Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Around the Blogs, Tuesday, October 10, 2007

  • Remember a while back when we talked about how new, easily stolen consumer products can spike crime rates until we figure out how to safeguard them better (I still miss my 8-track)? iPods are the latest example, and Matthew Bowen at Prevention Works is one of the newest buyers, already predictably on the prevention trail for his purchase. Good for us, though, is his subsequent post going over recent research and the importance of getting clueful about protecting these new items (and also therefore keeping crime rates and corrections costs down) to help the rest of us, too. (Clever headline, too.)
  • Very thoughtful and thought-provoking post by Anne Reed at Deliberations on the difficulty of knowing the workings of humans and how the really good lawyers at picking juries are probably the experts at knowing that difficulty. Worth your time, so give a read and a thought.
  • A highly unrepresentative survey has nevertheless produced a provocative study on the conditions for lie acceptability, via Deception Blog. Here are the basic findings (but read the post to find out more and to see why they aren’t necessarily representative):

Different types of lie may be more or less acceptable, depending on the motivaton for telling them and the context in which they are told. Broadly, lies which are told for personal gain or to harm others - so-called ‘antisocial lies’ - are generally considered less acceptable than those told to help another or for politeness - ‘prosocial lies’.


Ning and Crossman set out to explore how perceptions of lie acceptability vary across situations and by different cultural or subcultural groups at a detailed level. They argue that:

These issues are important, as one’s perceptions of the acceptability of lies may relate to the frequency with which one lies and to the facility with which one lies (e.g., whether or not one provides obvious cues that give away deceptive attempts out of discomfort with the act of lying). (p.2131)

They authors also note that understanding how liars and deceived people feel about the acceptability of the particular lies may also be important once a liar has been found out: “perceptions of lie acceptability predict reactions to the discovery that one has been deceived (DePaulo et al., 2004), which could be relevant to issues such as relationship stability in the wake of such a discovery” (p.2131)

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