No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
The sound of (in)sincerity
Abstract
In social life, humans do not always communicate their sincere feelings, and speakers often tell ‘prosocial lies’ to prevent others from being hurt by negative truths. Data illuminating how a speaker's voice carries sincere or insincere attitudes in speech, and how social context shapes the expression and perception of (in)sincere utterances, are scarce. Here, we studied the communication of social, other-oriented lies occurring in short dialogues. We recorded paired questions (So, what do you think of my new hairdo?) and responses (I think it looks really amazing!) using a paradigm that elicited compliments which reflected the true positive opinion of the speaker (sincere) or were meant to hide their negative opinion (insincere/prosocial lie). These Question–Response pairs were then presented to 30 listeners, who rated the sincerity of the person uttering the compliment on a 5-point scale. Results showed that participants could successfully differentiate sincere compliments from prosocial lies based largely on vocal speech cues. Moreover, sincerity impressions were biased by how the preceding question was phrased (confident or uncertain). Acoustic analyses on a subset of utterances that promoted strong impressions of sincerity versus insincerity revealed that compliments perceived as being sincere were spoken faster and began with a higher pitch than those that sounded insincere, while compliments rated as insincere tended to get louder as the utterance unfolded. These data supply new evidence of the importance of vocal cues in evaluating sincerity, while emphasizing that motivations of both the speaker and hearer contribute to impressions of speaker sincerity.
... Thus, prosodic cues may affect the assessments of speakers' sincerity. Research has shown, for example, that turns that exhibit lower levels of loudness and faster tempo and begin with a higher pitch tend to be rated as sincere, whereas compliments that get louder tend to be rated as insincere (Fish et al., 2017). ...
... In the unproblematic apology sequences, the pupils tended to convey (a) a complementary pitch pattern, as the first pair part anteeks ("I apologize") was ascending and the second pair part saat anteeks ("apology accepted") was descending, (b) matching of low speech loudness, employing local similarity, and (c) rhythmic alignment, establishing isochrony. As sincerity can often be inferred from prosodic cues such as lower loudness (see Fish et al., 2017), pupils' prosodic design may be seen to contribute to the legitimacy of the apology sequence. Then again, isochrony may display "more-thannormal involvement" and an emphatic speech style (see Selting, 1994Selting, , 1996. ...
... Thus, prosodic cues may affect the assessments of speakers' sincerity. Research has shown, for example, that turns that exhibit lower levels of loudness and faster tempo and begin with a higher pitch tend to be rated as sincere, whereas compliments that get louder tend to be rated as insincere (Fish et al., 2017). ...
... In the unproblematic apology sequences, the pupils tended to convey (a) a complementary pitch pattern, as the first pair part anteeks ("I apologize") was ascending and the second pair part saat anteeks ("apology accepted") was descending, (b) matching of low speech loudness, employing local similarity, and (c) rhythmic alignment, establishing isochrony. As sincerity can often be inferred from prosodic cues such as lower loudness (see Fish et al., 2017), pupils' prosodic design may be seen to contribute to the legitimacy of the apology sequence. Then again, isochrony may display "more-thannormal involvement" and an emphatic speech style (see Selting, 1994Selting, , 1996. ...
... Despite the rich information they provide, earnings calls remain relatively underexplored, particularly from the perspective of acoustics and speech. Audio features are strongly correlated to the verbal message said by a CEO and are indicative of the speaker's emotional and affective state [4,5]. Vocal cues and their interplay with text can help better analyze the impact earnings calls may have on financial markets. ...
... Motivation: Driven by extensive studies [4,5] on the correlation of the psychological state of a speaker with different acoustic features, we extend the feature sets of previous works [3,9]. These features include 11 point Amplitude Perturbation Quotient (APQ 11) Shimmer and DDA Shimmer, which are linked to stress and anxiety [22,23]. ...
... If anything, speech prosody is thought to carry more reliable markers of deception than other behaviors, such as gaze aversion 2,[39][40][41] . Similarly to doubt, pitch tends to increase 39,41 during lies, and speech rate to decrease, although this latter relationship is less reliable 2,42,43 . ...
... In summary, voices were perceived to be unreliable (i.e., doubtful or lying) if they had rising intonation, less intensity at the beginning of each syllable, and slower speech rate. These results-obtained through a data-driven method, and thus not subject to biases stemming from experimenters' expectations and perception of the stimuli-are in line with previous observations examining honest and certain prosodies separately with actorproduced expressions concerning intonation 14,39,42 . By contrast, they suggest that other aspects, in particular mean pitch, are not specifically discriminative when prosodic dimensions are also dynamically manipulated, which might explain previous discrepancies in the literature 14,16 . ...
