships literature. We know that North Americansociety generally frowns upon deception and, moreover, that those who arecaught deceiving, or are suspected of deception, risk censure and socialstigmatization (Camden, Motley, & Wilson, 1984; DePaulo, Kashy, Kirk-endol, Wyer, & Epstein, 1996; Hample, 1984; Kalbfleisch & Vogl, 1993). Itis less clear, however, that attitudes toward deception in romantic relation-ships are equally denunciatory. On the one hand, given that intimacy andtrust are often viewed as defining features of such relationships, we mightexpect that acts of deception occurring in romantic relationships wouldelicit even greater disapprobation than acts of deception that occur in othercontexts. On the other hand, individuals beliefs about deception in arelationship context may be tempered by their concerns about how the truthmay affect a partner and thereby the relationship (cf. DePaulo & Bell, 1996;McCornack, 1997; Turner, Edgley, & Olmstead, 1975). In this case, wemight expect participants attitudes about deceiving a romantic partner tobe more conditional disapproving of deception under some circumstancesbut approving in others. To examine these possibilities, we posed our secondresearch question:

RQ2: How favorable are individuals attitudes towards the use ofdeception in their romantic relationships and to what extent do suchattitudes reflect conditional approval?

Deceivers face higher stakes when their deceptive messages are aimed attargets with whom they share a relationship rather than at strangers. Turneret al.s (1975) seminal research on the motives that underlie deception (or,in their words, information control) was significant in demonstrating thatgetting caught is not the only concern that occupies a speakers mind as heor she deliberates whether to tell the truth. Speakers worry, too, about thereal harm that honest disclosure may cause. Our research expands on thiswork by directly assessing peoples attitudes toward deception (Turner etal.s conclusions in this regard were based on inferences, not direct assess-ment), and in particular their attitudes toward deception as it occurs withinthe confines of romantic partnerships.

Assessing the predictive value of estimated success and attitudestoward deceptionTwo additional research questions examined perceptions of success andattitudes toward deception as potential predictors of self-reported decep-tive behavior. Conceptually, there are good reasons to believe that each ofthese variables should relate broadly to parameters of deceptive communi-cation. For the purposes of this research, however, we limited our focus tochoice of deceptive strategy and responses to suspected acts of deception asthe criterion variables of interest.

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Predicting choice of deceptive strategy. Research suggests that people con-sider certain modes of deception more effective than others in ensuringinformation control (Turner et al., 1975). It would seem surprising if therewere not corresponding variation in peoples views regarding how safevarious strategies are in terms of minimizing the risk of detection. In eithercase, individuals judgments concerning how likely they are to succeed intheir efforts to deceive a partner may predict the particular approach theyuse on occasions when telling the truth seems out of the question. One ofthe more obvious possibilities is that individuals reliance on those methodsof deception deemed most safe will decrease as their confidence in theirability to deceive a partner increases.

Attitudes toward deception in romantic relationships may also relate topeoples selection among the various means of deceiving a partner. Themore disparaging are individuals attitudes toward deception, for instance,the more they may prefer to use milder forms of deception such as omissionor distortion in comparison with more blatant forms such as falsification.

Predicting responses to suspicion. Finally, whether we consider how indi-viduals respond when their partners question their truthfulness or, alterna-tively, how they respond when they harbor doubts about their partnershonesty, perceptions of success and attitudes toward deception in romanticrelationships would seem important predictors to examine. For example,the more people believe they can succeed in pulling the wool over their part-ners eyes, the more apt they may be to redouble their efforts to maintainthe deception, rather than confess, when confronted by a suspicious partner.Similarly, the more people credit their partners with success at deceivingthem, the more they may respond to their own feelings of suspicion withtactics designed specifically to uncover the truth.

Attitudes toward deception may also predict responses to suspiciouscommunications. The more condemning their attitudes toward deception inromantic relationships, the more people may be inclined to confess when theirpartners express doubts concerning the veracity of their messages. Greaterdisapproval of dishonesty among romantic partners may also increase theodds that individuals will respond in an accusing and confrontational mannerwhen they suspect that their partner has tried to deceive them.

