Lying in Intra-Asian Business Discourse in an ELF Setting

Introduction

While I was collecting data for my business discourse research, my interviewees sometimes claimed that their business partners gave false statements. In most cases, the interviewees did not necessarily mean that their partners intended to deceive them, but meant that what they said was not exactly true. Such moments happen to have been recorded. As an example, I present the part of such data in which a statement claimed to be untrue is included. The following data were recorded in an intercultural business encounter between Japanese and American business practitioners (Tanaka, 2010, p. 59).

The postmeeting interview revealed that Takenaka was not sure how to respond to Poffo’s compliments since the hotel was actually inconveniently located and the building obviously looked less attractive than the surrounding buildings. Therefore, he did not accept Poffo’s compliments. He downplayed these compliments following the Japanese conventions of politeness. For Poffo, of course, her compliments were simply a linguistic routine to establish a good business relationship. She was a little confused when her compliments were not accepted by Takenaka (Tanaka, 2010). By pointing out what is excessively overstated or arguably untrue as a common act of courtesy, one might be able to initiate a trustful business relationship in a certain situation, but the same act might be evaluated as insincere behavior in other situations. Such different evaluations of untrue statements become the focus of this study, since such differences may trigger friction or distrust between two parties.

In order to further explore the issue, it is critical to define lying with which I will work throughout this article. When a person makes a false statement, is it considered to be a lie? According to the English online dictionary (Reverso-Softissimo, 2008), a lie is “an untrue or deceptive statement deliberately used to mislead.” It would be possible to perceive that what Poffo said, the hotel is wonderful, was not a lie if she really thought that driving 15 minutes was not far at all, since she had just arrived from the United States where using a car for commuting is a matter of daily routine. It is, however, also possible for Takenaka to judge what Poffo said to be untrue, because there were many good hotels around within walking distance, and taking a taxi even for 15 minutes is quite costly in Tokyo. It is also each party’s subjective judgment as to whether or not Poffo intended to mislead Takenaka to think that she was happy with the hotel. Defining a lie is, thus, a challenging task in intercultural settings. Drawing on Ross’s (1930, cited in Carson 2010) argument that lying involves breaking a promise to communicate truthfully, Carson (2010) defines a lie as something told by Person S who makes a false statement X, where S believes that X is (probably) false. That said, people are not supposed to speak truthfully in a certain context. Carson included in his definition, “S states X in a context in which S thereby warrants the truth of X.” In other words, breaking a promise of telling a truth needs to be involved in telling a lie. In business settings, in particular, a relationship of trust is a premise; and business actors are constantly measuring the sincerity or trustworthiness of the other party. In certain situations, interlocutors may not feel that they should always tell the truth, because they may judge that the blunt truth can hurt the feelings of the recipient. In other cases, a very honest confession might terminate a relationship of trust. Therefore, judgment concerning whether or not a context warrants trust depends on various factors, including the speakers’ cultural grounds and situations.

In an intercultural business setting where English is used as lingua franca, linguistic factors may contribute to making a false statement. Saul (2012) gives a case of an English rock climber wanting to communicate the fact that many people in England climb without ropes, as an example of a linguistic error. Although the speaker believed what was said to be true, her claim was false. The rock climbers uttered “En Inglaterra hay mucha gente que escala sin ropa.” In spite of her intention, she accidentally said that in England there are many people who climb without clothes. Saul excludes such a false statement made by linguistic error from her definition of lying. However, malapropism and linguistic errors may likely occur more frequently when people communicate using their foreign or second language. The tricky part is that the participants may not detect that a seemingly false statement was made because of the speaker’s insufficient linguistic competence. In such a case, the participant may think that the other party lied.

Supposing that, in the presented data, Poffo had thought the hotel was moderate and a little far from the company and yet told Takenaka that the hotel was wonderful. People with whom Poffo interacted elsewhere might have sensed that what Poffo said about the hotel might not be true, but they would have perceived it as a white lie, and part of her effort to build a good business relationship. Nevertheless, others could have evaluated her comment as insincere and interpreted it as a sign of their partner’s potential betrayal of a relationship of trust.