The success of human cooperation crucially depends on mechanisms enabling individuals to detect unreliability in their conspecifics. Yet, how such epistemic vigilance is achieved from naturalistic sensory inputs remains unclear. Here we show that listeners’ perceptions of the certainty and honesty of other speakers from their speech are based on a common prosodic signature. Using a data-driven method, we separately decode the prosodic features driving listeners’ perceptions of a speaker’s certainty and honesty across pitch, duration and loudness. We find that these two kinds of judgments rely on a common prosodic signature that is perceived independently from individuals’ conceptual knowledge and native language. Finally, we show that listeners extract this prosodic signature automatically, and that this impacts the way they memorize spoken words. These findings shed light on a unique auditory adaptation that enables human listeners to quickly detect and react to unreliability during linguistic interactions.
... Bias in Financial Audio Data : Financial audio features can indicate a speaker's emotional and psychological state (Fish et al., 2017). Previous research has demonstrated that audio features, such as pitch and intensity, differ significantly across genders (Burris et al., 2014). ...
Stock volatility prediction is an important task in the financial industry. Recent advancements in multimodal methodologies, which integrate both textual and auditory data, have demonstrated significant improvements in this domain, such as earnings calls (Earnings calls are public available and often involve the management team of a public company and interested parties to discuss the company's earnings). However, these multimodal methods have faced two drawbacks. First, they often fail to yield reliable models and overfit the data due to their absorption of stochastic information from the stock market. Moreover, using multimodal models to predict stock volatility suffers from gender bias and lacks an efficient way to eliminate such bias. To address these aforementioned problems, we use adversarial training to generate perturbations that simulate the inherent stochasticity and bias, by creating areas resistant to random information around the input space to improve model robustness and fairness. Our comprehensive experiments on two real-world financial audio datasets reveal that this method exceeds the performance of current state-of-the-art solution. This confirms the value of adversarial training in reducing stochasticity and bias for stock volatility prediction tasks.
... Bias in Financial Audio Data : Financial audio features can indicate a speaker's emotional and psychological state (Fish et al., 2017). Previous research has demonstrated that audio features, such as pitch and intensity, differ significantly across genders (Burris et al., 2014). ...
... As analyzed in Section 4.1 of the speech acts of meishi, it is usually adopted by Chinese women to implicitly express negative feelings and avoid self-disclosure of their real intention. Their euphemistically implicit way of communicating with their male partners not only meets the accepted and established gender expectation of Confucian gentlewomen (Butler 1993;Rosenlee 2006), but also connotates a target test for their partners' sincerity (Fish, Rothermich & Pell 2017), as shown in Post 4. ...
This study explores the major types and main interpersonal functions of meishi (没事, literally ‘I'm fine’) by Chinese females in romantic conversation through analyzing collected posts from Sina Microblog. Results show that meishi by Chinese females in the context of romantic relationships primarily manifests the attributes of “expressive” and “assertive” (“insincere assertive” in particular), with specific functions to express comfort (expressive), to implicitly express negative feelings (expressive), and to avoid self-disclosure of negative emotion (insincere assertive). We hold that Chinese women's use of meishi is not only a realization of gendered discourse but also has a practical function as it detects the sincerity and attentiveness of their male counterparts.
... Sen sijaan voimakkuuden todellisista muutoksista valheellisessa puheessa löytyi muutamia ristiriitaisia tuloksia. Puhevoimakkuuden vaihteluvälin on todettu olevan valheellisessa puheessa laajempi (Rockwell, Buller & Burgoon., 2009) ja valehtelijan on havaittu puhuvan tavallista voimakkaammalla äänellä (Fish, Rothermich & Pell, 2017;Levitan, Maredia & Hirschberg, 2018). Osassa tutkimuksista ei kuitenkaan ole todettu vastaavia muutoksia (Burgoon ym., 2016;DePaulo ym., 2003). ...
Kansainvälisen stereotyyppisen mielikuvan mukaan valheen voi tunnistaa katseen välttelystä, hermostuneisuudesta ja kehon liikkeistä. Ihmiset uskovat tunnistavansa valheen erityisesti nonverbaaleista merkeistä, vaikka verbaalisten merkkien on todettu olevan luotettavampia valheentunnistuksessa. Viranomaistahoilla on myös todettu olevan stereotyyppisiä uskomuksia valheen merkeistä. Uskomuksissa on kuitenkin havaittu kulttuurisia variaatioita. Tutkimuksessa selvitettiin mistä verbaaleista ja nonverbaaleista merkeistä suomalaiset viranomaiset ja maallikot uskovat tunnistavansa valheen. Lisäksi selvitettiin mistä suomalaiset uskovat jäävänsä itse kiinni valehdellessaan ja miten nämä uskomukset vertautuvat kansainvälisiin tutkimustuloksiin. Verkkokyselylomakkeelle kerättiin vastauksia suomea äidinkielenään puhuvilta poliiseilta, hätäkeskuspäivystäjiltä ja maallikoilta (N = 154). Suomalaiset uskoivat kansainvälisen stereotypian mukaisesti tunnistavansa valheen katseen välttelystä ja hermostuneisuudesta. Myös puheen ristiriitaisuuksien, korjailujen ja välttelevyyden uskottiin olevan merkkejä valehtelusta. Viranomaiset uskoivat maallikoiden tapaan tunnistavansa valheen katseen välttelystä, ja aiempi tietämys valheentunnistamisesta ei vaikuttanut uskomuksiin. Suomalaisilla viranomaisilla oli samantapaisia ja virheellisiä uskomuksia valheen paljastavista merkeistä kuin maallikoilla. Suomalaisten käsitykset eivät juurikaan poikkea kansainvälisistä stereotypioista.
