Did You Deceive Today? An Experience-Sampling Study of Everyday Deception, Situation Construals, and Personality Pathology.

This study aims to examine enacted and perceived deceptive behaviour across everyday situations using an Experience Sampling Method (ESM). There is a longstanding interest in quantifying how often people engage in deception, with established research estimating an average of 1.96 lies per day for students and 0.97 for non-students (DePaulo et al., 1996). At the same time, research shows that deception frequency is rather skewed (Serota et al., 2010), suggesting that some individuals, also known as prolific liars, are responsible for a disproportionately larger number of lies (Serota & Levine, 2015; Serota et al., 2024). To account for potential biases in retrospective self-reports and to improve ecological validity, the present study used ESM to assess enacted deceptive behaviour as it naturally occurs in daily life. Further, aligning with the person-situation-interaction paradigm (Sherman et al., 2015), we explore perceived deception, i.e. situations that individuals construed as deceptive, regardless of whether they had engaged in deception themselves. Herein, perceived deception is captured by the Deception dimension of the DIAMONDS framework (Rauthmann et al., 2014). In doing so, we can investigate not only how often individuals deceive (as agents), but also how they psychologically understand and interpret deceptive situations. Moreover, we will examine if latent situational profiles (across all DIAMONDS) can be identified and further test, if enacted versus perceived deception might vary across these profiles. In addition to this situational perspective, we also investigate the role of maladaptive personality traits, as assessed via the PID5BF+M (Bach et al., 2020; Krueger et al., 2012). Hong et al. (2020) showed that associations between maladaptive personality traits and deception were largely driven by how individuals construed and experienced these situations and not by the actual contact with deceptive situations. Across multiple studies, the Deception dimension from DIAMONDS has been consistently linked to Antagonism, Psychoticism, and Detachment (e.g., Rauthmann et al., 2014; Hong et al., 2020, 2022; Jonason et al., 2021), with Antagonism reflecting the maladaptive pole of low Agreeableness (Suzuki et al., 2015). Finally, next to the subjective situation characteristics, we will also explore objective contextual cues (where participants were, who they were with, and what they were doing), provided through open-ended text responses. These descriptors will help us differentiate between subjective and objective psychological situation features. Taken all this together, this study contributes to a multi-perspective understanding of the processes underlying deceptive behaviour by considering dimensional personality pathology (PID‑5 traits), as well as subjective and objective situational cues in daily life.