People often find themselves in situations where they use lying or self-deception as tools for coping with the challenges of everyday life. The latter usually carries a negative connotation, yet people frequently use them. How often and why we engage in lying or self-deception is closely linked to our personality. In my master's thesis, I was interested in exploring the connection between lying, self-deception and the Big Five personality traits. Additionally, I focused on investigating the relationship between lying and self-deception. The study included 378 people over 18 years of age who completed an online questionnaire comprising the Lying in Everyday Situations Scale (LiES), the Self-Deception Scale (SDE), and the Big Five Inventory (BFI). The results showed that lying in everyday life is negatively associated with extraversion, conscientiousness, and agreeableness, and positively with neuroticism. The relationship with openness was found to be statistically insignificant. Conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism were the best predictors of lying. We can lie for various reasons, which I further examined using Relational Lying subscale and Vindictive Lying subscale on the LiES scale. It was found that conscientiousness and neuroticism were the best predictors of relational lying, while agreeableness predicted vindictive lying. On the other hand, self-deception was positively correlated with extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness, and negatively with neuroticism. Neuroticism and conscientiousness were the strongest predictors of self-deception. An interesting finding was the negative association between lying and self-deception.
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