ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Higher Education
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1579940
UNDERGRADUATES' UNDERSTANDING OF WHAT IT MEANS TO LIE
Provisionally accepted
- University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, United States
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This study investigated how undergraduate students define a lie and apply their definition when given more context in the form of scenarios. Sixty-five undergraduate students responded to questionnaires asking them to define a lie and then decided whether a lie was spoken along with a justification for their decision. All students determined that a lie contains a falsehood. However, there was disagreement about as to whether a speaker needed to intentionally tell a falsehood for a statement to be a lie. In addition, there was no single scenario that prompted unanimous agreement among the students as to what constituted a lie. Inconsistences were documented between students' personal definition of lies and the criteria they used to judge lies in the scenarios. Overall, this study contributed to the extant literature by uncovering undergraduates' perceptions of lies, comparing those definitions to their contextualized judgments, and gathering detailed justifications explaining their reasoning. The study also provides avenues for future research.
Keywords: lying, lying definition, deception, intentionality, Scenario-based methods
Received: 24 Mar 2025; Accepted: 26 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Maki and Alexander. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Alina J.K. Maki, University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, United States
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