At an important meeting, first date or interview, we are asked questions that we don’t want to answer at all: we are afraid that the answer will put us … in a bad light. What is better – to tell the truth or avoid the answer?
Leslie John, a professor at Harvard Business School, and her colleagues set out to figure out the best strategy for dealing with situations like this. To do this, the researchers conducted a series of experiments.
Pass the tests
- Why do you lie and hide your feelings?
The first experiment was about dating. The subjects were given two questionnaires to look at, which they thought were filled out by potential partners. In the questionnaires, in particular, it was required to answer how often a person committed some unseemly acts (from “often” to “never”) – including theft, fraud with insurance, concealment of sexually transmitted diseases from sexual partners, and so on. There were five questions in total. In one of the questionnaires, answers were given to all of them. In the second questionnaire, only three questions were answered; for two more, the option “I do not want to answer” was selected.
It turned out that almost 80% of the subjects preferred the first partner who answered all the questions. The preference persisted even if it followed from his answers that he often steals and fantasizes about bullying people.
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- Living is harmful, and lying is shameful
In another similar experiment, the questionnaires mentioned not negative, but positive actions – charity, blood donation, and so on. Some of the questionnaires also indicated “I do not want to answer.” In other cases, the response of the respondent was not shown, as if not by his own choice, but because of a website error. And in this case, the subjects preferred those “partners” who “answered” all the questions. When the answer was absent through no fault of the “partner”, this improved the attitude towards him, but not by much. Most often, however, they chose those in whose questionnaires it was possible to see the answers to all the questions asked.
In further experiments, subjects were asked to imagine themselves in the shoes of employers evaluating two candidates. In the questionnaires of candidates there was a question “What is the lowest mark you received in the exams”, while one of them admitted that he had ever received “unsatisfactory”, and the second refused to answer the question. 89% of the subjects preferred the first candidate.
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- “Drug addiction is an adaptation to the environment. To a bad environment”
In the next experiment, one group of subjects presented themselves as job seekers, and the other as employers. 70% of the “candidates” said that it is better not to answer the question whether they have ever taken drugs than to admit that they did. At the same time, the “employers” stated that they would prefer to hire a candidate who honestly admitted that he had such experience, and not one who refused to answer.
The authors of the study say that these experiments demonstrated how the intentional concealment of personal information causes mistrust. In many cases, you can leave a better impression of yourself by honestly revealing some unsightly facts from your biography. However, the researchers did not consider the plausible option in which the respondent hides these facts by lying, rather than refusing to answer.
See L. John et al. for details. “Hiding personal information reveals the worst”, PNAS, January 2016.