Statistical dependencies between personal traits and characteristics of mendacity (on the example of university students)

The paper discusses the content of the concepts of “lie” and “mendacity” in the context of the analysis of the works of Russian and foreign authors, provides examples of the personal traits of a person prone to the act of lying, and discusses the effectiveness of lie scales of psychological tests. It is noted that there is no empirical data in the literature to characterize the specifics of the manifestations of the phenomenon of mendacity in the student environment, which is one of the most active social groups of the population. The empirical study involved university students of full-time and part-time forms of education of both sexes in the amount of 407 people aged 17 to 37 years, average age is 19.80±2.64 years. The aim of the research was to study the personal traits of students as predictors of mendacity. The results obtained indicate the fundamental possibility of predicting the propensity to lie based on the analysis of statistical relationships between independent and dependent variables, which showed that the following characteristics of the student sample can be predictors of mendacity: extraversion, cooperation, conscientiousness and neuroticism. The “extroversion” predictor gives an opportunity to predict high values of the actual “mendacity” and a low value of “lie-justification” indicators. “Lie-gossip” is not inherent in “cooperation”, and general “mendacity” is not inherent in “conscientiousness”. “Neuroticism” acts as a predictor of “lie-justification”.