Deception, power, and self-differentiation in college students' romantic relationships: an exploratory study

The relationships among deception, power, and self-differentiation in college students' romantic relationships were explored. As hypothesized, lower total deception scores were found to significantly predict higher self-differentiation scores. Both men and women reported that men held significantly more power in their relationships. A secondary analysis revealed that men were significantly more likely than women to indicate they would be inclined to use deceptive strategies. Counter to the hypotheses, a significant negative correlation was not detected between power scores and omission scores, and positive relationships between power scores and contradiction scores were not found.