Strategies to Use Deceptive Statements in the Iranian Academic Context

Abstract

Lying, as a deceptive act in social interactions, has received much attention among social psychologists. Studies in this area mostly aim at developing lying taxonomies and finding verbal and non-verbal clues for detecting liars. However, it seems that the generalizability of their findings, because of cultural and contextual differences, is limited. Hence, admitting the fact that lying can be context and culture-specific, this study attempted to investigate lying among professors and students in the Iranian universities, to developa taxonomy for lying, and also to examine the role of gender and status in this relation. For this aim, frequent interactions between students, professors, and university staffs were identified and, based on these interactions, a questionnaire was designed and administered to 120 students and 80 professors. Results revealed 18 types of lies among which ‘projection’ and ‘forgetting’ were among the most frequent lies. Same-gender parings were found to tell more lies to each other. It was also found that professors and students tend to tell more lies to higher status people.