The Truth About Mendacity: The Role of Deception Motives in Perception of Deceptive Communication in Pakistan

Abstract

Deception scholarship is becoming increasingly interested in knowing how findings located predominantly in the North American context travel over diverse cultural contexts. Feeding into this line of inquiry, the study predicted that people’s perception of deceptive communication is always commensurate with their cultural understanding of deception as moral evil or a social necessity. Furthermore, the study also proposed that the perceived deceptiveness of a deceitful statement is the function of the deception goal it sets out to achieve. To test this assumption for Pakistani culture, the study used the theoretical guidelines and experimental design proposed in Information Manipulation Theory (IMT). Using Buller and Burgoon’s typology of deception motives, three deception motives (i.e., instrumental, interpersonal and identity) were identified and situational prompts were created in each category. The participants ( N = 753) read the situational prompts and rated five different types of information manipulations on four 7-point semantic differential scales. The results indicated that the motive type had a significant effect on the perception of deceptive communication. The information manipulation carried out for instrumental purposes was rated more deceptive than the interpersonal and identity-based manipulations. Nevertheless, completely disclosive messages and falsifications were consistently rated the most honest and the most deceptive respectively. The results indicate that Pakistani culture places a high premium on the value of truth and treats indirect messages as less honest than completely truthful messages. The findings bring insights about an understudied collectivist culture and help to make empirical profiling of deceptive communication more robust.