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Five studies investigated lying and evaluation of lies. Study 1 concerned questionnaire data which indicated that educational background, personal morality, and religiousness are related to the evaluation of lies. In Study 2, ratings of reprehensibility of lies were related to the sex, friendship, status, and occupation of the liar, and the presumed effect of the lie on the listener. Study 3 indicated that a polygraph (GSR) could not consistently differentiate persons who were acting a dishonest role from persons acting an honest role. The fourth study investigated the ability of subjects to detect lying while listening to tape recordings of honest/dishonest role-players. Their accuracy was then compared to the accuracy of the polygraph on the same roleplayers. Study 5 found that subjects, as a group, made a more suspicious judgment of a ro!e-player than they did as individual judges.The advent of "Watergate" and other examples of verbal falsehoods by high officials have generated increased concern over lying. However, the amount of psychological research on lying as an interpersonal behavior is limited to a relatively few studies. N. R. F. Maier ( 1966) found that subjects were able to discriminate between individuals assigned "honest" roles and those given "lying"-role instructions in an interview s i c~a t i o n .~ In a follow-up study, it was found that some individuals were significantly more accurate than others in discriminating the "honest" from the "lying" condition, but the reasons given for the judgments were very similar for the accurate and inaccurate judges (Maier & Janzen, 1967). In a third study involving the same "honest" and "lying" roleplaying situations, subjects were significantly less accurate in identifying the "lying" condition when they were present, i.e., when they heard and watched the interview, than when they only listened to a tape recording of the interview or when they simply read a transcript of the interview (Maier & Thurber, 1968).A study by Ekman and Friesen (1974) suggested that facial and body movement cues are related to the deception of a liar. Subjects were less accurate in identifying a "liar" when a videotape of the face was shown than when a videotape focusing on the body was shown. This finding was interpreted as indicating that the body is a greater source of "leakage" chan the face, i.e., a liar gives himself away more by body movement chan facial expressions. Investigating the evaluation of lying behavior, Patterson (1974) noted that status and intent were important variables. Liars of high status were judged more repre-'The order of the authors' names is fortuitous. T h e authors thank Emil J. Posavac and Homer Johnson for their critical comments on an earlier draft. 'See Maier and Janzen (1967, 142-144) for the text of the honest and dishonest role instructions.

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