To explore the predictive relations among perceptions of success, atti-tudes about deception in romantic relationships, and (i) choice of deceptivestrategy and (ii) responses to suspicion, we posed the following researchquestions:

RQ3: Do individuals beliefs about success (i.e., about their own andtheir partners ability to deceive each other) and/or their attitudestoward deception in romantic relationships predict the types of strat-egies they use to deceive their partners?

RQ4: Do individuals beliefs about success and/or their attitudestoward deception in romantic relationships predict their responses tosuspected deception (i.e., their own and others)?


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Method

ParticipantsAs part of a class exercise, 107 undergraduate psychology students (77 femalesand 30 males) completed a questionnaire about deception in romantic relation-ships. All participants were currently involved in heterosexual romanticrelationships at the time of the study (n = 73) or had been involved in such arelationship in the past (n = 34). Participants ranged in age from 18 to 47 years(M = 24.2, SD = 6.6). The mean length of the relationship on which participantsresponses were based was 56.4 months (SD = 61.7) for those reporting oncurrent relationships and 30.6 months (SD = 44.9) for those reporting on pastrelationships.

Materials and procedureThe first page of the questionnaire defined deceptive communication as follows:

Deceptive communication is any verbal or nonverbal message that onepartner sends with the intent of leading the other partner to a belief orconclusion that the sender considers to be less than absolutely true or lessthan totally complete. A deceptive or misleading message may involveproviding information that is either untrue or has been exaggerated or dis-torted in some manner, or may involve deliberately omitting informationsuch that the partner is led to an incorrect conclusion or belief.

Immediately following this definition, participants were instructed to base theirresponses on their current romantic relationship or, if they were not romanti-cally involved at the time of the study, on a past relationship. In either case, theychecked appropriately labeled boxes at the bottom of the first page to indicatethe nature of the relationship that served as their target relationship.

Subjective estimates of success. Two parallel items assessed respondentsbeliefs regarding their own and their partners success in deceiving. Respon-dents used a 7-point scale with endpoints labeled 1 = never and 7 = always toindicate their responses to the items In general, how frequently do you thinkthat your misleading messages are (were) successful? (i.e., how often do youthink that your partner fails (failed) to detect your miscommunications?) andIn general, how frequently do you think that your partners misleading mes-sages are (were) successful? (i.e., how often do you think that you fail (failed)to detect your partners miscommunications?).

Attitudes toward honesty in romantic relationships. Three items assessed par-ticipants beliefs about the importance of complete honesty in romanticrelationships. Participants used a 7-point scale with endpoints 1 = not importantto 7 = extremely important to indicate their response to the question Howimportant is complete honesty in a romantic relationship? They also indicatedtheir answer to the question Is it necessary for the success of a romanticrelationship that the partners are completely honest with each other all thetime? by checking response options labeled yes, no, and it depends on thesituation. Finally, they completed a dichotomous (yes/no) forced-choice itemthat asked them Should you ever mislead your romantic partner aboutanything? Those who answered in the affirmative completed the follow-up


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question, When is it better to mislead your partner than to be completelyhonest?

Modes of deception. Participants completed a brief checklist concerning thestrategies they use (had used) to mislead their partners. The items in thischecklist were based loosely on typologies used by Metts (1989) and DePauloet al. (1996). The five options were state something as true that isnt true, makea true statement but say it in a way to make your partner believe it is not true(i.e., say it in a joking or sarcastic way), communicate an untrue messagenonverbally (e.g., looked happy when you were not), deliberately omitinformation or fail to mention something so as to lead your partner to a falsebelief, and exaggerate or distort information so as to lead your partner to a falsebelief. Participants were instructed to check as many of these options asapplied to themselves.

