ABSTRACT
Personal relationships are typically founded on trust and a presumption of honesty. For various reasons, however, people opt to be less than completely honest in their relational interactions. Whether it be to hide infidelity or other transgressions, to mask one’s emotions, to preserve a surprise, or simply to spare another’s feelings, deceptive acts are common in relational communication. In this chapter, we discuss what deception is and the the process of
deception, both in terms of its psychological and physiological effects on the deceiver and in terms of the nonverbal behaviors that routinely accompany it. Finally, we address the issue of detection by discussing several of the individual and relational factors that predict deception success.
