A new study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships and Personal Relationships suggests that people who mislead their romantic partners tend to fall into three specific behavioral categories. By investigating the psychological reasons behind romantic deception, scientists have shown evidence that lies in intimate relationships serve a variety of purposes. These objectives range from attempts to maintain relationship harmony to calculated strategies to manipulate emotions.
Tim Cole is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at DePaul University and author of “ Broken Trust: Overcoming Intimate Betrayalconducted the study with Kelly Stonebrook. “This is one of my favorite pieces of research and won the best paper award at the International Communication Association conference in Cape Town this year,” Cole said.
Even though most couples value honesty, deception in relationships is common. People often mislead their partners for various reasons, making it difficult to understand the true impact of lies. Cole and Stonebrook designed two studies to identify the clear motivations behind these everyday falsehoods. The researchers suspected that certain psychological frameworks might help explain why individuals behave unfaithfully toward loved ones.
Attachment theory provides one such framework by explaining how people manage intimacy and emotional dependence. Securely attached people generally feel comfortable in close relationships and trust their romantic partners. There are two main forms of insecure attachment, known as anxious attachment and avoidant attachment. People with anxious attachment crave deep connection but are constantly afraid of abandonment. People with avoidant attachment, on the other hand, prefer emotional distance and tend to distance themselves when relationships become too intimate.
To capture a broader range of psychological behaviors, the authors also examined hostile personality traits known as the dark tetrad. This group includes Machiavellianism, which involves a highly manipulative approach to social interactions. It also includes narcissism, which is characterized by an exaggerated sense of self-importance, and psychopathy, which is characterized by a lack of empathy and remorse. The final characteristic is everyday sadism, which refers to people who experience intrinsic pleasure from inflicting emotional or physical pain on others.
In their first project, Cole and Stonebrook developed a measurement tool called the Romantic Deception Motive Scale. They first recruited 926 participants living in the United States to assess a long list of reasons for lying to their partners. Through statistical tests, they narrowed the list down to seven different motivations. The first few motives include malice, attention-seeking, conflict avoidance, and emotional appeasement.
Maliciousness means wanting to see your partner suffer, while attention-seeking involves lying to make yourself seem more interesting. Conflict avoidance is used to avoid arguments, and emotional appeasement involves lying to protect your partner’s feelings. The remaining three motives were concealment, privacy protection, and sexual avoidance. These include covering up embarrassing acts, withholding facts to maintain personal autonomy, and making excuses to avoid physical intimacy, respectively.
The researchers validated this new scale using an additional sample of 740 people. Following this step, they recruited 549 adults in romantic relationships and investigated how these seven motives related to attachment anxiety. Avoidant attachment was associated with motives related to psychological distance, such as protecting privacy and avoiding physical intimacy. Anxious attachment was associated with motives that reflect a need for reassurance, such as seeking attention or hiding mistakes to prevent rejection.
“In our first study, we identified seven common motivations for romantic deception — avoiding conflict, protecting privacy, hiding a mistake, preserving a partner’s feelings, seeking attention, avoiding sex, and intentionally causing harm — and linked them to attachment anxiety,” Cole told SciPost. “The second study asked a different question: Do people fall into different patterns based on their reasons for cheating on their partners?”
The second study recruited a new sample of 567 adults who were married or in committed relationships. The average age of the participants was 42 years, and the average relationship length was just over 14 years. The sample was split approximately evenly between men and women.
Participants completed a newly developed scale to measure reasons for deception. They also completed a questionnaire assessing their level of attachment security and four dark personality traits. Finally, respondents rated their overall relationship satisfaction and estimated how often they tend to cheat on their partners in general.
The researchers analyzed the data using a statistical technique called latent profile analysis. This method looks for hidden patterns in how people respond to multiple questions and groups individuals who share similar behavioral trends.
“Three profiles were uncovered,” Cole explained. “Transparent partners (38%) report having the most secure, secure relationships that rely less on deception.” For these people, honesty seems to be the default strategy for managing intimacy. They showed high relationship satisfaction, secure attachment styles, and very low levels of all four dark personality traits.
“Strategic meeks (48%) lie primarily to maintain peace: to avoid conflict, preserve emotions, hide mistakes, and protect privacy,” Cole said. These people showed that they mainly deceive their partners in order to maintain harmony in the relationship. They scored very low on motives aimed at causing harm or attracting attention.
