The Best Way to Stop Liars in Their Tracks |
People who tell the truth do so in the context of social relationships based on reciprocity and trust.
Perceiving that they’re not trusted could make deceivers more rather than less likely to deceive.
By giving people the space to admit to their failings you can encourage healthier communication.
People who lie can cause you all kinds of heartache. They trick, cheat, and manipulate you, possibly costing you money if not emotional pain. Why people engage in deception is one thing, but figuring out how to avoid their trap is quite another. To protect yourself, the avoiding part is probably more important than the understanding part.
Erin started to get into a new relationship with Pat, someone she met in her work at a bank. She didn’t ever share official duties with Pat in the workplace, so there were no issues there. A few weeks after they started dating, though, Erin knew that Pat didn’t drive, but she was shocked and hurt to learn that Pat had an arrest record for driving under the influence. It may have been an error of “omission,” but to Erin, it definitely felt like an error of commission; i.e., a lie.
A Social Informational Processing Theory of Trust
According to Zhejiang Normal University’s Mengqi Xu and colleagues (2025), the social context is everything when it comes to processing the information we receive from others. Attitudes in particular stand out as influences on the way that people interpret what other people say. When it comes to deception, the main form of social information people use involves trust. You have to decide whether to trust what someone else tells you based on all the available cues at your disposal.
Turning to the person who’s doing the communicating, and potentially engaging in deception, trust also comes into play. Pat had to decide whether to trust Erin before revealing the real reason for not owning or driving a car.
A couple of other layers of processing also come into play. The first is based in social exchange theory. If you think the other person is telling the truth, you will be more likely to do so yourself. In the words of the authors, “trust reciprocation functions both as a form of compliance with social norms and as a strategy to protect and reinforce their moral self-concept.” Breaking this down, it means that people are more likely to be honest with people they perceive as honest with them. People also want to be honest so they can live with their conscience as ethical individuals.
The second layer of processing is the quality of “need for cognitive closure (NFCC).” Some people really hate living with ambiguity, and they’ll rush to the first interpretation that pops into their head. This leads them to make snap decisions about whether to trust that another person is telling the truth. People low in NFCC don’t mind keeping an open mind to allow enough information to filter in so that they can make a proper judgment.
Trust and the Deceiver
The actual focus of the Xu et al. study was not on the recipient of deception, but on the perpetrator. In the first of two studies, participants (average age 21 years old) were given a chance to lie on a standard lab task in which they reported on the outcome of a virtual dice roll. In the high-trust condition, participants “overheard” (intentionally) two experimenters expressing the belief that their participants would be honest, and in the low-trust, the experimenters expressed uncertainty about whether the participants would honestly report their dice rolls. The findings supported the prediction that participants in the high-trust condition would, in fact, be more honest. Overall, high trust lowered the deception rate by 50%.
The second study added NFCC into the mix. People low in this quality were more likely to be affected by the trust manipulation in reporting the dice roll results. As the authors concluded, “Trustees with low NFCC engage in more thorough processing of trust-related information through various channels including language, behavior, and facial expressions.” In other words, if they stop to process the social input they’re receiving, people will become even more honest when they think they are being trusted.
From Giver to Receiver
Now we know that people will be more honest when they think they’re being trusted, especially if they tend to pause and evaluate all the information at their disposal. How does this translate to Erin’s relationship with Pat?
Let’s assume for the moment that Pat is not a bad person, and that Erin was right to think that they could have a good relationship. It’s also possible that Pat is indeed an inveterate liar, but the odds are that Erin would have sniffed something out sooner. After all, they’d worked together already, but beyond this, their place of employment pretty much demands total honesty.
If Erin were to use the Zhejiang Normal U’s study to interpret the fix she’s in, she might come to realize that she’s been sending out low-trust cues to poor Pat all along. How many times did Erin complain about people faking their income on account applications or leaving out a less-than-stellar work history? This could make Pat more and more uncomfortable as the weeks went on. It became harder and harder to trust that Erin wouldn’t end things instantly should Pat’s background somehow come out.
Indeed, with a lower NFCC, Erin might have suspended judgment until learning more of the facts behind Pat’s unfortunate past. Maybe the charges go back 10 years, and Pat has been sober ever since. Maybe Pat’s decision not to get back behind the wheel of a car was based on deep-seated feelings of guilt and anxiety, feelings that Pat struggles with every day.
Moving forward, were Erin to give Pat another chance, this blip in their ability to communicate openly could eventually result in stronger bonds being built between them. At the very least, Erin might learn from the experience to give people enough emotional space to be able to admit hard truths about themselves in an atmosphere of trust.
To sum up, the truth may not always come in a perfectly wrapped package. Being willing to keep an open mind while also showing you trust the other person may help make that package if not perfect, then more transparent.
Xu, M., Zhang, X., Wu, X. et al. (2025), The effect of interpersonal trust on trustees’ deception: the moderating role of the need for cognitive closure. Cogn Process. https://doi-org.silk.library.umass.edu/10.1007/s10339-025-01315-3