... As analyzed in Section 4.1 of the speech acts of meishi, it is usually adopted by Chinese women to implicitly express negative feelings and avoid self-disclosure of their real intention. Their euphemistically implicit way of communicating with their male partners not only meets the accepted and established gender expectation of Confucian gentlewomen (Butler 1993;Rosenlee 2006), but also connotates a target test for their partners' sincerity (Fish, Rothermich & Pell 2017), as shown in Post 4. ...
This study aims to explore the major types and main interpersonal functions of meishi (没事, literally “I’m fine”) by Chinese females in romantic conversation through analyzing collected posts from Sina Microblog. Results show that meishi by Chinese females in the context of romantic relationships primarily manifests the attributes of “expressive” and “assertive” (“insincere assertive” in particular), with specific functions to express comfort (expressive); to implicitly express negative feelings (expressive); and to avoid self-disclosure of negative emotion (insincere assertive). We hold that Chinese women’s use of meishi is not only a matter of gendered discourse but also has a practical function as it detects the sincerity and attentiveness of their male counterparts.
... In reading the speech signals for emotional information, we draw on models of interpretation from various sources (Scherer 2003, Jiang and Pell 2001, Ayadi et al. 2011, Fish et al. 2017, inter alia) as well as interpretations provided to us by translators and native speakers. First, it is important to note that the speech signal interpretations (the emotional analyses) are layered on top of the textual analyses. ...
This paper explores the public sentiment of Bangladeshi residents concerning the lockdowns imposed by the Bangladeshi government in 2021 in response to COVID-19. Through open-ended question design and analyses of natural language using NLP and sociolinguistic techniques, we show detailed, nuanced sentiments as well as common themes and discussions these sentiments are seated. Additionally, using a range of discursive analytical measures, we explore the interactions between enumerators and participants in live survey conditions, providing alternative methods to and potential field guidance for enumerator survey methods.
... Vocal pitch manipulations consisted of global increases in vocal pitch in line with predictions from the arousal theory of deception. However, it remains possible that more complex changes in pitch contour not tested here may yet prove to be informative (Fish et al., 2017). Finally, no experimental stimulus contained a genuine lie, and as such, stimulus manipulation itself may have reduced the naturalness of speech tokens. ...
Purpose
Communication is as much persuasion as it is the transfer of information. This creates a tension between the interests of the speaker and those of the listener, as dishonest speakers naturally attempt to hide deceptive speech and listeners are faced with the challenge of sorting truths from lies. Listeners with hearing impairment in particular may have differing levels of access to the acoustical cues that give away deceptive speech. A greater tendency toward speech pauses has been hypothesized to result from the cognitive demands of lying convincingly. Higher vocal pitch has also been hypothesized to mark the increased anxiety of a dishonest speaker.
Method
Listeners with or without hearing impairments heard short utterances from natural conversations, some of which had been digitally manipulated to contain either increased pausing or raised vocal pitch. Listeners were asked to guess whether each statement was a lie in a two-alternative forced-choice task. Participants were also asked explicitly which cues they believed had influenced their decisions.
Results
Statements were more likely to be perceived as a lie when they contained pauses, but not when vocal pitch was raised. This pattern held regardless of hearing ability. In contrast, both groups of listeners self-reported using vocal pitch cues to identify deceptive statements, though at lower rates than pauses.
Conclusions
Listeners may have only partial awareness of the cues that influence their impression of dishonesty. Listeners with hearing impairment may place greater weight on acoustical cues according to the differing degrees of access provided by hearing aids.
Supplemental Material
https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.24052446
... Focusing on the social functions of irony, Dews & Winner (1995) proposed the Tinge hypothesis, claiming that irony attenuates the perceived affective attitude of the speaker: ironic criticisms mute the aggressiveness of literal criticisms and ironic compliments are veined with some meanness compared to literal compliments. Since speakers' attitudes can be recognized through their facial expressions (see Keltner et al., 2003 for a review) and their tone of voice (Truesdale & Pell, 2018;Fish, Rothermich & Pell, 2017), it is highly relevant to verify if and how the expression of the speakers' negative or positive attitude through their modulation of speech and facial expressions interacts with the recognition of their sincere or ironic intent. We thus designed a series of experiments that aimed at assessing the role of visual cues in the detection of ironic remarks, also in comparison to the contribution of auditory information, testing sincere and ironic utterances of sentences with positive and negative content. ...
