We are interested in deception between young adult friends. Using previous research (Lewis et al., 2012; Bleske & Shackelford, 2001), we generated predictions about sex differences (male/female) and friendship differences (same-sex/opposite-sex) in the content of deceptions. For example, we predicted that heterosexual men and women would report deceiving their opposite-sex friends more than their same-sex friends about their current romantic relationship involvement, and that both sexes would deceive their female friends more often than their male friends about their friends’ appearance or attractiveness. Using a paper and pencil questionnaire, we defined deception for participants as “directly lying, misleading, or failing to tell a person something” and then asked them to report what they have deceived a male friend about and what they have deceived a female friend about (order was counterbalanced across participants). We provided blank lines for participants to provide open-ended responses. To code the responses, we divided into two teams of two coders, with each team categorizing the responses into predetermined categories based on our predictions. After both teams finished the first round of categorizing, we collectively discussed nominations that had been tagged as difficult to code. We will analyze the data and present the results at CERCA.
