Are you Really Happy to See Me? Asymmetric Perceptions of the Ethicality of Emotional Deception

Prior work has defined emotional deception as the inauthentic display of a felt emotion. We demonstrate that the directionality of an inauthentic emotional display profoundly influences perceptions of emotional deception. Specifically, we introduce the term up-display to define the exaggerated display of a felt emotion; and we introduce the term down-display to define the suppressed display of a felt emotion. We focus our investigation on emotional misrepresentation in negotiation, because both deception and emotion profoundly influence negotiation outcomes. Across five studies, we demonstrate that individuals judge up-displays of anger, sadness, and happiness to be significantly less ethical than down-displays of these same emotions, even when the intentionality and outcomes of the emotional deception are equivalent. These findings advance our understanding of emotional deception and challenge prior work that has overlooked the crucial distinction between up- and down-displays of emotion.