I argue that lying in this manner may be discursively constructed among participants in intercultural communication. Therefore, my definition of lying in the present article needs to consider not only what is said but also how the participants involved were judged. When one party believes what is said to be false, they take themselves to be in a warranting context whose participants may or may not be the victim of linguistic error/malapropism.

Illumination of the Field

Generally people believe that lying poses a threat to the moral fabric of society. When we are caught lying directly or seen lying to someone else, we lose a degree of credibility and trust from those around us. Nevertheless, we all know that people do lie. In fact, most people tell a substantive lie on the average of 1.5 times a day according to research conducted by psychologist DePaulo (1996). Turner, Edgley, and Olmstead’s (1975) study reports that only 38.5% of recorded conversation was completely honest.

In an organizational setting, when such lies are self-serving, colleagues may begin to question whether you are pushing your idea in the best interest of the company or to serve your own agenda. Credibility built on honesty is one of the critical factors that contributes to establishing a trustful relationship both within an organization and between organizations. Past research in international trust management found various factors that influence a trustful relationship. Babar, Verner, and Nguyen’s (2007) research shows a variety of factors involved in developing initial trust and in maintaining trust between Indian and Vietnamese vendors and Far Eastern Asian, European, and American clients. Their analysis found that for initial trust building, factors such as credibility, and capability based on cultural understanding of their partners, were important. According to Babar et al. (2007), cultural understanding includes understanding of a specific value placed on a certain action or notion, for example, a personal visit, providing a customer list, reputation and experience, in addition to using certain communication strategies. Culture, in this study, includes norms, beliefs, business ethos, and communication strategies.

Culture was also found to be critical in lying behavior in general. People justify their lies as being the right thing to do. This is not surprising because in some contexts people know that all the interlocutors are aware that what is being told is not true. For example, we say you are looking good to people when you may sense they are having a bad day. In such a case, applying Carson’s (2010) definition, the false statement is not a lie because people involved in the conversation know that we are not telling a blunt truth. A white lie could be included in such a justifiable lie. Because white lies are supposed to make social interactions go more smoothly, lying can be considered to be a tool adaptive for the maintenance of a good relationship. In a way, culture is a critical factor that determines one’s judgment as to whether or not a lie is told based on a goodwill motivation.

The social motivation for telling a lie was a focus of the research into deception by Camden, Motley, and Wilson (1984). They found that people tell a lie not only to benefit themselves but also to benefit others or enhance human relations. The findings of the study show the complexity of motivation in lying. In their data, a young male participant turned down a party invitation from his girlfriend because he thought her parties were always dull. He told her a lie saying that he had two invitations that same night. Camden et al. (1984) point out that there are self-serving motivations, that is, popularity image construction, and other beneficial motivations, that is, ones in which concerns for the receiver’s feelings coexist. Their research result indicates that it is not easy to use taxonomy in sorting out motivations for deception since it is difficult to judge which individual benefitted by the lie, and how.

Telling a lie needs to be considered as part of communicative competence in order to deal with complexity in human relations. Thus, deception can be recognized as a tool that can be adaptive and essential for survival and for the maintenance of social relationships (Kraus, 1981). Polite linguistic routines such as “thank you” or “I’m sorry” can also be interpreted as superficial insincere utterances, a weaker version of a lie, when such routines are not universally shared. Pinto (2011) discusses two perspectives on such routines: the first perspective is that an individual judges speakers to be sincere when they are expressing their true beliefs or feelings; and the second is that an interlocutor evaluates a speaker as sincere if the person seems to be concerned with smooth and friendly interaction. Past studies, including the one by Lefebvre (1982), conclude that culture is a variable that affects this judgment as to whether or not telling a lie can be acceptable as a strategy. Lefebvre argues that moralistic judgment appears to be learned and varies across cultures. The different interpretation affects business relations management since it relates to an evaluation of trustworthiness and sincerity in intercultural business encounters.

