Did you know research shows that 60% of people can't sustain a 10-minute conversation without lying at least once! Your participants are lying to you. Not all of them. Not all the time. But more often than you'd like to think. Sometimes they don’t even realise they are lying. They told you that confusing interface "made sense". They said the site was "really easy to use" despite failing every single task. They swore they declared all of their cash income to the government, when really they didn’t but they don’t want to be judged.
People lie in research for a whole range of reasons:
- To avoid hurting others' feelings and to please people - social politeness often overrides honesty, especially when giving feedback on something a researcher or UX designer created.
- To make themselves look better and deny socially undesirable traits - participants shade the truth to appear more capable, healthy, or virtuous than they are.
- To conceal something they did (or didn't do) to save face - e.g., admitting they skipped a task, missed instructions, failed to declare cash income or didn't complete something as asked.
- To influence or achieve a positive outcome for themselves - shaping answers strategically, such as overstating willingness to pay or downplaying concerns, to steer a result in their favour.
Understanding the reasons people lie can help you become a better researcher. If your methods don't account for that, your data is already compromised before you've analysed a single response.
The good news? You don't need a psychology degree or a polygraph. You just need to design your research so that honesty becomes the path of least resistance.
Here are 10 techniques we use to get past the polite answers and into the truth, drawn from 20 years of research across dozens of industries.
1. Use behavioural methods over opinion-based methods
There's a useful way to think about research methods: on one axis, you have qualitative (small sample, deep insights) versus quantitative (large sample, numerical data). On the other, you have behavioural methods (what people actually do) versus opinion-based methods (what people say they do).
The problem is that what people say and what people do are often two very different things. A participant might tell you in a survey that they "always" check their privacy settings, but a usability test reveals they can't even find them. Whenever your research objectives allow it, lean towards behavioural and observational methods: usability testing, analytics, ethnographic studies, contextual inquiry. You'll get closer to the truth by watching behaviour than by asking for opinions about it.
2. Don't test your own designs
If a participant knows (or suspects) that the person sitting across from spent many days designing the thing they're testing, they're far less likely to criticise it. They don't want to hurt your feelings. So they'll smile, nod, and tell you it's great, even when it isn't.
This is easy to fix. Have someone else run the session and make it clear to participants upfront: "I didn't design this. You can say anything you like about it and I won't be offended. I really want your help improve it." You can also tell them you know there are problems with the design but need their help to find them. Give them explicit permission to be honest and remove the social pressure that makes them hold back.
3. Be transparent and set expectations early
Don't wait until a participant arrives at a research session to ask them for their consent. Nobody is going to sit there and carefully read a form with a researcher watching, and if they're already at the session (virtual or in-person), they'll feel pressured to sign regardless.
Send an informed consent form before the session. Let them know what they'll be doing, how their data will be used, what will be recorded and what the risks are. Give them a genuine opportunity to opt out before they show up. You want participants who are comfortable and willing to be there, not people who feel trapped into cooperating. Comfortable participants give you honest answers. Pressured ones tell you what they think you want to hear.
4. Create the right environment
Your research environment sends a message before you ask a single question. A video call with six observers staring silently from a grid feels like a panel interview, not a conversation. People who feel like they are being interrogated don't tend to open up and speak freely.
Think about what the participant experiences when they join the session. Keep the number of visible researchers to a minimum. If multiple stakeholders want to observe, encourage them to watch a recording afterwards. Keep your own camera on and your manner casual. Even small things matter: a friendly greeting, a relaxed tone, not launching straight into the script. The goal is to make them forget they're in a research session at all.
If conducting research sessions in person, choose and environment that the participant will feel comfortable in while still allowing you to conduct and record the session with minimal interruptions.
5. Encourage anonymity and reconsider recording
Recording sessions is standard practice, and for good reason: it lets you share quotes, clips, and insights with stakeholders who weren't in the room. But it comes at a cost. A participant who knows they're being filmed may filter what they say, especially on sensitive topics.
