Using the truth to mislead (paltering) feels less bad than lying, but will cost you in the long run

By Alex Fradera Work is getting stale, and you’ve recently been courted by an exciting new company for a great role, the one drawback being a slight pay cut. Before you’ve made up your mind, your manager asks you whether you have plans to go elsewhere. If you wanted to avoid showing your hand, you could lie blatantly. You could change the topic. Or, you could palter: use a truthful statement to create a misleading impression. “Financially, you’re treating me really well and I don’t think there’s anything out there that could match that.” Paltering is the topic of a new paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The authors, Todd Rogers and others at Harvard University, focused on negotiation situations, where access to accurate information had concrete consequences. They found that paltering is fairly common – real-life negotiators reported doing it more frequently then telling a lie, and as commonly as neglecting to share information – and that one reason for this is that they believed it wasn’t such a big deal as lying. In this, they were sadly mistaken. In one experiment, 130 participants on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk website imagined trying to use eBay to sell a car with generally positive features but that sometimes mysteriously failed to start. When a prospective customer asked if there were any engine problems, the researchers told some participants to imagine that they parried the question by using a palter: emphasising the...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Lying Morality Social Source Type: blogs