Strategies for dealing with suspicion. Participants completed a checklist con-cerning how they would respond if (or had responded when) they suspected thattheir romantic partners were being less than honest with them. The five optionsin the checklist (derived via discussion among the authors) included ignore thesituation (do nothing), ask questions/probe for more information, accuse thepartner of not being completely honest, set traps to try to catch the partner in thelie, and seek information from other sources (e.g., searched their things, talked toothers, checked on their whereabouts). Participants were instructed to check asmany of these options as applicable. We also included an open-ended questionthat shifted the focus from participants suspicions about their partners mes-sages to partners suspicions about participants messages by asking them todescribe how they had responded when (or would respond if) their partner wassuspicious of an untrue message that they had communicated to him/her. Twocoders (an undergraduate research assistant and a graduate student who wasnot otherwise involved in this research) classified each of the responses to thisquestion into one of five categories derived from examination of the question-naires (coders agreed on 91% of all classifications). Almost half (45%) of the88 participants who responded to this question said they would confess. Otherfrequent responses included adding to the story (22%), ignoring the situation(10%), and changing the subject (8%). A small, but not inconsequential,number of respondents said that they would respond to their partners sus-picions by denying everything (6%).

Demographic information. Participants indicated their age, sex, and ethnicityas well as the length of the relationship on which their responses to the ques-tionnaire were based. As a check on how well they followed the instructions forselecting a target relationship, we also asked them whether they were currentlyinvolved in a romantic relationship.

Results

A small number (n = 10) of individuals who were currently involved in a roman-tic relationship at the time of the study chose to report on a past relationship.These respondents were removed from the sample prior to analysis to eliminatevariation between those reporting on a past relationship attributable to


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differences in their current relationship status (i.e., presently involved versuspresently uninvolved). The final sample thus consisted of 97 participants includ-ing 63 individuals (47 females and 16 males) who completed the questionnairewith reference to a current relationship and 34 (23 females and 11 males) whoresponded on the basis of a past relationship.

All analyses reported below were first performed with sex and target relation-ship included as predictors to determine whether either variable influenced thepattern of results obtained. However, given the absence of systematic effects foreither variable, we opted to present the simpler results of analyses performedexcluding them. The results of the analyses including sex and target relation-ship are available upon request from the first author.

RQ1: Subjective estimates of successHow successful do participants believe they are at misleading their partners andhow successful do they think their partners are at misleading them? A 2-partnerrating (own versus partner success) within-subjects ANOVA revealed a signifi-cant difference between how participants rated their own success at deceivingtheir partner and how they rated their partners success at deceiving them,F(1,96) = 22.60, p < .001. On average, participants believed that they are suc-cessful a little more than half of the time (M = 4.64, SD = 1.47) in their attemptsto mislead their partners. However, they credited their partners with signifi-cantly less success in their efforts at misleading them (M = 3.63, SD = 1.38).Ratings of own success were weakly but positively correlated with ratings ofpartner success, r = .27, p < .01.

RQ2: Attitudes toward dishonesty in romantic relationshipsOn average, respondents strongly endorsed the belief that complete honesty isimportant in a romantic relationship (M = 6.11, SD = 1.04). However, whenasked if the success of a romantic relationship depends upon complete honestybetween the partners, only 27% of the sample responded in the affirmative. Thevast majority of participants (65%) expressed a more conditional point of view,endorsing the option it depends on the situation. A full 7% responded no. Inaddition, as further evidence of the conditional or contingent nature of peoplesbeliefs about the acceptability of deception among romantic partners, 61respondents (63%) replied in the affirmative when asked if a person should evermislead his/her romantic partner. The conditions under which these participantsthought it better to mislead a partner than to tell the truth included protectingthe partners feelings (59%), preventing damage to the relationship (14%), andincreasing or avoiding damage to the partners self-esteem (14%). Ten percentof the participants said it was better to lie than to tell the truth if the deceptionwas minor, and 6% responded that it was better to mislead a partner than totell the truth if doing so avoided conflict.