When speakers from different cultural backgrounds interact, their differing perceptions of what trust and deception entail might cause problems in communication. However, in light of recent research on intercultural communication, the ways most studies in the past treat culture appears rather problematic. The majority of past research that has examined lying behavior in relationship to culture has aimed to measure differences using simple dichotomies such as collectivist-individualist (Anue & Waters, 1994) or interdependent-independent (Kim, Kam, Sharkey, & Singelis, 2008). For example, the study by Anue and Waters (1994) investigated North American and American Samoans using notions of collectivism and individualism. Their questionnaire-based study concluded that, collectively, Samoans are likely to attempt deception when it relates to group or family in addition to authority-based concerns, while individualist Americans tend to lie in order to protect their privacy or to protect the feelings of the target person. The essentialist assumption underlying this research treats an ethnic group as people who exhibit monolithic and stable behavioral patterns. Moreover, a number of other past studies on lying behavior tended to use this essentialist view of culture, according to which people’s default perception of lying is developed uniformly in a certain region surrounded by a national border drawn by political powers, or a region traditionally recognized as representative of a certain culture, such as Middle Eastern, Chinese, or Eastern. This essentialism sees people in this area as all the same, under a single and monolithic culture.

Kim et al. (2008) used cultural identity rather than ethnic group as an index of deception evaluation. They investigated the impact of cultural identities on motivation, perceived deceptiveness, and willingness to use deceptive strategies. In order to measure cultural identity, they used a self assessment questionnaire (Revised Self-Construal Scale) to determine participants’ cultural identities in terms of interdependent and independent dimensions. While nationality accounted for only 2% of the variance of predicting motivation to use strategic deception, interdependent and dependent dimensions accounted for a statistically significant portion of total variance. Their analysis found that a higher degree of interdependence correlated with greater motivation for using both self- and others-benefitting deceptive strategies.

While recognizing these statistical studies’ contributions to understanding intercultural lying behavior, using self-assessment and simple questionnaires to identify participants’ culture ignores the socially constructed nature of lying behavior in real life. Some of the recent studies, such as the study by Kim et al. (2008) discussed above, employ a sophisticated view of culture, a neo-essentialist view, in which I see fundamental essentialist assumptions still in place. These studies use dichotomous labels instead of nation-state categories in order to facilitate quantitative analysis. Although neo-essentialists typically acknowledge that two types of culture (e.g., collectivism and individualism) exist in varying degrees in all nation states, specific countries are often referred to as individualist or collectivist cultures (Holliday, 2011). It is generally perceived that Latin Americans, Southern and Eastern Europeans, East and South Asians, and Africans are collectivist countries. In terms of population distribution, there is great deviation. The world consists of a majority of collectivists and a minority of individualists. For example, BRICS countries that contain 40% of the world’s population are collectivist countries. The Asian continent alone holds more than 60% of the world’s population, and again Asians are regarded as collectivists. Another problematic Western-centered aspect of this dichotomy is that, in spite of claimed neutrality, negative characteristics such as being closed to new experience, circular logical development, and conservatism are cited as attributes of collectivist cultures (Kim, 2005). Moreover, an individualist/collectivist country list and a colonizing/colonized list are symmetric. Thus, a neo-essentialist approach to culture seems to place individualist countries in the center and collectivists on the periphery. Likewise, in the majority of past studies on lying behavior, Asia has been treated as a monolithic periphery. Recognition of the limitation of a simplistic cultural dichotomy makes cultural boundaries blurred and negotiable (Holliday, 2011). It is critical to view culture as complex, multidimensional, and dynamic rather than applying such a simplistic dichotomy. An interesting attempt to investigate the effects of multilayered cultural differences was made by Seiter, Bruschke, and Bai (2002). If the perceiver can infer the underlying motivation of the lie-teller, it is more likely that deception as a social strategy will be accepted. Seiter et al. studied the relation between culture and the acceptability of deception in order to explore deceiver-deceived relationships. They developed a survey and administered it to American and Chinese students. It was interesting that they found different motivations more and less acceptable across different relationships. The findings denied that culture is a strong determining factor of deception acceptability and showed rather that specific types of deception are related to acceptance. They suggested the importance of contextual factors such as communicator’s motives and deceiver-deceived positionings. They argued a need for a nuanced role to be given to culture in future theorizing.