We present four studies that aimed at investigating the contribution of purely visual cues for the detection of irony. In Study 1-3, we presented, without any preceding context, remarks (criticisms and compliments) uttered with sincere and with ironic intent, in three modalities: in the V modality participants could read the comment and see speakers' facial expressions and bodily movements; in the A modality they could only hear the audio tracks of the uttered sentences; in the VA modality, both visual and auditory information were present. We found that purely visual cues were sufficient to discriminate the ironic intent of the speakers. In Study 4 we presented comments in the V modality, without showing the content of the remark: Accuracy in the detection of sarcasm dropped. We discuss that irony in Study 1-3 might have been recognized indirectly, by comparing the polarity of the remark with the polarity of the actors' attitude, and we interpret Study 4 data as casting some doubts on the idea that there exist visual cues that specifically convey the speaker's ironic intent.
... Audio features contextualize text and connotate speaker's emotional and psychological state (Fish et al., 2017;Jiang and Pell, 2017;Burgoon et al., 2015;Bachorowski, 1999). Hence, when used with textual features, audio features significantly determine the effect of earning calls on the stock market (Qin and Yang, 2019;Yang et al., 2020). ...
... While in everyday life, communicators' sincerity and truthfulness can be inferred from what they say (Rosenblum et al., 2020) and how they say it (Hornsey et al., 2020) the aforementioned scenario seems to suggest that it somehow also depends on when they say it. In the present study, we asked the question whether and why slower, slower responses can be perceived as less sincere. 1 Much like the loudness and pitch of people's response (Fish et al., 2017) and the genuineness of their smile (Bernstein et al., 2010), if response speed is indeed one of the many ubiquitous social cues that people base their inferences on, then it would be imperative to establish the nature of this phenomenon and its underlying mechanism. The reason for this is that this effect, if present, may manifest without people's awareness, and across many high stakes situations, such as those involving business deals and legal processes. ...
Evaluating other people's sincerity is a ubiquitous and important part of social interactions. Fourteen experiments (total N = 7,565; 10 preregistered; 11 in the main article, three in the online supplemental materials; with U.S. American and British members of the public, and French students) show that response speed is an important cue on which people base their sincerity inferences. Specifically, people systematically judged slower (vs. faster) responses as less sincere for a range of scenarios from trivial daily conversations to high stakes situations such as police interrogations. Our findings suggest that this is because slower responses are perceived to be the result of the responder suppressing automatic, truthful thoughts, and fabricating a novel answer. People also seem to have a rich lay theory of response speed, which takes into account a variety of situational factors. For instance, the effect of response delay on perceived sincerity is smaller if the response is socially undesirable, or if it can be attributed to mental effort. Finally, we showed that explicit instructions to ignore response speed can reduce the effect of response speed on judgments on sincerity. Our findings not only help ascertain the role of response speed in interpersonal inference making processes, but also carry important practical implication. In particular, the present study highlights the potential effects that may be observed in judicial settings, because the response speed of innocent suspects may mislead people to judge them as insincere and hence guilty. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
... Several reasons have been proposed to explain variation in reflected appraisals accuracy. First, social communication is diluted by norms of politeness and simple reluctance to give negative feedback; people are not always honest when telling others what they think of them (Fish et al., 2017). Thus, reflected appraisals are shaped by a set of cues that can often be incomplete or ambiguous, which can undermine individuals' accuracy in perceiving others' appraisals of them (Wallace & Tice, 2012). ...
This study analyzed adolescents’ self-representations construction process, relying on the Looking Glass Self Hypothesis (LGSH), within parent-child relationships – that is, the mediating role of mothers’ and fathers’ reflected appraisals (i.e., adolescents’ perceptions of their parents’ appraisals of them) in associations between parents’ actual appraisals and adolescents’ self-representations. Participants were 221 adolescents, 12-16 years old, and both their parents. The standard paradigm was used to measure the LGSH elements: self-representations were measured with the Self-Representation Questionnaire for Adolescents, which was reworded to measure parents’ actual and reflected appraisals. Structural equation modeling with bootstrap estimation supported the LGSH for all self-representation domains under analysis. Results are discussed considering the specificities of the adolescent-mother and adolescent-father relationships, and the different self-representation domains analized.
... Among these IFIDs, prosodic devices are less discussed in the literature and will be given more attention in this study. Prosodic features such as pitch, loudness, duration, and timing have been found to express speakers' intentions (Hellbernd & Sammler 2016), emotions (Pell et al. 2009), and sincerity (Fish et al. 2017) in perception experiments and acoustic analyses. The problem of these studies is that they rely heavily on the native speaker's intuition in recognizing these abstract senses, overlooking the interactional aspects of social actions. ...
In Mandarin conversation, utterances about future actions with severe consequences are observed to correlate with bigger promises, marked by devices indicating greater illocutionary force, as compared with those about actions with less serious consequences. Applying the principle of propor-tionality proposed by Goffman (1971), I argue that participants' design of promise is proportional to the severity of the action consequences, which is evaluated by the participants on a moment-by-moment basis. The ad hoc construction of promises shows that promising is a dynamic process, rather than a one-time action. The proportionality principle may also account for the differences between promises in institutional discourse and ordinary conversation.
