مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Possibly unsurprisingly, telling lies is headline news especially in 2015 and 2016. The following two brief stores illustrate. Running for U.S. President in 2015–۱۶, Donald Trump has repeatedly labeled his political opponents liars. He dubbed Senator Ted Cruz lying when it became clear that Cruz was a serious rival for his nomination; he identified Senator Marco Rubio an “even a bigger liar” than Cruz. He dubbed Dr. Ben Carson a pathological liar and said former Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s lies were almost as bad as Cruz’s. Trump has termed virtually every mildly adversarial media member a liar, too. Yet for the “۲۰۱۵ Lie of the Year Award”, PolitiFact (a Pulitzer award-winning fact checking organization) recognized “the misstatements of Donald Trump” as the recipient of the award, “PolitiFact has been documenting Trump’s statements on our Truth-O-Meter, where we’ve rated 76 percent of them ‘Mostly False’, ‘False’ or ‘Pants on Fire’, out of 77 statements checked. No other politician has as many statements rated so far down on the dial” (Holan & Qiu, 2015, p. 1).

The Wells Fargo retail banking scandal of 2016 is a second example of widespread lying. For years, Wells Fargo employees secretly issued credit cards without a customer’s consent—an assumed consent lie. The employees created fake email accounts to sign up customers for online banking services. They set up sham accounts that customers learned about only after they started accumulating fees. In 2016 these illegal banking practices cost Wells Fargo $185 million in fines, including a $100 million penalty from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the largest such penalty the agency has issued. Federal banking regulators said the practices, which date back to 2011, reflected serious flaws in the internal culture and oversight at Wells Fargo, one of the nation’s largest banks. In September 2016 Wells Fargo fired at least 5300 employees who were involved but no senior managers. In all, Wells Fargo employees opened roughly 1.5 million bank accounts and applied for 565,000 credit cards that may not have been authorized by customers, the regulators said in a news conference (Corkery, 2016).

The present study conceptualizes four types of individuals based on their self-reported lying versus non-lying frequency and whether they view most others as being honest or dishonest. This study investigates whether individual social-economic status (SES) and prosocial and antisocial behaviors identify big-liars consistently. The study describes the “heavy-half” of self-reported big-liars—adopting the heavy-half proposition from prior marketing theory (Cook & Mindak, 1984; Perfetto & Woodside, 2009; Twedt, 1964), that is, half or the majority of lies are told by a relatively small share of the population (e.g., a population share less than 20%). The study proposes a cased-based theory that individuals scoring high on complex configurations of SES and social behavior conditions are consistently big-liars while other cases scoring high on other complex configurations of SES and social behavior conditions identify “truth-tellers” consistently. The present study defines “truthtellers” to be individuals claiming not to tell lies.