| The purpose of this study is to contribute to our understanding of deception by examining cultural and situational influences in people's reactions toward deception. The general hypothesis is that Chinese and Americans will respond differently in a similar deceptive situation. Specifically, they will rate deception differently in terms of likelihood of telling lies, acceptability, perceived success, and likelihood of experiencing shame. Five specific hypotheses were also developed to investigate the subtle differences between the two cultures in deception.; One hundred English-speaking college students recruited from a large private university on the west coast of the United States served as respondents of American culture. One hundred Mandarin speakers were recruited from a large public university in the city of Tianjin, the People's Republic of China. The Chinese participants were given a Chinese version of the questionnaire, which was translated from the English version. A back translation was conducted and it was determined that the two questionnaires were identical in content.; A multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) was performed to test the hypotheses of the study. The overall design was a 2 (Chinese vs. America) x 3 (parents, friends, and acquaintances) x 3 (resources, relationships, self-esteem) x 2 (harmful vs. harmless) MANOVA. The dependent variables were likelihood to lie, acceptability of the lie, success in telling the lie, and the shame felt if telling such a lie. Follow-up univariate analysis of variance was performed after a significant main effect was found in the MANOVA analysis. The results of the MANOVA and ANOVA analyses support the general hypothesis that there are cultural-situational differences in people's reaction to deception. The American participants expressed a greater likelihood to tell a lie, perceived higher acceptability, higher success, and more shame relative to Chinese participants. However, the Chinese participants reported higher likelihood in telling lies when the lies are not harmful. A discussion of the contributions and limitations of the study and future directions are included. |