... Much like the loudness and pitch of people's response (Fish et al., 2017) and the genuineness of their smile (Bernstein et al., 2010), if response speed is indeed one of the many ubiquitous social cues that people base their inferences on, then it would be imperative to establish the nature of this phenomenon and its underlying mechanism. The reason for this is that this effect, if present, may manifest without people's awareness, and across many high stakes situations, such as those involving business deals and legal processes. ...
Evaluating other people’s sincerity is a ubiquitous and important part of social interactions. Fourteen experiments (total N = 7565; ten preregistered; eleven in the main paper, three in the SOM; with U.S. American and British members of the public, and French students) show that response speed is an important cue on which people base their sincerity inferences. Specifically, people systematically judged slower (vs. faster) responses as less sincere for a range of scenarios from trivial daily conversations to high stakes situations such as police interrogations. Our findings suggest that this is because slower responses are perceived to be the result of the responder suppressing automatic, truthful thoughts, and fabricating a novel answer. People also seem to have a rich lay theory of response speed, which takes into account a variety of situational factors. For instance, the effect of response delay on perceived sincerity is smaller if the response is socially undesirable, or if it can be attributed to mental effort. Finally, we showed that explicit instructions to ignore response speed can reduce the effect of response speed on judgments on sincerity. Our findings not only help ascertain the role of response speed in interpersonal inference making processes, but also carry important practical implication. In particular, the present study highlights the potential effects that may be observed in judicial settings, since the response speed of innocent suspects may mislead people to judge them as insincere and hence guilty.
... Pitch, loudness, speed, duration, and stressed elements in speech can serve as distinctive prosodic features that alter the way we express things, adding information to our conversational behavior about our emotions and state of mind (Pell, 2001;Scherer & Bänziger, 2004). Research shows that prosody is also an important marker of attitudes or the interpersonal stance of the speaker in many situations (Caballero, Vergis, Jiang, & Pell, 2018;Fish, Rothermich, & Pell, 2017;Jiang & Pell, 2017;Truesdale & Pell, 2018). ...
In spoken discourse, understanding irony requires the apprehension of subtle cues, such as the speaker’s tone of voice (prosody), which often reveal the speaker’s affective stance toward the listener in the context of the utterance. To shed light on the interplay of linguistic content and prosody on impressions of spoken criticisms and compliments (both literal and ironic), 40 participants rated the friendliness of the speaker in three separate conditions of attentional focus (No focus, Prosody focus, and Content focus). When the linguistic content was positive (“You are such an awesome driver!”), the perceived critical or friendly stance of the speaker was influenced predominantly by prosody. However, when the linguistic content was negative (“You are such a lousy driver!”), the speaker was always perceived as less friendly, even for ironic compliments that were meant to be teasing (i.e., positive stance). Our results highlight important asymmetries in how listeners use prosody and attend to different speech-related channels to form impressions of interpersonal stance for ironic criticisms (e.g., sarcasm) versus ironic compliments (e.g., teasing).
... As noted, prosodic variations used to signal politeness may demonstrate similarities to those that signal affect more generally (Grice and Baumann, 2007), and cues referring to particular emotive devices may be important for communicating politeness more specifically (Arndt and Janney, 1985;Caffi and Janney, 1994). The acoustic variables we selected for the present research mainly reflect f0-related measures, speech rate and spectral quality, which have proved to be important for conveying discrete emotions (Banse and Scherer, 1996;Juslin and Laukka, 2003;Pell et al., 2009) as well as prosodic 'attitudes' and intention states of a more interpersonal nature (Fish et al., 2017;Jiang and Pell, 2017;Truesdale and Pell, 2018) (Mixdorff, Hönemann, Rilliard, Leed & Ma, 2017, Jiang & Pell, 2016. Given that the same cues we identified function in different ways to specify an array of meanings in speech communication, it may be said that voice information contributes to signaling politeness, although it may not be the case that there is a "prosody of politeness" per se (Arndt and Janney, 1985;Wichmann, 2000Wichmann, ,2002c.f. ...
Until recently, research on im/politeness has primarily focused on the role of linguistic strategies while neglecting the contributions of prosody and acoustic cues for communicating politeness. Here, we analyzed a large set of recordings — verbal requests spoken in a direct manner (Lend me a nickel), preceded by the word “Please” or in a conventionally-indirect manner (Can you) — which were known to convey polite or rude impressions on the listener. The pragmatic imposition of the request was also manipulated (Lend me a nickel vs. hundred). Fundamental frequency (f0: mean, range, contour shape), duration, and voice quality (harmonics-to-noise ratio) were measured over the whole utterance and for key constituents within the utterance. Differences in perceived politeness corresponded with systematic differences in continuous utterance measures as well as local acoustic adjustments, defined by both categorical and graded vocal contrasts. Compared to polite utterances, rude requests displayed a slower speech rate, lower pitch, and tended to fall in pitch (or rise less markedly in the context of yes-no questions). The high versus low imposition of a request separately influenced the acoustic structure of requests, with evidence of these effects right at utterance-onset. Results are consistent with theoretical proposals about how prosody functions to convey speaker politeness as one facet of emotive communication. It is suggested that while a specific “prosody of politeness” may not exist, prosodic cues routinely and potently interact with other sources of information to allow listeners to generate inferences about im/politeness.
