LIKING AND LYING

Do people lie more to people they like than to people they dislike? Fo rty-eight female participants were experimentally induced to like or d islike an art student who had painted one of the paintings that partic ipants liked and one that they disliked. According to their own self-r eports and objective measures of the content of the discussions, parti cipants favored the art students they liked with kind lies. When discu ssing the paintings with liked (compared to disliked) artists; partici pants conveyed more liking for all of the paintings, exaggerated their liking for the paintings they disliked that were the artists' own wor k, and were especially unlikely to say explicitly that they disliked t hose paintings. Participants favored the art students they liked not o nly by what they said or did not say about the artists' own work, but also by what they communicated about the other artists' work This was the case even though they liked the paintings equally in both conditio ns and were explicitly instructed to be polite to all the art students . Judges who watched videotapes of the discussions noticed many of the differences in the ways that participants communicated about painting s that were and were not the artists' own work, but they did not notic e differences in communications with the liked versus the disliked art ists even though these interactions did objectively differ.