A SOCIAL-PERSONALITY PERSPECTIVE ON PEOPLE'S PREFERENCES TO HEAR THE TRUTH

Abstract

Honesty is a fundamental aspect of social behavior. Although people typically prefer tohear the truth, past work has documented that in certain situations, most people prefer hearing lies. Predominant social psychology theories conceptualize a person’s preferences to hear the truth or a lie in a situation as a function of the positive and negative consequences of a communicator revealing the truth in that situation. The present paper goes beyond this situationist perspective, by including novel construal and personality effects to better understand how people value honesty. In the first study, a novel personal-level predictor, intrinsic honesty value, is introduced: a brief, self-report measure is created to assess participants’ level of belief that, “honesty is intrinsically valuable, regardless of its instrumental or practical effects.” In the second study, participants rated a variety of everyday situations on the positive and negative consequences that honesty would cause and their preference to hear the truth. The intrinsic honesty value measure was used, along with measures of how each participant uniquely construed honesty’s consequences, to predict the extent to which they would prefer to hear the truth in each situation. Altogether, the novel predictors uniquely predicted honesty preferences. I conclude that future investigators of how people value honesty, need to embrace a perspective that accounts for the situations that people find themselves in, their unique construals of those situations, and their personalities.