Social Motives and Strategic Misrepresentation in Social Decision Making.

In 4 experiments we examined lying and deception as a function of beliefs about other's cooperative or competitive motivation, and of own social value orientation.In a newly developed Information Provision Game, individuals gave information about payoffs that provided the basis for an interdependent other to make a decision affecting both parties' outcomes.Results showed that withholding information was associated with fear of being exploited, greed, and punitive sentiment, and that giving inaccurate information was associated with greed.Further, individuals gave less accurate and more inaccurate information when the other was competitive rather than cooperative, especially when they had a pro-social rather than selfish value orientation.Finally, individuals facing a competitive other misrepresented the decision problem as one of compatible rather than opposed interests, a tendency indicative of a "if you can't beat them, join them" strategy. Lying and Deception 3 Social Motives and Strategic Misrepresentation in Social Decision MakingIn his classic novel "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," Mark Twain tells the story of Tom Sawyer, who is painting Aunt Polly's fence when Ben Rogers walks by, eating an apple and heading for the river to go for a swim.It is a beautiful day and when Ben asks why Tom is painting the fence rather than going for a swim, Tom decides not to answer truthfully-instead he tells Ben that he is actually enjoying himself and that painting the fence is an interesting and gratifying activity.Because Tom is so convincing, he actually raises Ben's desire to engage in whitewashing and, after some negotiation, Tom hands over the brush to Ben, and lies down in the shadow eating the rest of Ben's apple.By suggesting he loves whitewashing, and thus misrepresenting his true preferences, Tom Sawyer manipulates Ben Rogers to make a decision that is favorable to Tom.And although few of us may be as cunning and convincing as Tom Sawyer, we often find ourselves in situations where we can influence others by manipulating information and misrepresenting our true preferences and priorities.Tobacco companies misrepresent the addictive properties of nicotine (Tenbrunsel, 1998).Car owners deliberately conceal technical problems when trying to sell their car (Schweitzer & Croson, 1999).When negotiating a divorce, a husband may misrepresent the importance of having child custody to induce his spouse to concede on alimentation costs (O'Connor & Carnevale, 1997).Although lying and deception have been of interest to the social sciences for many decades, this research has mainly focused on animal and human ability to distinguish cheaters from non-cheaters (e.g., Cosmides & Tooby, 1992;DePaulo, 1992).Far less research has been concerned with what Tom Sawyer was doing--the active misrepresentation of values, preferences and priorities.Extending interdependence theory (Kelley & Thibaut, 1978;Rusbult & Van Lange, 1996, 2003), and goal expectation theory (Pruitt & Kimmel, 1977), we study the influence of one's counterpart' s cooperative or competitive motivation and one's Lying and Deception 4 own pro-social or selfish value orientation on the tendency to provide accurate or inaccurate information, answering such basic questions as "When and why are individuals likely to deceive their counterparts?"and "How do they fine-tune the provision of accurate or inaccurate information to influence their counterpart's decision making?" Lying and Deception in Social InteractionMisrepresentation, lying, and deception have all been subject of considerable research in psychology.Social psychologists have focused on the individual's ability to detect lying and deception by others (e.g.,