RQ3: Predicting the mode of deceptionRQ3 asked whether judgments of success at deception and attitudes toward dis-honesty in romantic relationships predict the means by which intimates chooseto deceive their partners. To examine this question, we conducted a series oflogistic regression analyses with responses to the five items in the deceptionstrategy checklist (i.e., whether participants reported using each strategy)serving as the criterion variables (in separate analyses) and ratings of ownsuccess at deception and attitudes toward deception as the predictors. In the


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absence of a strong conceptual rationale justifying any particular contrastamong the yes, no, and it depends responses to the item that asked participantswhether it is necessary that romantic partners be completely honest with eachother all the time, we opted to exclude this item from analysis (in logistic regres-sion, interpretation of effects for predictor variables with three or more levelsinvolves examination of the results of user-specified contrasts among the levelsi.e., yes versus the combination of no and it depends; see Tabachnick & Fidell,1996). Therefore, only two of the three attitude items were included in the setof predictors in the analyses reported below.

Results showed that neither perceived success nor attitudes toward deceptionsignificantly predicted whether participants reported that they deceived theirpartners by exaggerating or distorting information, by omitting or concealingthe truth, or via nonverbal means. However, analysis of the data for the remain-ing two modes of deception (i.e., falsification and using jokes or sarcasm)revealed significant results. The more strongly participants endorsed the viewthat complete honesty is important in a romantic relationship, the less likelythey were to report using falsification, B = 0.61, Wald 2 (1, N = 94) = 4.67,p < .05, and the more likely they were to report using jokes and sarcasm todeceive their partners, B = 0.63, Wald 2 (1, N = 94) = 6.12, p < .05. Participantswere also more likely to report using jokes and sarcasm as means of misleadingtheir partners as their confidence in their ability to deceive their partnerdecreased, B = 0.41, Wald 2 (1, N = 94) = 5.66, p < .05.

RQ4: Predicting responses to suspicionRQ4 asked whether judgments of success at deception and attitudes toward dis-honesty in romantic relationships predict intimates responses to suspicion. Inthe first set of logistic regression analyses conducted to examine this question,responses to the five items in the suspicion checklist (i.e., whether participantsreported having engaged in each response) served as the criterion variables (inseparate analyses) and ratings of the partners ability to deceive and attitudestoward deception (the two items used to test RQ3) served as the predictors.

Recall that the suspicion checklist assessed the nature of participantsresponses on occasions when they believed they were the targets of deceptivecommunications. Neither perceived success nor attitudes toward deception sig-nificantly predicted participants reports that they would ignore the situation,probe for further information (i.e., ask questions), or set traps to catch theirpartner in the lie. However, participants were somewhat more likely to reportboth that they would accuse the partner of lying, B = 0.55, Wald 2 (1,N = 95) = 3.19, p < .10, and that they would take steps to corroborate their sus-picions (e.g., checking with their partners friends, searching their partnersthings, and so on) to the extent that they believed that complete honesty isimportant in a relationship, B = 0.46, Wald 2 (1, N = 95) = 2.92, p < .10.

The second set of analyses examined participants reactions when their part-ners suspected that they were being dishonest (i.e., participant as deceiver,partner as suspicious target). Participants responses to the open-ended ques-tion (i.e., whether a given strategy was or was not reported in their response)asking them how they would respond to this event served as the criterion vari-ables (in separate analyses) and ratings of their own success at deception andattitudes toward deception (the two items used to test RQ3) served as the pre-dictors.

The more frequently participants believed they were successful in deceiving


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their partners, the more likely they were to report that they would respond toa partners suspicions by adding to their story, B = 0.86, Wald 2 (1,N = 95) = 4.05, p < .05, or denying that they were lying, B = 1.11, Wald 2 (1,N = 95) = 7.02, p < .01, and the less likely they were to report that they wouldignore the situation, B = 0.73, Wald 2 (1, N = 95) = 5.98, p < .05. In addition,participants were marginally more likely to claim that they would confess if sus-pected of deceiving the less they thought themselves capable of successfullydeceiving their partners, B = 0.27, Wald 2 (1, N = 95) = 2.98, p < .10, and themore important they believed complete honesty to be, B = 0.44, Wald 2 (1,N = 95) = 3.14, p < .10. Finally, participants who believed that occasions existin which it is better to mislead a partner than to tell the complete truth wereless likely than those who believed the contrary to report that they wouldrespond to a partners suspicions by continuing to lie, B = 1.63, Wald 2 (1,N = 95) = 3.93, p < .05.