Strategic comforters showed average levels of insecure attachment but very low scores on dark personality traits. They also reported moderate relationship satisfaction, but slightly below the scores of transparent partners. The authors suggest that this group uses deception as a coping mechanism to manage relationship anxiety and prevent arguments, acting as a shield of protection rather than a means of exploitation.
“Adversarial strategists (14%) endorse all motives, including inflicting harm, seeking attention, and avoiding sex, and report the lowest relationship satisfaction and the most deception,” Cole added. They had unique methods of deceiving their partners in order to gain attention, avoid sexual intimacy, and intentionally cause emotional distress.
Psychologically, this group showed high levels of attachment anxiety, along with elevated scores for narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and sadism. For these people, deception appears to function as a tool for relationship control and self-interest.
“What surprised us most was how cleanly the profiles were separated,” Cole said. “We expected the boundaries to be more blurred, but the statistical indicators showed that the distinction between the three groups was unusually clear.”
“The difference was huge by any standard,” Cole said. “In terms of self-reported propensity to deceive, the difference between adversarial strategists and transparent partners was more than two standard deviations (d = 2.18), which is a very large value in behavioral research.” Beyond the statistical details, he emphasized that the difference in satisfaction was also quite large. “These were meaningfully different groups, not statistical nuances.”
The researchers also noted an unexpected psychological pattern between the two groups of frequent liars. “Another surprise was that strategic pacifiers and hostile strategists showed about the same levels of attachment anxiety,” Cole said. “What set them apart wasn’t anxiety per se; it was hostile personality traits like narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism. Attachment anxiety alone doesn’t explain harmful deception.”
The findings provide a new lens for understanding romantic relationships. “What this study reminds us is that deception is not a panacea,” Cole said. “Two people may tell the exact same lie for completely different reasons, and their motives can tell you a lot about the health of the relationship.”
Mr. Cole emphasized two main points for the public. “First, the largest group in our sample, nearly half, use deception to maintain relationships rather than take advantage of them,” he says. “Lying to keep the peace may be more of the norm than the exception in romantic relationships.”
Second, the reasoning behind the act is more important than the act itself. “Second, it’s not so much whether you lie as it is why you lie,” Cole explained. “The same act of deception can reflect relationship maintenance in one person and manipulation in another, and those patterns are associated with very different relationship outcomes.”
These findings provide real-world applications for relationship counselors and therapists. If a client fits the profile of a strategic healer, a therapist may help them build the confidence needed to honestly face disagreements. Therapists can focus on reducing the client’s fear of conflict and showing them that honesty will not automatically lead to a breakup.
Working with adversarial strategists requires a completely different professional approach. In such cases, standard couples therapy can pose real risks, as the deceitful partner may use the therapy’s insights to further manipulate the partner. Recognizing these patterns allows professionals to prioritize safety and boundary-setting over traditional communication exercises.
Strategic pacifiers will lie to protect their bond, but their actions are not a foolproof solution. “Another point worth emphasizing is that strategic pacifiers should not be interpreted as evidence that ‘deception works,'” Cole cautioned. “While they commonly lied for relationship maintenance reasons, they were still less satisfied than transparent partners. Their deception may help maintain peace, but it does not eliminate the relationship costs associated with attachment insecurity.”
The authors also caution against classifying individuals too strictly. “These are patterns, not fixed types. People can change, and one lie doesn’t reveal a person’s profile,” Cole said. “The data are also cross-sectional, so while we can explain associations between personality, attachment, and deception, we cannot explain causality.”
Participants were primarily white and relatively affluent, suggesting that the findings may not fully apply to more diverse populations. Another limitation is that the researchers only measured the psychological motivation for lying, not the specific theme of the lie. Lies about financial debt can have a different impact on relationships than lies about enjoying a home-cooked meal.
In the future, scientists plan to continue investigating these complex dynamics. “We are working to recreate these profiles and expand the picture by examining traits such as trust, empathy, guilt, jealousy, and forgiveness,” Cole said. “We also want to collect dyadic data to better understand what happens when two strategic pacifiers are paired against strategic pacifiers and adversarial strategists.”
This next step involves following couples over long periods of time and observing both partners at the same time. “Ultimately, we hope this study will help us better understand how patterns of deception shape the relationships that function over time,” Cole concluded.
The study, “The Deceptive Mind: Insecure Attachment and the Motivations Underlying Deception in Romantic Relationships,” was authored by Tim Cole and Kelly Stonebrook.
The study, “Strategic Spoilers, Transparent Partners, and Adversarial Strategists: A Latent Profile Analysis of Romantic Deception,” was authored by Tim Cole and Kelly Stonebrook.
