PONE-D-19-22731

Lie prevalence, lie characteristics and strategies of self-reported good liars

PLOS ONE

Dear Ms Verigin,

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PLOS ONE

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Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The submitted manuscript describes a data-driven piece of scientific research about the prevalence of lies in everyday life, providing an exploratory analysis about lies characteristics and strategies of self-reported good liars.

The manuscript is written in a good quality standard English. The study is clear and well presented. The authors exposed and motivated the research questions addressed, each research question has been faced separately into the results section and, finally, the main findings were described considering what is known in the field. Furthermore, the main limitations of the study and their possible mitigations were exposed and the contradictions with previous findings on the subject were discussed and explained.

Concerning the data collection procedure, the authors seem aware of the limitations of using crowd-sourcing platforms in scientific research and the strategies and constraints employed seem enough for ensuring the data quality. Nonetheless, as stated by the authors, the inconsistencies emerged between the response to the qualitative strategy question and the multiple-response strategy question could be due to inattentive or careless responding by participants (a common issue when collecting data through crowd-sourcing platforms such as mTurk). In order to exclude this effect, a possible solution could be to collect an additional small sample in a more controlled setting (i.e. in the laboratory) and comparing the new results with the ones reported in this version of the manuscript.

Among the described findings, the self-reported good liars seem mostly telling inconsequential lies (white lies) and placing a higher value on verbal strategies than on behavioural ones for successfully deceiving. However, the results described in the supplementary materials concerning the last section of the questionnaire (where participants were asked which kind of strategies they use when telling serious lies) highlighted that "Behavioural manipulation" was the most frequently endorsed strategy. The authors are asked to explain this contrasting result.

Regarding the data analysis approach, the employed methodology and the statistical tests adopted are appropriate for the reported aims. The entire procedure is extensively described and enough detailed for allowing its replication.

The authors made all the data underlying the described findings fully available.

Reviewer #2: In this paper, the authors administered a self-reports questionnaire to investigate the prevalence of deception, the characteristics of good-liars and the strategies they used. Results confirmed the previous literature, showing that participants who tell more lies in daily life are those who consider themselves good liars. These individuals mostly lie face to face to colleagues and friends, using verbal strategies like simple, clear and plausible stories that are as much as possible closed to the truth.

Overall, I think that the paper is suitable for this journal. It deals with an interesting topic for the scientific community that study the cognitive and behavioural aspects of deception. The manuscript is well written and clear. However, it could benefit from clarifying some points:

1) To encourage open science and data reproducibility, the authors should publish their data in a repository, so the link to the data should be made available and open.

2) References: I noticed that the number of self-citations is very high. 11 out of 53 references (20%) contain at least one of the authors of the present paper. I invite the authors to reduce self-references.

3) Data are collected through Amazon Mechanical Turk. To addressed the limitations commonly associated with this type of study (these limitations are mentioned by the authors in the manuscript as well, see also http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-021815-093623 and http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0057410#s15), I suggest to expand the sample with additional subjects collected in laboratory. This addition sample can be used to confirm the results obtained from the Turkers.

4) Participants: information about schooling is missed. I think that this is a variable that should not be underestimated. I would like to see a discussion about how this variable may influence the self-reported perception about the ability to lie and the strategy used. If the authors collected this data, I’d like to see some statistics comparing high and low schooling participants and males vs females. For example, are self-reported good liars mostly males with high educational level?

5) Which are the practical implications of this study? How this study enriches the state of the art? And how this study can concretely influence the development of more efficient lie detection machines? Please, discuss this point.

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Reviewer #1: No

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Lie prevalence, lie characteristics and strategies of self-reported good liars

PONE-D-19-22731R1

Dear Dr. Verigin,

We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it complies with all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you will receive an e-mail containing information on the amendments required prior to publication. When all required modifications have been addressed, you will receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will proceed to our production department and be scheduled for publication.

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With kind regards,

Giuseppe Sartori

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The authors addressed all the comments raised in the previous review phase. In my opinion, although further research in more controlled settings is necessary, the authors' responses were well-argued and provided a reasonable explanation to the raised questions.

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes: Merylin Monaro