Deception in everyday life of Japanese young adults: a reanalysis

Very little research has focused on the subject of lying in everyday life, despite the benefits such study would provide. In this paper, we reanalyze the data from Murai’s work in 2000, which examined the telling of lies and the perception of being lied to in daily life by using a diary method in which participants recorded events in a diary for a certain period of time as directed by the researcher. Our reanalysis led us to three key findings. First, we found one prolific liar in the data. This is relevant because previous deception studies have only discussed the existence of “a few prolific liars” in Asia through one-shot surveys, whereas we confirm it through the reanalysis of the data collected by the diary method. Second, we did not find any significant rank correlation between the number of lies told and the number of perceptions of lies, nor was there evidence of any “prolific lie perceivers”. Third, we found that the mean percentage of the subjective accuracy of recording was roughly 80%, which demonstrates the accuracy of the diary method. In this paper, we report our findings, discuss the limitations (in particular, the small sample size), and mention future research directions using the diary method in deception studies.