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A Developmental-Behavioral Analysis of Lying Mitch J. Fryling*

California State University, Los Angeles, USA

Abstract Lying is a common behavior in society and causes a number of problems in social relationships, the workplace, political affairs, and more. Most often, individuals who lie are considered to be liars and are therefore held responsible for their behavior. Unfortunately, the practice of assuming that the individual is responsible for engaging in lying behavior prevents an understanding of the context that supports the development and persistence of lying. As an alternative, the current paper considers contextual-behavioral factors that contribute to the development and maintenance of lying during both childhood and adulthood. In doing so, the unique features of lying as a target behavior are described, and specific targets for prevention and intervention are identified. The detection of lies is given specific attention, highlighting both conceptual and applied issues. Key words: behavior analysis, honesty, lying, truth telling. Novelty and Significance

What is already known about the topic? •

Relatively little has been said about the topic of lying within behavior analysis. What has been said has focused on Skinner’s (1957) verbal operants, and elaborated on various types of lying.

What this paper adds? •

The current paper adds to the small amount of work on the topic by identifying the unique features of lying as a target behavior, considering factors that contribute to lying across the lifespan, pointing to targets for both prevention and intervention, and finally, commenting on conceptual issues related to the behavioral analysis of lying and in particular the detection of lies.

Lying is a behavior that seems common throughout various cultures, ages, settings, and more. Lying also seems to be associated with several societal problems; it often disrupts social relationships, causes problems in the workplace, and corrupts politics, for examples. Most often, however, individuals who engage in lying behavior are considered to be liars, whereby the problem of lying is considered to reside within the individual. Following from this, the individual is to be held responsible for their lying behavior. In this sense, a consideration of environmental factors that lead to the development and persistence of lying is bypassed, as the problem of lying is assumed to reside within the individual. A behavior-analytic alternative to this conceptualization is to consider lying not as something that develops and occurs within an individual, but rather, as a behaviorenvironment relationship that develops as a function of factors in the environmental context. The behavioral approach to lying is supported by operant research on the topic, which has shown that both non-human (Lanza, Starr, & Skinner, 1982) and human (Sato & Sugiyama, 1994) animals will lie when the context supports this behavior. On a practical level the behavior analytic alternative permits an analysis of factors that might *

Correspondence concerning this article: California State University, Los Angeles, 5151 State University Dr., Los Angeles, CA 90032. Email: Mitchell.Fryling2@calstatela.ed. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the European Association for Behavior Analysis conference in Stockholm, Sweden, September 2014.