Discussion

Perceptions of success at deceptionConsistent with previous findings which suggest that people think theirefforts to deceive others often meet with success (DePaulo et al., 1996), ourrespondents reported that their romantic partners accepted over half oftheir deceptive messages as truthful. Interestingly, they also believed thatthey, themselves, were more successful at deceiving their partners than theirpartners were at deceiving them.

There are a number of possible explanations for the high confidence ourrespondents expressed in their ability to deceive their partners. One possi-bility is that they may, in fact, succeed in their efforts to deceive their part-ners about as often as they believe they do. Studies on accuracy of detectionshow that, in general, people do only slightly better than chance whenjudging the truthfulness of others messages (DePaulo et al., 1985; Levine& McCornack, 1992; McCornack & Parks, 1986; Zuckerman et al., 1981).Such findings suggest that individuals correctly identify a partners lies onlyabout half of the time. In this case, our participants estimates of theirsuccess may in fact be fairly accurate representations of reality. Alterna-tively, deceivers might come to hold exaggerated beliefs about their successat dissimulation if in the interests of either avoiding confrontation andpotential conflict and/or maintaining a climate of trust in the relationship their partners sometimes choose to conceal their doubts concerning thetruthfulness of a disclosure (which our results suggest they do). Over thecourse of numerous interactions of this sort, partners silence in this regardcould lead intimates to overestimate their abilities to deceive each other.

The fact that respondents believed that they were more successful atdeceiving their partners than their partners were at deceiving them may bean effect of differential feedback. Respondents know when they are beingdishonest and know (or perhaps mistakenly believe) that at least some oftheir efforts at deceptive communications are successful. However, they arelikely to detect accurately only some proportion of all their partners


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attempts to deceive them. Under these circumstances, we would expectpeople to underestimate the frequency with which their partners succeed intheir efforts to manipulate the truth. After all, the only clear data they haveabout their partners rate of success concern that fraction of the partnersdeceptive messages they have discovered. More generally, we suspect thatparticipants tendency to ascribe less success to their partners than to them-selves may be connected to participants beliefs about their ability to detectwhen their partners are being dishonest. McCornack and Parks (1986)showed that romantic partners confidence in their ability to detect eachothers lies far outstripped their accuracy in actually distinguishing truthfulfrom deceptive messages. Accordingly, our respondents may have underes-timated their partners success at deceiving them in part because they havean inflated sense of their own ability to detect when their partners are dis-honest. More research is needed to test these and other explanations for thepattern of results we obtained. As we review below, this study suggests thatpeoples decisions concerning which of several strategies to use to deceivea romantic partner are informed by their level of confidence in their abilityto communicate a dishonest message without raising their partners sus-picions. Our findings also suggest that individuals beliefs in their own andtheir partners deceptive prowess affect how they respond when somethingabout a message smells fishy. To the extent that these are just two of manyaspects of deceptive communication that may be subject to the influence ofjudgments of success, it will be important to determine whether the self-serving pattern of results we observed reflects a tendency for individuals tooverestimate their own abilities in the art of deception, to underestimatetheir partners abilities in this regard, or both.

Attitudes toward deceptionAt first blush, our participants seem to hold rather contradictory attitudestoward deception in romantic relationships. On the one hand, theystrongly endorsed the view that complete honesty is important in a roman-tic relationship. On the other hand, they were quick to identify conditionsunder which honesty is not the best policy between partners (over two-thirds responded in the affirmative when asked whether there areoccasions that demand that a person mislead his or her partner) and werewilling to place limits on the extent to which they believed relationalsuccess depends on full and honest disclosure (less than one-third agreedwith the position that a romantic relationships success depends on com-plete honesty between partners). If we take these findings at face value,the results suggest that, notwithstanding the importance they attach tohonesty in romantic relationships, many people feel that deceiving theirpartners is not merely acceptable under some circumstances, but is in factthe proper and perhaps from some ethical standpoints the moral thingto do.

