RUNNING HEADER: INTERPERSONAL DECEPTION
Interpersonal Deception and the Truth Bias in John Tucker Must Die
Do you ever sit back and think about the relationships that you are in, whether it be one
of your friendships or romantic relationships, and think about how you just willing trust this
person, with your secrets, with pretty much anything? This idea is the concept described by
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Buller and Burgoon called the Truth Bias. This idea, along with many others has an important
impact on a person’s relationship. The truth bias sometimes makes long time relational partners
believe that their partner is always telling them the truth.
With any relationship someone has with one another, romantic or not, their relationship is
based upon the trust these people have for one another. Although deception is not something
most like to think about, deception within a relationship is also very common, and sometimes the
person who is receiving the deception is not normally able to detect it, a lot of the time because
of the Truth Bias.
According to Buller and Burgoon, the truth bias is “the expectation that others will be
honest.” The idea of the truth bias relates back to Buller and Burgoon’s theory titled,
Interpersonal Deception Theory. They created this theory to detect deception.
The movie John Tucker Must Die provides examples of deception, hiding secrets, and the
truth bias, and how these things can affect someone’s relationship. This paper will show how the
relationship with John Tucker and Kate, and how it is affected by deception. First I am going to
discuss my theory, Interpersonal Deception, next I will apply it to two case studies to get a better
understanding of the definition, then I am going to apply this theory to the characters in the
movie John Tucker Must Die.
Background
David Buller and Judee Burgoon (1986) have conducted dozens of experiments in which
they asked participants to detect deception. They have explained that people “often find
themselves in situations where they make statements that are less than completely honest in order
to avoid hurting or offending another person, to emphasize their best qualities, to avoid getting
into a conflict, or to speed up or slow down a relationship” (Buller & Burgoon,1986 p. 27). This
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theory draws attention to deception and how it plays a role between sender and receiver that
occurs in our conversations. Conversational behavior, interpersonal influence, nonverbal
communication, normative expectations, and source credibility our factors that these authors
looked into to form this theory. This idea that people expect others to be honest relates back to
the truth bias. Buller and Burgoon have three types of responses people might give if they decide
to not tell the truth to their close friend or significant other.
These strategies are falsification, concealment, and equivocation. Although these
strategies are used, they have some differences. Deception is something that is always hard to
detect, but very important to try to.
Falsification is a term that is used to give false information about anything. This term is
used to make people believe something that is not true. When in a relationship, someone could
use this term to lie about anything.
Concealment has some of the same qualities as falsification. Concealment is the action of
hiding something or preventing something from being known. For example, if you were to of
cheated on your significant other you would use concealment to make sure your significant other
never finds out what you did.
The last term is equivocation which is the use of vague language to conceal the truth. For
example, if someone were to ask you what you did last night and you were to respond very short
with little eye contact, you would be using a type of language to make sure you are hiding the
truth. All of these terms relate back to the idea of lying to someone you should not be. All three
of these strategies fall under the concept of deception, in which Buller and Burgoon define as “a
message knowingly transmitted by a sender to foster a false belief or conclusion by the receiver”
(Buller & Burgoon, 1986). All of these terms can be used in the movie that I picked out.
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John Tucker Must Die
Since I have further explained my theory, I picked out a movie that goes into more detail
of the truth bias, and deception. John Tucker Must Die is a teen/romance film created in 2006. I
would say this film was one of my favorite all time films growing up. This whole movie is based
upon relationships, but unhealthy relationships. Unhealthy relationships one after the other. The
movie is based around John Tucker, the school hottie, the star athlete. The guy pretty much every
girl wants to date, and of course this raises his ego a ton. So he does what any guy like that
would do, he dates them all. But he does not just date them all, he dates them all at once.
At the beginning of the movie, we see John on dates at the same restaurants with a
different girl each time. He tells the girls “I can’t date during basketball season, I just got to
focus on my skills ya know?” He does this to keep his cover, so that the girls never realize he is