Bond and Atoum (2000) have examined two different types of “cultures,” nation-state cultures and differences in socioeconomic status, in their study of lie detection. They compared Jordanians, Americans, and Indians. They also paid attention to various levels of socioeconomic status between Jordanian and American university students and illiterate Indian workers. The results showed evidence of equally accurate lie detection across cultures. Whether or not they shared a common language was not a determining factor. They detected lies told to them by referring only to audiovisual clues. Furthermore, Bond and Atoum point out certain biases in international judgment. Often people regard foreigners with suspicion and mistrust (see also Smith & Bond, 1994). Imagining that ethnocentric stereotypes could impel people to judge foreigners as deceptive, their finding that people perceive foreigners as more truthful than compatriots seemed counterintuitive. Instead, they perceive Indians speaking in an unfamiliar language as more deceptive than those who are speaking in a shared language. The poorly educated often attribute their failure to their own ignorance when there is an inability to converse in a shared language. In sum, Bond and Atoum’s study suggests that researchers need to go beyond conventional conceptions of culture and explore an alternative way to investigate culture and lying behavior.

Methodology

This study frames data naturally occurring in business discourse that consists of multilayered elements, including doing, believing, valuing, and speaking in business interaction (see Gee, 1996). The data were recorded in an intra-Asian business setting in which multiple Asian discourses were negotiated. The data sets were supplemented with interviews with the participants. By examining the lying behavior in such interaction, this study aims to redefine intercultural business communication from an Asian perspective. Specifically, this study analyzes interaction between Indian and Japanese business practitioners.

The research to date suggests that the assumption that individuals belonging to particular cultural and geographical groups will behave in certain ways in terms of telling, detecting, and accepting lies is indeed problematic. Choosing such an approach to communicative behavior, researchers might well impose their own biased views on the data (Nishizaka, 1995). Inspired by studies in the field of business discourse, I propose that lying behavior needs to be seen as a situated practice. One’s judgment as to whether or not to conceal truth and candid opinions may frequently be tailored to the context and to identity built on situational interculturalities. In addition, judgment may be constrained by use of the language chosen for intercultural communication—in this case English was used as lingua franca.

In the present study, I will focus on the participants’ identities and examine how they perceive and treat interculturalities. Nair-Venugopal (2009) uses plural interculturalities to refer to the ways in which identity constructions of personhood and nationhood are produced in local contexts of interaction. She presents multiple data to support her argument of interculturalities as identity construction. I use the notion of interculturalities as identity constructions in examining the data naturally occurring between Asian business practitioners.

Another framework to analyze the data is the notion of English as lingua franca (ELF). Linguistic constraints and identity as language users were a neglected part of past research on lying and culture. When people from different linguistic backgrounds interact, the language chosen for communication can affect speakers’ communication behavior. Firth (2009) revised the traditional view of a “command of English” competency by analyzing linguistic, discursive, and interactional factors in ELF communication. He contends that the competencies of ELF speakers could be identified in forms of discourse rather than in language itself. The notion of discursive competencies is useful in unraveling the motivations underlying the business interactions of speakers of other languages. The findings from my studies investigating ELF usage in meetings involving Asians, Europeans, and Americans (Tanaka, 2008, 2009) support Firth’s argument. I identified discursive strategies such as back channeling and the co-construction of messages used by central participants in meetings. The data showed that nonnative English speakers with much experience had developed competencies that potentially “entail monitoring each other’s language proficiency to determine the appropriate grammar, phonology, pace of delivery, lexical range, and pragmatic conventions” (Firth, 2009, p. 162). The data from my studies suggest that entailment does not require complete mastery of grammar and vocabulary but rather a mastery of strategies that ELF participants activate to negotiate their mutual understanding. Such strategies could indeed be situational and worthy of further exploration in the data that involves lying behavior.

