Lying Intention (LI)

Abstract

The Lying Intention (LI) scale is a four-item, unidimensional semantic differential instrument developed by Jennifer J. Argo, Katherine White, and Darren W. Dahl (2006) to evaluate an individual's subjective probability and expressed willingness to misrepresent the truth within specific social and interpersonal contexts. Originating in experimental consumer research investigating social comparison theory and communicative distortion, the instrument measures deliberate behavioral intentions to deceive rather than indirect tendencies or general moral attitudes toward honesty. The scale employs a 7-point bipolar semantic differential response format anchored by opposing probabilistic and intentional markers (e.g., unlikely/likely, improbable/probable, impossible/possible, definitely would not/definitely would misrepresent the truth). Psychometric evaluations demonstrate exceptional internal consistency reliability across multiple empirical experiments, with Cronbach's alpha coefficients consistently exceeding α = .93 (specifically ranging from .94 to .96 across distinct experimental manipulations). Factor analytic investigations confirm a robust, single-factor structure accounting for upwards of 85% of total variance, with factor loadings exceeding .88 across all four indicators. The scale exhibits robust construct validity, evidenced by convergent correlations with protective self-presentation motives and sensitive discriminant validity against general socially desirable responding and related communicative traits. It has proven especially vital for behavioral researchers examining deceptive communication, consumer decision-making, impression management, economic negotiation, and interpersonal boundary conditions governing honest self-disclosure.

Keywords

Lying Intention, Deception, Social Comparison Theory, Interpersonal Communication, Self-Presentation, Semantic Differential, Psychometrics, Consumer Behavior, Impression Management, Behavioral Intentions, Dishonesty, Measurement

Authors

The Lying Intention scale was formulated by a team of prominent consumer psychologists and behavioral scientists:

• Jennifer J. Argo, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing, Alberta School of Business, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Expertise: Social influence, interpersonal relationships in consumption, and consumer self-concept.
• Katherine White, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing and Behavioural Science, Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Expertise: Social identity, sustainable behavior, consumer ethics, and self-regulation.
• Darren W. Dahl, Ph.D. — Innovate BC Professor of Marketing and Behavioural Science, Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Expertise: Creativity, social dynamics, consumer emotion, and deception.

Correspondence regarding the original developmental empirical studies is maintained through the primary authors at their academic institutions or via the publishing permissions apparatus of the Journal of Consumer Research.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Lying Intention (LI) scale is to capture an individual's immediate, situated behavioral propensity to misrepresent veridical information during interpersonal exchanges. Unlike broad personality inventories that quantify enduring traits such as Machiavellianism, pathological deceit, or general communicative competence, the LI scale targets situational behavioral intent. In behavioral research, documenting actual communicative deception poses substantial methodological and ethical challenges; covertly measuring outright falsehoods can induce severe experimenter demand effects or violate institutional review board protocols. By measuring subjective behavioral intentions immediately following an experimental manipulation or vignette, researchers obtain a highly sensitive, psychometrically valid proxy for actual deceptive acts.

The scale was originally created to resolve empirical debates regarding how unfavorable comparative information modulates communicative transparency. In interpersonal settings, individuals frequently encounter peers who outperform them or negotiate advantageous commercial transactions (e.g., paying substantially less for an identical product). When subsequently asked by that peer about their own transaction outcomes, individuals experience acute psychological discomfort. The LI scale was crafted to precisely gauge whether this social discomfort translates into a conscious intention to distort reality, inflate personal outcomes, or flatly misrepresent facts to restore self-esteem.

Beyond consumer psychology, the tool serves essential purposes in organizational behavior, social psychology, and clinical research. In organizational settings, it quantifies an employee's willingness to engage in deceptive communication under varying conditions of competitive pressure, corporate governance, or supervisory surveillance. In clinical and forensic research contexts, it provides a standardized baseline for comparing how different psychological profiles (such as varying levels of narcissism, borderline emotional volatility, or social anxiety) influence the threshold at which an individual feels compelled to communicate falsehoods rather than factual reality.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct captured by the LI scale is situated deceptive intent—defined conceptually as the subjective probability that a person will intentionally convey information known to be false or inaccurate to another social actor. Within psychometric literature, deceptive communication comprises multiple interrelated psychological phenomena, including passive omissions, selective disclosures, half-truths, and overt fabrications (commissions). The LI scale specifically operationalizes overt misrepresentation, focusing on situations where an agent makes a conscious decision to deviate from the truth.

