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Thou Shalt Lie: Anticipatory Deflection Management, Victoria L. Money

Theses and Dissertations

As people visualize ongoing or future interactions, do they lie to maintain situational congruency? While visualizing various behavioral options, or the outcomes of such behaviors, people have a unique opportunity to preemptively alter the definition of the situation based on anticipated sentiments. Affect Control Theory emphasizes the salience of deflection management in everyday life. This is otherwise known as an attempted realignment of experiences and expectations in the face of situational incongruency such as the bizarre. Using a vignette experiment, I extend Affect Control Theory by illuminating deflection not yet experienced but instead anticipated. I do so by estimating the …