Using the frameworks of interculturalities and ELF, I will investigate three pieces of naturally occurring business interaction data recorded in India (53 minutes and 49 seconds in total) and post interviews with the participants. As the fact that most studies discussed earlier used questionnaires or simulation for data collection suggests, researchers’ accessibility to naturally occurring data that includes lying behavior is limited. It is even more difficult to capture such data in a business setting. Nevertheless, the present study aimed to collect real life data. Naturally occurring conversation in addition to the feelings and factual data collected through interviews were used for analysis. I believe the reality of lying behavior can only be explored by examining real life data. The participants are the following:

I asked Mayumi and Mayumi’s son who traveled with Mayumi to record the conversation. In order to capture the participants’ feelings and personal thoughts, interviews with Mayumi and Romy are also analyzed. Mayumi was interviewed; Romy was also interviewed by e-mail after their meeting in India. To ensure the validity of the research findings, I repeatedly returned to the participants and shared my analysis in participants’ debriefing sessions.

Analysis

Both Indian and Japanese participants claimed that their business partners lied. The interview data demonstrate that lying behavior is situated in the locally emerging business discourse in which participants’ concerns for politeness, frustration triggered by their use of ELF, and fears of losing business opportunities interplay. First, Mayumi’s interview data suggest that trust management strategies were not shared by the speakers. Rather, the trust management strategy that Mayumi expected was different from the strategy Romy employed. Romy emphasized his capabilities and strengths to impress his potential business partner, Mayumi, in order to develop a relationship of trust with his business partner. Romy’s emphasis on his capability, which Babar et al. (2007) found to be of a specific value in developing trust among their Asian participants, was rather negatively evaluated by Mayumi. For Mayumi, Romy’s strong emphasis on his capability made her think that Romy was insincere, that he hid his weakness and mentioned only his strengths. His strong sell put her off. Urikomi ga hageshii kanji. Anmari soo yuu koto iwareru to nan ka ii kimochi shinai [I feel that he sells himself too hard. I don’t feel good when he talks too much about it] (Mayumi, Interview data).

In her business in Japan, her partners often humbly downgraded themselves, in a way similar to Takenaka’s behavior presented at the beginning of this article. This is a strategy used to increase credibility by emphasizing the speaker’s honesty. The assumption is that showing one’s weakness ensures the interlocutor’s honesty and trustworthiness. Mayumi mentioned that this initial impression might have triggered her suspicion about Romy’s credibility.

Further interviews with Mayumi and Romy revealed that Romy’s habitual tardiness also frustrated Mayumi. Moo sono mae kara nankai mo chikoku shite kite okotteta koto wa shitte ita to omou [before that (the moment of the lying behavior), he was late many times and he knew that I was upset about it] (Mayumi, Interview). “I told Balaji (a local small business owner), never be late when you meet with Mayumi san. She is strict about time” (Romy, E-mail data).

These situational factors could have foregrounded Romy’s lie in the data. The following two excerpts are from the recorded conversation between Mayumi, Romy, and Higashi. Mayumi and Romy were having a meeting in Higashi’s office in the local town. Romy told Mayumi to meet in front of Higashi’s office at 4 p.m. Before the scheduled meeting, Mayumi was working in a local printing workshop with her friend Haru. Mayumi left the workshop and arrived at Higashi’s office at a few minutes to 4 o’clock. The office was locked and Romy did not show up. Machi naka no chotto kowaina tte ommotta. Zen zen shiranai basho ni pon tte tatte ta. Soko de 30 pun tatte ta [I was downtown, and it was a little scary. A totally unfamiliar place, and I was all alone. I stood there for 30 minutes]. Romy was late again. Thirty minutes later, Romy showed up and explained that he was with Higashi at their friend’s house. He handed food to Mayumi, and the following conversation took place.

