Telling lies : a skill mastered by men or women? : a sociolinguistic approach to the act of lying among Maltese university students

Abstract

Do you lie? To say that one is capable of speech, is to say that one is also capable of lying. Lying is the product of language, as language is the source of lying. In fact, lying is a fundamental practice in our everyday social interaction with others. It is, ironically, what ties people together by means of discourse, and what enables us to survive and develop as human beings. Lying is part of our very nature, it is inevitable and a life of truth telling is unliveable. Everybody, male and female, lies, and no one stands a chance to declare otherwise. Implementing, previously conducted studies on the subject of deceit, and taking into consideration the fact that lying is a form of everyday interaction, this sociolinguistic study, which is built on quantitative research, mainly sets out to analyse how men and women, so sturdily deviate when it comes to playing the lying game, in an effort to discern the masters of the art of lying and the skilful lie detectors. The distinct patterns of deceit and lie detection were elicited by means of highly supervised self-administered questionnaires, which were, subsequent to the accumulation of the data, viewed in relation to two major variables: gender and marital status, as a means of enabling comparative study.