There are times when turning off the camera (or even the audio) will get you closer to the truth than any recording ever could. If the topic is personal, embarrassing, or carries social stigma, skip the recording and take your notes by hand instead. You'll lose the recording, but you'll gain honesty. And if a recording is genuinely necessary, at least acknowledge it openly and reassure participants about how the footage will be used.
6. Allow bonding time to build rapport
It can take five to ten minutes for a participant to warm up to you. If you skip that and jump straight into the research questions, you'll spend the whole session talking to someone who's still guarded.
This is why ultra-short session formats can backfire. If you're running 15-minute blocks back-to-back, there's barely time to say hello before the questions start, let alone build the kind of trust that leads to honest answers. Invest time at the start of every session in small talk. Find a point of common interest. Ask about their day. It might feel like wasted time, but it makes everything after it more reliable.
We have found that when conducting research on sensitive topics such as with victims of crime or domestic violence, we include 5-10 minutes for participants to ‘offload’ and share their story (but only if they want to). If they don’t feel they are being heard by the researcher, they will just shut down.
7. Avoid leading and suggestive questions
The way you ask a question can shape the answer you get. "Do you like this feature?" suggests there's a right answer. "How do you feel about this feature?" doesn't. It's a small difference in wording, but open questions make it harder for the participant to simply agree with you rather than provide their own opinion.
Leading questions are surprisingly easy to write without realising it. New Zealand's 2009 referendum on smacking asked, "Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand?”. The framing did the persuading before anyone had a chance to think. In research, the same thing happens on a smaller scale every time we embed an assumption in a question. Stick to open questions and let the participant lead you to their answer rather than the other way around.
8. Show empathy and don't judge
Sometimes participants tell you things that are hard to hear. It's human nature to react, but a raised eyebrow, a sigh, or even a subtle shift in posture can signal disapproval. Once a participant senses judgement, they stop telling you the uncomfortable truths and start giving you the safe version instead.
Keep your body language neutral, even when the answer surprises you. Try to understand things from the participant's point of view rather than evaluating their choices. This doesn't mean you have to agree with them. It means creating a space where they feel safe enough to be honest. While empathy relies on personality traits, it's a professional skill, and like any skill, it gets better with practice.
9. Probe with follow-up questions
When a participant gives you a vague or surface-level answer, that's your cue to dig deeper. Ask why. Ask them to walk you through it. Ask what they meant by that. The more detail you ask for, the harder it becomes for someone to sustain an answer that isn't true, because fabricated stories fall apart under specifics.
This isn't about catching people out. It's about getting past the first response (which might be the socially acceptable version) and into what actually happened. Good probing is one of the most valuable skills a researcher can develop. If something doesn't quite add up, don't move on to the next question. Stay with it.
10. Save sensitive topics for the end
If the first question you ask touches on something personal, embarrassing, or emotionally loaded, you've lost the participant before you've started. They haven't had time to build trust with you yet, and they'll retreat into safe, surface-level answers for the rest of the session.
Build up to the difficult stuff. Use the first part of your session to establish rapport and cover less confronting ground, then ease into sensitive territory once the participant is comfortable. You can also use a technique called projection: instead of asking "what did you do?", ask "what do people generally do in that situation?". It lets participants draw on their own experience without feeling personally exposed. They'll talk about "other people" while most likely telling you exactly what they did themselves.
Designing for honesty
None of these techniques require special equipment, a bigger budget, or a degree in psychology. They're choices you make before and during every research session: how you set up the environment, how you frame your questions, how you build trust, and how much space you give people to be honest.
Participants don't lie because they want to mislead you. They lie because something in the situation makes it easier than telling the truth. Your job as a researcher is to flip that equation, so that honesty becomes the path of least resistance. Get that right, and the quality of everything that follows (your insights, your recommendations, your credibility) takes care of itself.
Want help designing research that gets you honest, actionable insights? Learn more about our research services and some of our favourite client projects.