Two Paths to Deception: How Deception Endorsement and Normative Alignment in Deception Dilemmas Relate to Personality...

As a pervasive social behavior, deception evokes a blend of shared moral consensus and individual variation in its evaluation. This research investigated two judgmental tendencies in the LYin Deception Dilemmas, Deception Endorsement (instrumental permissiveness toward deception) and Normative Alignment (adherence to social norms) across both self-regarding and other-regarding contexts, examining their relationships with personality traits, perceived social norms, and social interaction. Study 1 revealed that self-regarding Deception Endorsement correlated negatively with Honesty-Humility and positively with Machiavellianism, whereas Normative Alignment showed a negative association with psychopathy. Individuals scoring higher on Deception Endorsement reported greater perceived similarity to self-benefiting liars and less similarity to honest characters depicted in video clips. Study 2, assessing judgments from both personal and majority perspectives, showed that Normative Alignment, but not Deception Endorsement, correlated with higher consistency between personal judgments and estimates of majority judgments. Study 3 introduced an interpersonal discussion and found that although Normative Alignment increased during discussion, it exhibited an upward trend over repeated judgments, whereas Deception Endorsement showed a decrease over time. Overall, these findings suggest that Deception Endorsement and Normative Alignment in the LYin Deception Dilemmas reflect distinct psychological characteristics, with the former relating to honesty-associated traits and the latter to social norm adherence.