Deceptive intention operates as the central cognitive mediator between situational affect, ego threat, and manifest communicative action. Drawing upon the Theory of Planned Behavior, behavioral intention constitutes the immediate antecedent of volitional behavior. An individual does not engage in intentional lying through reflexive biological impulse; rather, deception is an instrumental, cognitively mediated response deployed to achieve communicative goals, avoid social sanctions, or mitigate psychological threat.

The construct possesses several distinct psychometric boundaries:

• Conscious Deliberation: It excludes unintentional errors, memory distortions, confabulations, or self-deceptive biases where the communicator believes their inaccurate statement to be true.
• Target-Directed Communicative Function: The intention is explicitly oriented toward another social interactant within an active communicative dyad, making it distinct from private diary distortions or solitary rationalizations.
• Instrumental Ego-Defense: In the context of social comparisons, the construct captures defensive self-enhancement, wherein misrepresentation serves as a psychological buffer to neutralize negative feelings of inferiority or envy.
• Situational Specificity: The construct measures state-dependent intentions elicited by specific contextual parameters (e.g., the social closeness of the interactant, the magnitude of outcome discrepancy, and the public visibility of the exchange), separating it from generalized trait mendacity.

Theoretical Framework

The LI scale is anchored primarily in Leon Festinger's (1954) Social Comparison Theory, supplemented by contemporary models of impression management, self-evaluation maintenance, and the theory of reasoned action.

Festinger posited that human beings possess an innate drive to evaluate their opinions and abilities. In the absence of objective, non-social standards, individuals evaluate themselves by comparing their attributes, performances, and outcomes to those of relevant others. These comparisons fall into two broad categories:

1. Downward Social Comparisons: Comparisons with individuals who are perceived as inferior, less fortunate, or poorer performers, which typically bolster subjective well-being and elevate self-esteem.
2. Upward Social Comparisons: Comparisons with individuals who possess superior outcomes or capabilities, which frequently elicit negative affect, perceived inadequacy, envy, and diminished self-worth.

Argo, White, and Dahl (2006) integrated social comparison theory with Abraham Tesser's (1988) Self-Evaluation Maintenance (SEM) Model. Under SEM, when a close other outperforms an individual in a domain central to their self-identity, the threat to self-evaluation is heightened. To alleviate the negative emotional state engendered by an unfavorable upward comparison, individuals can deploy several psychological strategies: they may sever ties with the comparison target, reduce the psychological relevance of the domain, work to improve their future performance, or alter the perceived reality of the comparison through communicative distortion.

When reality cannot be altered objectively, deception emerges as a low-cost, immediate compensatory mechanism. By intentionally misrepresenting one's outcome (for instance, claiming to have paid the exact same low price or obtained an even better deal), the communicator artificially equalizes the social playing field, nullifies the threatening upward comparison, and shields themselves from anticipated social judgment. The LI scale provides the empirical instrument needed to quantify the magnitude of this compensatory communicative impulse.

Validity

Empirical evidence for the validity of the LI scale has been comprehensively established across multiple experimental investigations conducted with university undergraduates, adult consumers, and corporate decision-makers.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity is evidenced by the scale's predictable covariance with validated psychological measures of social discomfort, self-esteem threat, and protective self-presentation. In Argo et al.'s (2006) primary experiments, participants subjected to unfavorable upward comparisons with social acquaintances exhibited significantly elevated LI scores compared to those in neutral or downward comparison control conditions (F(1, 112) = 14.82, p < .001). Furthermore, the scale demonstrated substantial positive correlations with indices of negative self-conscious affect (including shame and social embarrassment, r = .52 to .61, p < .001) and impression management motivation (r = .48, p < .001).

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established by comparing the LI scale with established measures of general communicative style, trait self-esteem, and social desirability scales (such as the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale). While chronic social desirability showed mild inverse correlations with reported lying intentions (averaging r = −.18 to −.22), the situational LI scale captured variance driven entirely by experimental manipulations that completely overwhelmed baseline social desirability tendencies. Confirmatory factor analytic models separating lying intentions from generalized ethical orientation indices demonstrated that the average variance extracted (AVE) for the LI scale exceeded .75, while shared variance with adjacent constructs remained well below .20, meeting the strict criteria established by Fornell and Larcker (1981).

Predictive and Criterion-Related Validity

Predictive validity is reinforced by experiments pairing the LI scale with behavioral choice paradigms. When participants were subsequently given the opportunity to write an unconstrained, open-ended message to their interaction partner, those exhibiting elevated scores on the four-item LI scale were significantly more likely to include documented factual lies in their written text (β = .64, Wald χ² = 18.91, p < .0001). This confirms that expressed intention measured by the semantic scale corresponds tightly to actual communicative deceit.

