Lying, Prevalence of

Prevalence refers to the extent or commonness with which something occurs in a population. In deception, the prevalence of lying is taken to mean the proportion of a population that engages in lying behaviors. Many scholars consider lying ubiquitous; that is, everybody lies. A related concept is the incidence of lying: incidence is the rate at which a behavior occurs in the population during a specific interval of time. Research in the United States suggests that people lie at the rate of one or two lies per day.

Estimates of prevalence and incidence depend on how broadly or narrowly the behavior is defined. When applied to all types of lies, prevalence and incidence are likely to be greater than when applied to more narrowly defined classes such as white lies, paltering, or exaggeration. The extent of lying also varies across subpopulations. Studies have shown that younger people lie more than older people, and men or women lie more than members of the other gender depending upon the circumstances. Within a population, low-incidence liars, including those who do not lie on a daily basis, may be classified as everyday liars, while those who lie on a daily basis and with great frequency are considered prolific liars.

Prevalence is an importance aspect of scientific inquiry in many disciplines. Examining prevalence—and the related measures of event incidence, frequency of events, and intensity of events—is most common in epidemiology and provides a statistical basis for studying health risk factors and disease transmission. It is also used frequently in the examination of antisocial and socially undesirable behaviors such as alcohol and drug abuse, sexual deviance, prostitution, rape, and murder. In these areas entire publications, such as the Journal of Substance Abuse, are devoted to establishing the extent and nature of a phenomenon. Although lying and deception are societal norm violations and part of the class of behaviors considered to be socially undesirable, the presumption of ubiquitousness appears to have precluded much serious investigation into the extent to which people engage in lying or how the prevalence and incidence of lying may vary across subpopulations.

The antecedents of human deceptive behavior strongly support the view that lying is ubiquitous. Charles Darwin noted that deception and the ability to detect deception are an important part of natural selection in the evolution of plants and animals. The traits of deception and the ability to perceive deception are adaptations of information processing skills that enhance the survival likelihood of an organism. At the cellular level, cancer cells mimic healthy cells in ways that allow them to be accepted by the host. Plants create camouflage in order to avoid being consumed, and most animals used a variety of deception strategies in order to evade predators, capture prey, mate successfully, and promote the well-being of the species.

Humans have inherited similar deception abilities as one component of their biological imperative and, with the acquisition of language, have refined deception and detection as social interaction and communication skills. Despite the moral and ethical concerns of philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, who declared all lying wrong, and Sissela Bok, who described lying as the essence of a dysfunctional society, nearly all humans utilize lies as a social lubricant to avoid conflict. For many people lies are also purposeful behaviors, used when it appears that telling the truth will not help them to achieve their goals.

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