... We included all global factors given that these measures were determined to be associated with vocal expression of different emotions or attitudes in acted speeches [4] [12][13][14][15], and had been demonstrated as critical cues to predict confidence and doubt in the native speaker [4]. The same feature sets were used for all models to enable comparisons of results across models. ...
The Cambridge Handbook of Irony and Thought offers the first comprehensive collection of chapters in multidisciplinary irony scholarship. These chapters explore the significance of irony, both verbal and situational, in language, thought, human action, and artistic expression. They cover five main themes: the scope of irony in human experience; irony's impact (both personal and in social life); irony in linguistic communication; irony and affect, and irony in expressive contexts. Contributions come from a wide range of academic disciplines, including psychology, linguistics, philosophy, literature, computer science, film and media studies, and music, making this a truly cross-disciplinary collection of benefit to a wide range of students and researchers.
This paper introduces a new perspective on analysing courtroom insincerity by focusing on questions asked by lawyers in the Malawi criminal justice system. The study aimed at examining the linguistic tools of tracing insincerity in lawyers’ questions; the varying degrees of insincerity in defence and prosecution lawyers and their rationale for making such choices. The study argues that courtroom setting is a war zone where different parties have divergent goals. Such encounters are much likely to yield higher chances of insincerity, which can be manifested in the questions lawyers ask. The analysis is based on data from four criminal cases, which were collected from the High Court of Malawi. My framework of analysing insincerity in questions examines the prescribed degrees of control that questions exert on the witnesses in relation to their productiveness. The findings indicate that, when examining witnesses, prosecutors exercise less insincerity while defence lawyers opt for questions with high insincerity. These imbalances in language use are enshrined in and supported by law in its statutes. The findings of this study have jurisprudential implications, especially in Africa which is internationally less represented in the studies of language and law.
White lies, lies that are beneficial to the addressee and uttered out of concern for them, are pervasive in daily life. This raises a prima facie question: if white lies are so common, are they still lies? I tackle this question from the perspective of speech act theory, using the case of white lies to shed light on the broader question of whether lying itself can be considered a type of speech act. Adopting Sbisà’s (Uptake and Conventionality in Illocution. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 5 33–52. Reprinted in Marina Sbisà (forthcoming), Essays on Speech Acts and Other Topics in Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) neo-Austinian approach that places the emphasis on the achievement of certain conventional effects, I claim that malicious lying cannot be a type of speech act. However, white lies are a type of speech act, a claim which finds support in three types of evidence: the conventionality of means by which white lies are performed, their online processing, and their acquisition. Moreover, the existence of a continuum between white (harmless) lies (which are a type of speech act) and malicious (harmful) lies (which are not) suggests that whether an utterance performs a certain type of speech act or not can be a matter of degree. In other words, the property itself of being a speech act of a certain kind, an utterance’s speech-act-hood, so to speak, may be graded. This is an interesting result, which applies to speech acts more generally, beyond lying.
The phenomenon of self-denigration is a typical example of politeness in Chinese culture. Despite the fact that this phenomenon has attracted much attention from scholars in previous studies, the issue of how to clarify self-denigration in relation to sincerity still remains very much an open question. Thus, the current study aims to revisit self-denigration from the perspective of sincerity. Based on data drawn from TV plays and structured interviews, it is found that sincere self-denigration is often perceived as a form of politeness. On the contrary, insincere self-denigration brings about an impolite evaluation. Thus, the study offers a new way of explaining self-denigration in terms of its politeness and communicative effects.
Interpreting other people's intentions during communication represents a remarkable challenge for children. Although many studies have examined children's understanding of, for example, sarcasm, less is known about their interpretation. Using realistic audiovisual scenes, we invited 124 children between 8 and 12 years old to watch video clips of young adults using different speaker intentions. After watching each video clip, children answered questions about the characters and their beliefs, and the perceived friendliness of the speaker. Children's responses reveal age and gender differences in the ability to interpret speaker belief and social intentions, especially for scenarios conveying teasing and prosocial lies. We found that the ability to infer speaker belief of prosocial lies and to interpret social intentions increases with age. Our results suggest that children at the age of 8 years already show adult-like abilities to understand literal statements, whereas the ability to infer specific social intentions, such as teasing and prosocial lies, is still developing between the age of 8 and 12 years. Moreover, girls performed better in classifying prosocial lies and sarcasm as insincere than boys. The outcomes expand our understanding of how children observe speaker intentions and suggest further research into the development of teasing and prosocial lie interpretation.
This piece was the first in history to posit the notion of "truth-bias," which has now become foundational within the field of deception. It also posits what has come to be known as The McCornack-Parks Model of Deception Detection; namely, that as relational intimacy increases, detection confidence increases, truth-bias increases, and detection accuracy decreases.