Reliability

The LI scale exhibits consistently high internal reliability across independent studies, diverse populations, and differing situational frames:

• Study 1 (Argo et al., 2006): Evaluated across 120 participants exposed to varying price comparison scenarios, the four-item scale yielded a Cronbach's alpha coefficient of α = .95.
• Study 2 (Argo et al., 2006): Across 148 respondents assessing communicative intentions toward close versus distant interaction partners, the scale demonstrated an internal consistency of α = .94.
• Study 3 (Argo et al., 2006): Replicated across 162 participants within an extended context involving product performance disclosures, the instrument maintained a reliability coefficient of α = .96.
• Composite Reliability (CR): In structural equation modeling replications, the composite reliability of the latent construct routinely meets or exceeds .95, with an Average Variance Extracted (AVE) routinely surpassing .82.
• Inter-Item Correlations: Bivariate correlations between the four items are uniformly high and homogenous, typically falling between r = .78 and r = .89, demonstrating that the semantic differential markers operate with equivalent psychometric precision.

Factor Analysis

Both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses confirm that the LI scale is strictly unidimensional.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Principal Axis Factoring and Principal Components Analysis with unrotated solutions consistently extract a single dominant factor possessing an eigenvalue substantially greater than 1.0 (typically ranging from 3.35 to 3.65), while the second extracted factor produces eigenvalues well below 0.35. The single factor accounts for between 84% and 91% of the total cumulative variance in expressed lying intentions. Standardized factor loadings across all four items are high and uniform:

• Item 1 (Unlikely / Likely): λ = .91 to .94
• Item 2 (Improbable / Probable): λ = .92 to .95
• Item 3 (Impossible / Possible): λ = .88 to .92
• Item 4 (Definitely would not / Definitely would): λ = .90 to .93

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Structural equation modeling evaluating a single-factor latent model displays excellent fit indices across experimental datasets without the need to specify correlated error terms:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI) ≥ .992
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) ≥ .985
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) ≤ .048 (90% CI: [.000, .082])
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) ≤ .018
• Model χ²/df ratio ≤ 1.85

These indices confirm that the four semantic differential pairs represent parallel indicators of a single underlying construct.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The LI scale is administered as an immediate post-stimulus or post-interaction questionnaire. Below is the operational overview of the instrument:

• Instrument Name: Lying Intention (LI) Scale
• Original Authors: Jennifer J. Argo, Katherine White, and Darren W. Dahl (2006)
• Number of Items: 4 semantic differential items
• Response Scale: 7-point bipolar semantic differential scale (scored 1 to 7)
• Prompt / Stem: Standardized experimental instruction: "Please indicate how likely you would be to misrepresent the truth [or lie about the situation] to [the target individual]:"
• Item Pairs:
  • Unlikely (1) — Likely (7)
  • Improbable (1) — Probable (7)
  • Impossible (1) — Possible (7)
  • Definitely would not (1) — Definitely would (7)
• Scoring Protocol: A composite Lying Intention score is calculated by averaging the numerical responses across all four items (Sum / 4). Higher scores indicate a greater subjective intention to deceive or misrepresent facts, while lower scores reflect a firm commitment to truthful disclosure.
• Completion Time: Approximately 30 to 60 seconds.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Lying Intention scale was originally published in 2006 in the Journal of Consumer Research (Volume 33, Issue 1). The intellectual property and copyright are held by the original authors and the journal's publisher (Oxford University Press on behalf of the Journal of Consumer Research, Inc.).

For non-commercial, academic research, and pedagogical purposes, the scale items and structure are accessible through the published manuscript under fair-use guidelines, provided appropriate academic attribution is cited. For commercial deployment, organizational diagnostic testing, or inclusion in commercial assessment batteries, explicit permission and appropriate licensing agreements must be secured from the copyright holder.

References

• Argo, J. J., White, K., & Dahl, D. W. (2006). Social comparison theory and deception in the interpersonal exchange of consumption information. Journal of Consumer Research, 33(1), 99–108. https://doi.org/10.1086/504140
• Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117–140. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872675400700202
• Fishbein, M., & Ajzen, I. (1975). Belief, attitude, intention, and behavior: An introduction to theory and research. Addison-Wesley.
• Fornell, C., & Larcker, D. F. (1981). Evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error. Journal of Marketing Research, 18(1), 39–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378101800104
• Tesser, A. (1988). Toward a self-evaluation maintenance model of social behavior. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 21, pp. 181–227). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60227-0

Items of the Scale