Two Paths to Deception: How Deception Endorsement and Normative Alignment in Deception Dilemmas Relate to Personality Traits and Perceived Norms

As a pervasive social behavior, deception evokes a blend of shared moral consensus and individual variation in its evaluation. This research investigated two judgmental tendencies in the <i>LYin</i> Deception Dilemmas, <i>Deception Endorsement</i> (instrumental permissiveness toward deception) and <i>Normative Alignment</i> (adherence to social norms) across both self-regarding and other-regarding contexts, examining their relationships with personality traits, perceived social norms, and social interaction. Study 1 revealed that self-regarding <i>Deception Endorsement</i> correlated negatively with Honesty-Humility and positively with Machiavellianism, whereas <i>Normative Alignment</i> showed a negative association with psychopathy. Individuals scoring higher on <i>Deception Endorsement</i> reported greater perceived similarity to self-benefiting liars and less similarity to honest characters depicted in video clips. Study 2, assessing judgments from both personal and majority perspectives, showed that <i>Normative Alignment</i>, but not <i>Deception Endorsement</i>, correlated with higher consistency between personal judgments and estimates of majority judgments. Study 3 introduced an interpersonal discussion and found that although <i>Normative Alignment</i> increased during discussion, it exhibited an upward trend over repeated judgments, whereas <i>Deception Endorsement</i> showed a decrease over time. Overall, these findings suggest that <i>Deception Endorsement</i> and <i>Normative Alignment</i> in the <i>LYin</i> Deception Dilemmas reflect distinct psychological characteristics, with the former relating to honesty-associated traits and the latter to social norm adherence.