Listeners often encounter conflicting verbal and vocal cues about the speaker's feeling of knowing; these "mixed messages" can reflect online shifts in one's mental state as they utter a statement, or serve different social-pragmatic goals of the speaker. Using a cross-splicing paradigm, we investigated how conflicting cues about a speaker's feeling of (un)knowing change one's perception. Listeners rated the confidence of speakers of utterances containing an initial verbal phrase congruent or incongruent with vocal cues in a subsequent statement, while their brain potentials were tracked. Different forms of conflicts modulated the perceived confidence of the speaker, the extent to which was stronger for female listeners. A confident phrase followed by an unconfident voice enlarged an anteriorly maximized negativity for female listeners and late positivity for male listeners, suggesting that mental representations of another's feeling of knowing in face of this conflict were hampered by increased demands of integration for females and increased demands on updating for males. An unconfident phrase followed by a confident voice elicited a delayed sustained positivity (from 900 ms) in female participants only, suggesting females generated inferences to moderate the conflicting message about speaker knowledge. We highlight ways that verbal and vocal cues are real-time integrated to access a speaker's feeling of (un)knowing, while arguing that females are more sensitive to the social relevance of conflicting speaker cues. (PsycINFO Database Record
Indirect forms of speech, such as sarcasm, jocularity (joking), and ‘white lies’ told to spare another’s feelings, occur frequently in daily life and are a problem for many clinical populations. During social interactions, information about the literal or nonliteral meaning of a speaker unfolds simultaneously in several communication channels (e.g., linguistic, facial, vocal, and body cues); however, to date many studies have employed uni-modal stimuli, for example focusing only on the visual modality, limiting the generalizability of these results to everyday communication. Much of this research also neglects key factors for interpreting speaker intentions, such as verbal context and the relationship of social partners. Relational Inference in Social Communication (RISC) is a newly developed (English-language) database composed of short video vignettes depicting sincere, jocular, sarcastic, and white lie social exchanges between two people. Stimuli carefully manipulated the social relationship between communication partners (e.g., boss/employee, couple) and the availability of contextual cues (e.g. preceding conversations, physical objects) while controlling for major differences in the linguistic content of matched items. Here, we present initial perceptual validation data (N = 31) on a corpus of 920 items. Overall accuracy for identifying speaker intentions was above 80 % correct and our results show that both relationship type and verbal context influence the categorization of literal and nonliteral interactions, underscoring the importance of these factors in research on speaker intentions. We believe that RISC will prove highly constructive as a tool in future research on social cognition, inter-personal communication, and the interpretation of speaker intentions in both healthy adults and clinical populations.
In 2 diary studies, 77 undergraduates and 70 community members recorded their social interactions and lies for a week. Because lying violates the openness and authenticity that people value in their close relationships, we predicted (and found) that participants would tell fewer lies per social interaction to the people to whom they felt closer and would feel more uncomfortable when they did lie to those people. Because altruistic lies can communicate caring, we also predicted (and found) that relatively more of the lies told to best friends and friends would be altruistic than self-serving, whereas the reverse would be true of lies told to acquaintances and strangers. Also consistent with predictions, lies told to closer partners were more often discovered.
We propose a new functional-anatomical mapping of the N400 and the P600 to a minimal cortical network for language comprehension. Our work is an example of a recent research strategy in cognitive neuroscience, where researchers attempt to align data regarding the nature and time-course of cognitive processing (from ERPs) with data on the cortical organization underlying it (from fMRI). The success of this “alignment” approach critically depends on the functional interpretation of relevant ERP components. Models of language processing that have been proposed thus far do not agree on these interpretations, and present a variety of complicated functional architectures. We put forward a very basic functional-anatomical mapping based on the recently developed Retrieval-Integration account of language comprehension (Brouwer et al., 2012). In this mapping, the left posterior part of the Middle Temporal Gyrus (BA 21) serves as an epicenter (or hub) in a neurocognitive network for the retrieval of word meaning, the ease of which is reflected in N400 amplitude. The left Inferior Frontal Gyrus (BA 44/45/47), in turn, serves a network epicenter for the integration of this retrieved meaning with the word's preceding context, into a mental representation of what is being communicated; these semantic and pragmatic integrative processes are reflected in P600 amplitude. We propose that our mapping describes the core of the language comprehension network, a view that is parsimonious, has broad empirical coverage, and can serve as the starting point for a more focused investigation into the coupling of brain anatomy and electrophysiology.
Past research on verbal deception has found inconsistent patterns, possibly due to failure to consider the dynamic nature of interpersonal deception. The current investigation examined temporal changes and sequencing effects in truthful and deceptive responding on 23 linguistic measures. Interviewees responded to 12 questions during which they alternated between giving blocks of truthful and blocks of deceptive answers. Results showed significant variability in verbal behavior across the course of the interviewon virtually all measures. Deceptive responding differed from truthful responding depending on the truth-deception sequence and the phase of the interview. The truth-first order made it much easier for deceivers to approximate truthful discourse sooner. The existence of significant variability due to time and sequence has important implications for identifying reliable indicators of deception and for research paradigms used to investigate deceptive and truthful discourse.