How do we make sense of this apparent inconsistency in beliefs? Turneret al. (1975) argued that the participants in their study seemed to definehonesty more in terms of fidelity to the maintenance of some on-going


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relationship (p. 82) than in terms of complete disclosure. If our participantsunderstood the term honesty in the same way, this might go some distancetoward explaining the seemingly contradictory nature of their responses tothe attitude items we asked them to complete. That is, if by rating completehonesty as being very important in a romantic relationship participants wereindicating to us how important it was to them to preserve the integrity oftheir relationships, it is perfectly understandable that they would lateracknowledge the existence of situations in which it might be important tomislead their partners to avoid placing their relationships with these part-ners at risk.

It is less clear how this type of explanation could account for the findingthat most participants rejected the assertion that complete honesty is neces-sary for the success of a romantic relationship. Nevertheless, Turner et al.smore general point is well taken. We would be wise to use caution in assum-ing that participants necessarily interpreted the term honesty in the way weintended. As Turner et al. concluded on the basis of their research, com-monsense notions that equate honesty with complete disclosure may notaccurately reflect the way most people define honesty in the context of theirinteractions with important others.

Further research is needed to examine more extensively the conditionsunder which people think it is appropriate, or even necessary, to mislead aromantic partner rather than tell him or her the truth. Nevertheless, ourdata are important in demonstrating that attitudes towards deceiving aromantic partner are neither as simple nor as straightforward as philosophypredicated on always telling the truth might suggest (cf. Bok, 1978; La-Follette & Graham, 1986). Indeed, as McCornack (1997) recently argued,many acts of deception that occur in relational contexts may derive not fromdishonest motives, but from honest ones. Continued exploration intopeoples beliefs about the moral value of deception and its place in thefabric of romantic relationships seems warranted.

Predicting deceptive strategy and responses to suspicionOur final two research questions explored the predictive value of percep-tions of success and attitudes toward dishonesty in romantic relationships.Our results suggest that it may be of considerable value to continue this lineof inquiry and expand the range of self-reported deceptive behaviors thatserve as criterion variables in future investigations.

Both perceptions of success at deceiving and attitudes toward honesty inromantic relationships demonstrated associations with choice of deceptivestrategy and responses to suspicious communications. For example, bothsuccess and attitudes were related to the use of jokes and sarcasm to deceivea romantic partner. The less participants believed that they were likely tosucceed in their efforts to deceive their partners and the more strongly theyendorsed the view that complete honesty is important in a romanticrelationship, the less likely they were to report using jokes and sarcasm asmeans of deceiving their partners. Attitudes also predicted the use of out-right falsification. The more importance participants attached to complete


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honesty between intimates, the less likely they were to report using falsifi-cation to deceive their partners.

Success and attitudes further predicted participants reactions to apartners charges of dishonesty. The more participants believed completehonesty to be important in a relationship, the more likely they were to claimthat they would confess in response to a partners suspicions of deception.Confession tended to be an increasingly less likely option, however, as par-ticipants confidence in their ability to deceive their partners increased. Per-ceived success also predicted whether participants reported that they wouldrespond to a partners accusations by denying that they had been dishonest,as well as whether they would add to the story. The fewer their doubts thatthey would succeed in their venture to mislead their partners, the morelikely participants were to report responding to their partners suspicions byeither adding to the story or denying that they had lied and the less likelythey were to report ignoring the situation. In addition, participants whobelieved that it is sometimes better to mislead a partner than to tell the com-plete truth were less likely than those who believed the contrary to reportthat they would continue to lie.

