The Influence Of Good Lies On Trust:the Role Of Empathy

Trust is an indispensable part of people's social life,reflecting thinking and understanding in human nature.Trusting others and improving their own reliability are the preconditions for favorable social communication.Previous studies have shown that lying,cheating and other forms of behaviors can destroy trust,but a recent study have revealed that some kind of lie can not destroy but promote trust.This kind of lies with prosocial intention occupies the majority of daily lies,and will not bring extremely high risk,and it is called good lies.Due to the lack of research,it is impossible to confirm whether good lies promote trust is a stable phenomenon,and the possible influencing factors between them have not been discussed.Based on previous studies,this study designed three sub studies to explore the influence of good lies on trust and the role of empathy.First of all,the story of good lies in interpersonal communication as the research key material was adapted,and the trust game in the form of questionnaire as the research paradigm was used.As trustors,the participants could get the characteristics of their partner who were as trustees by knowing partner's behavior choice in the situation described in the story,and then completed the trust game.Study 1 explored whether the situation of good lies in interpersonal communication can promote trust;Study 2 explored the mediating effect of context-based state empathy,which was divided into two parts according to Double Randomization Design;Study 3 further explored the moderating effect of personality based trait empathy.The main conclusions of this study are as follows:1.The materials of adapted lie stories are in line with the research assumption.Various tests on the materials show that the manipulation of social status is effective,the four speech types conform to the corresponding characteristics and may exist in daily life,furthermore,the similarity between the characters in the story and the participants has no effect on trust decision.In short,the materials are reasonable and ecological.2.Good lies in the social situation contribute to build trust,the details are as follows:in the trust game,participants had more investment and expected return to their partners who chose to tell three kinds of good lies than another group of participants whose partners chose to tell truth in social situation.The group whose partners chose to tell altruistic good lies had the best trust performance.Goodwill and honesty are both factors that affect trust,but some researchers believe that in the judgment of interpersonal trust,the individual's attention to goodwill is more deeply rooted than the attention to honesty.Based on the values and rules of social:interaction,goodwill is also more valued in Chinese culture.When people perceive a higher kind of human nature,they believe in mutual benefit and mutual assistance between people,and they are willing to build trust with individuals who care for others in a dishonest way.3.Participants also perceived more kindness to the partners who chose tell good lies.Although good lies violate honesty,they reflect the principle of caring and loving with people.The straightforward truth complies with honesty but ignores the power of love in human nature,4.State empathy mediates the influence of good lies on trust.According to Double Randomization Design,the first part shows that participants whose partners chose to tell altruistic good lies had more empathic response and more expected return in the trust game than another group whose partners chose to tell truth,the results indicates that there is causality between independent variable and mediator,independent variable and dependent variable.The second part shows that manipulation of instructions can effectively induce state empathy of participants,then in the trust game,compared to the group induced weak empathic response,participants who induced strong empathic response had more investment and expected return to their partners who wrote material of altruistic good lies,these results indicate mediator can significantly affect the dependent variable,and there is a causal relationship between them.Combining the results of the two parts,it supports state empathy mediate the influence of good lies on trust.5.Trait empathy can not directly predict trust decision-making,while state empathy is the direct predictor of prosocial behavior.Compared with personality traits,the situation of good lies has stronger predictive power on trust behavior.The acts empathy component in trait empathy has predictive effect,which may lie in telling good lies actually help the young people in need in the situation.The acts empathy of the participants makes them perceive the helping behavior of their partners and are willing to build trust with them.