Study: Honesty Not Always Best Policy When It Comes To Friendship

October 23, 2000

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Honesty may be the best policy, but people stretch the truth when it comes to helping friends make favorable impressions, new University of Florida research finds.

In a series of studies, UF psychology Professor Barry Schlenker learned that people exaggerate the good points and downplay the faults of their friends when describing them to members of the opposite sex.

And the more people liked their friend, the more apt they were to fib or put a positive spin on their personality, intelligence or behavior.

“The results suggest that friends help each other out not just because it’s expected, but because they care about the other person’s welfare,” he said.

The study has implications for a wide variety of situations where friends have opportunities to describe someone they know, from blind dates to job openings, Schlenker said.

“Given that we extol the virtues of truthfulness and admire honesty in others, it raises a question of how we react to people who stretch the truth to help their friends,” he said.

Past research on the subject focuses on more Machiavellian overtones of people controlling information strictly for selfish reasons, not how it can be used to help others, said Schlenker, whose four studies involved a total of 633 participants.

“Whenever people hear the term ‘impression management’ or ‘packaging information,’ the thoughts that come to mind are ‘Slick Willie,’ a used-car salesman or some other overused stereotype,” he said. “This research tries to move us toward a fuller portrait of how we use information to construct our world.”

In one study with 172 UF psychology students, the participants arrived with a friend. They were asked to write about their friend in an evaluation booklet to a member of the opposite sex. Schlenker found the description was tailored to match perceived expectations. Participants might, for example, depict their chum as a sociable, outgoing type who enjoys spending time in sports pubs or as a romantic introvert who prefers talking in front of a cozy fire, Schlenker said.

“When people thought their friend was attracted to another person, their friend became transformed depending on what constituted a favorable impression,” Schlenker said. “If the other person was looking for an extrovert, their friend became very outgoing and popular and liked to do extroverted things — whether they really did or not — and the same held true when the preference was for introverts.”

People also helped their friends avoid unpleasant entanglements by pretending they were “not your type” if they knew the attraction was not mutual, he said.

In another study with 159 participants, Schlenker learned that people prefer friends who describe them in a favorable light, even if it means lying or exaggerating.

Although people respect honest folks who are candid about their flaws, they do not always want them as pals, Schlenker said. The participants said they respected people who most often told the truth but were happier with friends who would sacrifice the truth to present them in a more favorable light, he said.

“I think that what it comes down to is we like people who have high integrity except where it comes to our interests,” he said.