Deborah A. Kashy

Deborah A. Kashy, Ph.D., was Professor of Psychology at Michigan State University, where she received her M.S. in applied statistics and her Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Connecticut. Her research interests included models of nonindependent data from dyads and small groups, close relationships, and interpersonal perception, making substantial contributions to the understanding of the role of relationships in social behavior. Kashy coauthored over 160 scientific publications and received over 32,000 citations throughout her career.

Working with Bella M. DePaulo from the University of Virginia while Kashy was at Texas A&M University, she made pioneering contributions to understanding deception in everyday life. In their landmark 1996 diary studies, 77 college students reported telling 2 lies a day, and 70 community members told 1, with participants telling more self-centered lies than other-oriented lies, except in dyads involving only women. Their "Who lies?" study examined individual differences in lie-telling, finding that verbally skilled people get away with their lies more often as they tend to include more details in their deceptive stories. These naturalistic studies found that during interpersonal interactions of 10 minutes or longer, people lied on average twice a day, with deception used in a quarter of interactions with others.

Kashy and DePaulo's research on the frequency and characteristics of everyday lying has become foundational to modern deception research, establishing that most real-world lies are low-stakes and unplanned rather than high-stakes events. Her methodological innovations earned her the 2021 Methodological Innovator Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. She served as senior associate editor of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin and associate editor of Personal Relationships. Her most notable contribution was co-authoring the reference book Dyadic Data Analysis, which has become the go-to resource for social scientists and has been cited over 7,000 times.

While Kashy's 1996 deception studies represent only a small portion of her career, they connect to her broader expertise in dyadic research methods and interpersonal processes. Her specialization in analyzing data from pairs of people made her uniquely qualified to study deception within social interactions, examining both the liar and the target as interdependent partners. She provided week-long workshops on dyadic data analysis that trained many psychologists and improved how research is conducted across disciplines. In 2023, the College of Social Science formally recognized Kashy's weighty contributions to the field of social and personality psychology at Michigan State through the Lifetime Achievement Award.