In Utterance 6, Romy explained that his friend had invited Mayumi, Higasi, Romy, and Haru to his house. Because neither Mayumi nor Haru was available, Romy thought they should visit Romy’s friend with Higashi. Romy neither apologized nor showed empathy for Mayumi’s feeling. Mayumi told Romy that she had been waiting for 30 minutes. Romy insisted that their meeting was for 4.30, and that he did not know that Mayumi was coming at 4.00. But while Romy was saying this, Higashi was simultaneously talking to Mayumi in a low voice in Japanese. He was telling Mayumi that Romy was lying, saying that Romy knew that Mayumi was coming at 4.00.

The italicized line is the lie that Mayumi pointed out. Mayumi judged the italicized part was a lie for two reasons. First, Higashi said it was a lie. Second, Romy’s tone of voice sounded like he was trying hard to offer excuses. According to Higashi, who stayed with Romy all afternoon, what Romy said included lies. Higashi also advised Mayumi to accept this false statement in order to maintain a good human relationship. Higashi san wa tomodachi ni shoutai sareta tte iu no wa uso datte. Demo uso datte wakatte itemo iiwake wo shinjita koto ni surubeki da tte. Sore ga indo jin no yarikata tte [Higashi san told me that the story about his friend’s invitation was not true. Even so, we should pretend to believe his excuse. He said this was the Indian way] (Mayumi, Interview). In other words, Higashi’s advice was to accept Romy’s deception to facilitate their business. Higashi emphasized “the Indian way.” It is interesting that essentializing intercultural communication is part of what the participants themselves do. Mayumi also mentioned that it was necessary for Romy to tell a lie at that particular moment. Romy knew that his credibility was at risk because of his repeated tardiness before this incident. He should not have been late for this particular meeting and felt the need to coin a good reason.

Interestingly, further analysis of the data revealed that Mayumi was not the only victim of lying behavior. Romy also claimed that he suffered from Japanese visitors’ lies. Previous to this incident, Higashi had organized a tour consisting of a group of potential business partners and small business owners, where Romy acted as a liaison between local business people and these Japanese guests. When they left, they expressed great appreciation to Romy for his service; but later Romy came to know through Higashi that people had complained about the quality of their accommodations and disorganization in the meetings that Romy had prepared for them.

Nanka Romi wa okotteta mitai. Nippon jin wa kaeru wakareru toki ni wa arigatoo tte kansha shiteita noni. Nippon ni modottara Romi no koto monku itte ta tte. Mou shinji rare nai tte. [Romy was angry because his Japanese guests thanked him before going home; but once they returned to Japan, they complained about Romy(’s service). He said he could not trust them anymore]. (Mayumi, Interview)

Such conflict avoidance is commonly seen in Japanese business settings. Research on Japanese business discourse pointed out that people avoid direct confrontation using various strategies (see Fujio & Tanaka, 2012; Kondo, 2007; Tanaka, 2011). However, for Romy what they told Romy at the airport was not true, and their behavior was insincere.

