The relationship between Japanese adults’ age and self-reported verbal strategies when lying

Abstract

We examined the relationship between age and self-reported verbal deception strategies in Japanese adults. Japanese participants (N = 153) aged 18 to 73 years took part in this study. We requested the participants to state their age and freely describe how they structure their speech to appear convincing when lying during their daily interactions. We extracted 13 verbal strategies from the participants’ open-ended descriptions. Japan is a high-context culture. The results indicated that 11 categories corresponded to the verbal strategies reported in previous studies on lying conducted in low-context cultures. However, two strategies mentioned in the current study, making ambiguous statements and adding irrelevant details to the lie, were not reported in low-context cultures. As expected, age was significantly and negatively correlated with the number of verbal strategies used when lying. Moreover, verbal strategies that seem relatively cognitive demanding were used less as the age of the participants increased. We concluded that these results reflected the age-related decline of cognitive abilities.

Cultural differences in the efficacy of unexpected questions, sketching, and timeline methods in eliciting cues to deception

“…Vrij and Vrij ( 2020 ) also found that Russian, Hispanic, and Korean samples differed in the cues to deception they provided: For Korean and Hispanic samples, the total number of details provided was a cue to deception (with a small effect size), whilst for a Russian sample, detail level was not a cue to deception. Tabata and Vrij ( 2023 ) research investigated the use of verbal strategies in a sample of Japanese adults. They found that, although several reported deception strategies in this sample matched strategies reported in the literature by participants from Western countries, there were also strategies reported by Japanese participants that did not occur in the Western samples in the literature.…”