Finally, attitudes toward honesty also predicted participants reactions toa partners dubious messages. Specifically, participants were somewhatmore likely to report both that they would accuse the partner of lying andthat they would take steps to corroborate their suspicions to the extent thatthey believed complete honesty is important in a relationship.

In addition to demonstrating that subjective estimates of success and atti-tudes toward deception in romantic relationships are worthy predictors toconsider in research on deceptive communication, our findings suggest thatfuture research might profitably be directed toward investigating variationin intimates views concerning the relative ease, effectiveness, safety, andmoral value of various strategies for deceiving and responses to suspiciousmessages. For example, our results suggest that sarcasm and joking may beperceived as easier (or perhaps safer) and relatively more moral ways ofdeceiving a romantic partner than other strategies that might be used forthis purpose (e.g., falsification or exaggeration). Our findings also suggestthat there may be variation in the extent to which people view certain kindsof responses to suspicion (e.g., confessing versus continuing to lie) associally acceptable.

Of the two criterion variables we examined, perceptions of success (inparticular, participants estimates of the success of their own attempts atdeception) and attitudes toward honesty (especially the importance par-ticipants attached to complete honesty in romantic relationships) seemed todo a better job of predicting responses to suspicion than participants choiceamong means of misleading their partners. The success and attitudes vari-ables predicted participants responses to two of the five options in thechecklist intended to assess their reactions to a partners suspicious mes-sages and each of the five categories of responses they offered in the open-ended question that asked them how they respond when their partners


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suspect them of deception. In contrast, success and attitudes predicted theuse of just two of the five options with which participants were presented inthe checklist intended to assess their use of various strategies for deceiving.The attitude items also seemed somewhat more closely related to bothmode of deception and responses to suspicion than did perceptions ofsuccess. Our analyses revealed a total of six significant predictive relationsinvolving attitudes toward honesty (again, most particularly responses tothe item concerning the importance of complete honesty). In contrast, weidentified five such relations (two of which achieved only marginal signifi-cance) involving participants subjective estimates of their own success atdeceiving their partners and no such relations involving participants esti-mates of their partners success at deceiving them.

Any conclusions we might draw about the relative importance of the atti-tude and success variables on the basis of the present study are, however,best considered in light of constraints that our measures imposed on par-ticipants freedom to respond. In particular, deceptive strategy andresponses to a partners suspicious message were both assessed with 5-itemchecklists constructed for purposes of this research. Although we encour-aged participants to describe other means of deceiving their partners andother ways they might react when they suspect a partner of trying to pullthe wool over their eyes, we cannot be certain that their general failure totake advantage of this opportunity is evidence that our checklists capturedthe full range of possible responses. In short, more research is neededbefore we would feel safe drawing conclusions about the respective abilityof perceptions of success and attitudes toward dishonesty to predict the vari-ables we examined here. It is also worth noting that, whereas the attitudemeasures were entered in the model for each of the analyses we conducted,the success ratings were not (i.e., we entered own success in the analyses fordeceptive strategy and for responses to a partners suspicions, but partnersuccess in the analyses for participants suspicions of their partners mes-sages). This analytic strategy may have disadvantaged the success variablesrelative to the attitude variables in terms of the number of predictiverelations that could be found.

Future research might examine a number of other criterion variablesbeyond choice of deceptive strategy and responses to suspicion. Forexample, attitudes toward honesty in romantic relationships ought topredict the reasons that underlie romantic partners decisions to deceiveeach other. Consistent with theorizing mentioned previously (e.g., Mc-Cornack, 1997; Turner et al., 1975), if individuals are motivated by the desireto maintain fidelity to their romantic relationships, we would predict thatthey would be apt to chose deception over full and complete disclosurewhenever they believe telling the truth might jeopardize the relationship(cf. McCornack & Levine, 1990a). Peoples beliefs concerning their own andtheir partners abilities to deceive one another ought also to predict howoften people choose to dissemble rather than tell the truth, as well as theirperceptions of the likely consequences associated with discovery.


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