The data demonstrate the participants’ plural interculturalities in action. By acknowledging the differences in their time orientation, Romy’s intercultural identity was formed so as to develop a trustful relationship with his potential business partner, Mayumi. He realized he needed to adjust his time orientation to Mayumi’s. This was the reason why he cautioned his friend, Balaji, not to be late for the meeting with Mayumi. On the other hand, his local bonding with his friends made him stay at their house longer than he planned, which caused his late arrival at the meeting place with Mayumi. My follow-up e-mail interview with Romy did not successfully capture whether or not his telling a falsehood was due to an unethical choice or to his local specific assumptions about being in a nonwarranting context. The great challenge for rationalizing and explaining this complex identity struggle could have motivated him to lie. Meanwhile, Mayumi had also developed her interculturalities on this trip. Mayumi had been deceived by local people in other cities in India. She admitted that she had a certain prejudice about Indians. She acted Chuui shite tsukiau kanji [being careful (not to be a victim of deception) when interacting with them]. At the same time, she perceived herself as an international business practitioner and tried to be unbiased; yet she could not help developing a stereotyped image of Indians. She said, Romy ga uso tsuita no dakedo, Indo jin wa uso tsuku to omocchau. Hanashi kata toka hatsuon toka [I know it was Romy who told me a lie, but I cannot help thinking all Indians tell lies. Because of their way of talking and their accents]. The interview data show that Mayumi’s interculturalities (Nair-Venugopal, 2009) entered into her struggles.

Camden et al. (1984) note that although white lies are both a fact of life and a stratagem in tactfulness, they are only superficial; the ultimately tactful remark is one in which truth is communicated in such a way as to minimize the receiver’s offense. From an ELF perspective, tactful truthfulness presents a greater encoding challenge. This simply means that in intercultural communication where English is used as lingua franca, white lies tend to be employed as an easy conflict-avoidance strategy; that employing tactful honesty requires a higher degree of linguistic and communicative competence. Therefore, the language in which they chose to communicate, ELF, was a situational factor in this lying behavior. Lying is arguably one of the strategies that ELF entails; but it needs to be handled with care because of its situatedness. The data demonstrated that while meaning was jointly created as a result of linguistically and pragmatically strategic interaction, different evaluations of the assumed function of lying impeded the development of a relationship of trust.

Conclusion

The analysis above described that the participants sought to establish a mutually beneficial relationship to facilitate cooperation in a joint commercial activity. Special attention was paid to lies told and detected by the interlocutors. The analysis illustrated how Indian and Japanese speakers of ELF tried to co-construct meaning and how they dealt with issues emerging from differences in taken-for-granted business practices, language proficiency, and situated identities in behaviors marked with a certain degree of deception.

While this study emphasizes situated discourse and identity as critical factors affecting intercultural business communication within real life data, it implies further challenges and insights in investigating lying behavior and deception in intercultural business discourse. First, proving someone’s statement to be a lie in naturally occurring data presents great difficulty. For example, by examining various contextual and linguistic data, I assumed what Romy said was a lie. Romy implicitly confessed that he manipulated the facts, and Mayumi believed it was a lie. One of the reasons for Mayumi’s judgment is the testimony of Higashi. However, one could even suspect that Higashi, feeling that Romy had lied, might also have lied.

In this study, in spite of the fact that all the interactional data were collected in India, it is apparent that more interview data were collected in Japan than in India because of the geographical constraints. This constraint compelled me to refer more to what Japanese participants said. Symmetrical data collection would be necessary in future research to interpret intercultural interaction. Second, the study showed the complex relationships in locally fabricated business discourse where people behave in a taken-for-granted way of talking, behaving, valuing, and using strategies. It shows how participant’s situational identities may be constructed throughout intercultural business negotiations. Furthermore, the data suggest that interactions in Asian business discourses need to be discussed in their plurality. Finally, the analysis showed that the role ELF plays in intra-Asian intercultural communication provides an additional perspective in observing lying phenomena. The data showed that ELF could also entail an approximation of facts that could be interpreted as deceptive messages. In addition, a certain type of accent, phraseology, and way of talking can give the listener a certain attitude toward the speaker.

Examining lying behavior from a business discourse point of view enables a more profound understanding of the interplay of discourse(s), language, and business practices. Additionally, it illustrates the plurality of Asian business discourses and of actors’ interculturalities. Future research on lying behavior in Asian business discourse(s) should not neglect these multifaceted elements underlying naturally occurring data.