In the fall of 1987 and early spring of 1988, deception scholar Steven McCornack - then a doctoral student at the University of Illinois - collected data for his dissertation.
Fully expecting to be able to code his data in terms of "truth" versus "falsity," McCornack was stunned to observe that the messages that had been generated defied such a dichotomy.
Reanalyzing his data from a four-dimensional Gricean perspective (see below), McCornack found an almost perfect goodness-of-fit, and authored a series of conference papers explicating his analysis.
The most influential of these, in shaping McCornack's thinking, was a study by Turner, Edgley, and Olmstead examining information control during important conversations.
[3] Turner et al. had participants record an important conversation, and then self-analyze how many of their utterances were completely honest, versus those that controlled information in significant ways.
They observed several forms of information control, and described them in terms of categories, including "lies", "exaggerations", "half-truths", "secrets", and "diversionary responses".
In 1984, Hopper and Bell[4] introduced a typology of deceptive types using English terms, including "fictions", "playings", "lies", "crimes", "masks", and "unlies".
In 1986, Metts and Chronis[5] posited deception as something that arises when communicators are faced with complicated contexts involving multiple and competing goals.
Grice framed this as a cooperative principle; namely, "make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged".
[10] Two substantial criticisms have been levelled at IMT: In 2014, McCornack, along with colleague Kelly Morrison and several of their graduate students (including Jihyun Paik and Xun Zhu) published Information Manipulation Theory 2.
The result is that people rarely produce "lies" in conversation; but instead routinely integrate small bits of false information into otherwise truthful discourse streams while speaking.