Personality Correlates of the Self-Assessed Abilities to Tell and Detect Lies, Tell Truths, and Believe Others

Abstract

The contribution of personality dimensions (the Big Five) to self-assessed communication abilities to tell and detect lies, tell truths, and believe others was examined. One hundred seventy-four undergraduate students completed the Big Five personality inventory (BFI) and evaluated their relative lie-telling, truth-telling, lie-detection and their ability to believe other peoples’ truths. Results indicated that Extraversion predicted enhanced lie-telling, truth-telling, and lie-detection abilities. Openness to experience predicted higher ratings of lie-telling and lie-detecting abilities, indicating that for curious people with intellectual skills and attentiveness to inner feelings, lie-related abilities are important. Agreeableness predicted high ratings of believing skills and low ratings of the remaining three skills, indicating that well-tempered people tend to believe others. Conscientiousness and Neuroticism were negatively associated with telling lies persuasively. This was explained by the need of conscientious people to be honest and by the low self-confidence and negative emotions of people who scored high on Neuroticism. Implications of the present results were discussed.