Liking and lying

Do people lie more to people they like than to people they dislike? Forty-eight female participants were experimentally induced to like or dislike an art student who had painted one of the paintings that participants liked and one that they disliked. According to their own self-reports and objective measures of the content of the discussions, participants favored the art students they liked with kind lies. When discussing the paintings with liked (compared to disliked) artists; participants conveyed more liking for all of the paintings, exaggerated their liking for the paintings they disliked that were the artists' own work, and were especially unlikely to say explicitly that they disliked those paintings. Participants favored the art students they liked not only 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 conditions 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 paintings that were and were not the artists' own work, but they did not notice differences in communications with the liked versus the disliked artists even though these interactions did objectively differ.