This study explores individuals' reported frequency of lying to strangers and close friends as a function of (i) type of lie told (self-centered, other-oriented or altruistic) and (ii) attachment style in social relationships. One hundred university students (average age = 23.09, SD = 5.36) completed self-report questionnaires. The close friend could be either a best friend (N = 52) or a romantic partner (N = 48). Results revealed that frequency and nature of lies told to strangers differ from those told to close friends. Attachment-related anxiety was positively related to frequency of lying to strangers and best friends, while attachment avoidance primarily related to deception towards one's romantic partner. Results are discussed as contributing to understanding the use and function of deception in everyday life.
The role of social or communication skills in the ability to deceive was investigated. Thirty-eight student volunteers were administereda number of standardized social skill instruments. Subjects were then videotaped while giving short, persuasive messages. Messages were of three types: attitude-consistent (truthful), counterattitudinal (deceptive), and neutral. The videotaped messages were viewed by groups of judges who made ratings of the subject's believability for each message. Expressive and socially tactful subjects were more successful deceivers, whereas socially anxious subjects were less successful at the deception task. These results were attributed to an honest demeanor bias in the socially skilled subjects and a deceptive demeanor bias in the socially anxious subjects. Implications for future research on individual differences in deception skill were discussed.
Lying is a universal activity and the detection of lying a universal concern. Presently, there is great interest in determining objective measures of deception. The examination of speech, in particular, holds promise in this regard; yet, most of what we know about the relationship between speech and lying is based on the assessment of English speaking participants. Few studies have examined indicators of deception in languages other than English. The world’s languages differ in significant ways, and cross-linguistic studies of deceptive communications are a research imperative. Here we review some of these differences amongst the world’s languages, and provide an overview of a number of recent studies demonstrating that cross-linguistic research is a worthwhile endeavor. In addition, we report the results of an empirical investigation of pitch, response latency, and speech rate as cues to deception in Italian speech. True and false opinions were elicited in an audio-taped interview. A within-subjects analysis revealed no significant difference between the average pitch of the two conditions; however, speech rate was significantly slower, while response latency was longer, during deception compared with truth-telling. We explore the implications of these findings and propose directions for future research, with the aim of expanding the cross-linguistic branch of research on markers of deception.
This study examined the nature of deceptive vocal behavior in interactive situations. Data from an earlier study were used to conduct a detailed analysis of vocal features of deceptive speech. Vocal samples were analyzed perceptually and acoustically. Of three categories examined (time, frequency, and intensity), the time variables best discriminated between truthful and deceptive speakers, with deceivers exhibiting shorter message length, longer response latencies, slower tempo, and less fluency than truthtellers. Deceivers also evidenced increased intensity range, increased pitch variance, and less pleasant vocal quality than truthtellers.
Asked 52 male and female undergraduates whether they would communicate evaluations of others under various hypothetical circumstances. Results were verified in a 2nd study in which 112 female Ss indicated how much they had actually discussed traits they saw in others. Evaluations were communicated freely among most friends, but both positive and negative information tended to be withheld from the person being evaluated. Positive evaluations circulated more freely than negative, and more was communicated to closer friends. (21 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Lies are considered bad, immoral, and reprehensible. Yet there is considerable evidence that prevarication is a ubiquitous feature of human social interaction. Psychologists, as well as others in society, often use deceptive techniques for the "social good," and there are a number of conditions under which the "truth" cannot be discerned. This article argues that a psychology of lying needs to be developed that is focused on understanding how actors and observers come to view the world and particular situations rather than on the detection and punishment of lying. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The current work intended to enhance our knowledge of changes or lack of changes in the speech signal when people were being deceptive. In particular, the study attempted to investigate the appropriateness of using speech cues in detecting deception. Truthful, deceptive and control speech were elicited from ten speakers in an interview setting. The data were subjected to acoustic analysis and results are presented on a range of speech parameters including fundamental frequency (f(0)), overall amplitude and mean vowel formants F(1), F(2) and F(3). A significant correlation could not be established between deceptiveness/truthfulness and any of the acoustic features examined. Directions for future work are highlighted.
This meta-analysis provides a quantitative synthesis of paraverbal indicators of deception as a function of different moderator variables. Of nine different speech behaviours analysed only two were reliably associated with deception in the weighted, and four in the analysis unweighted by sample size. Pitch, response latency and speech errors were positively, message duration negatively related to deception. As most effect sizes were found to be heterogeneous, analyses of moderator variables revealed that many of the observed relationships varied as a function of content, preparation, motivation, sanctioning of the lie, experimental design and operationalization. Of different theoretical approaches reviewed, a working memory model of lie production may best account for the findings. Because of the small effect sizes, and the heterogeneity in findings, practitioners must be cautioned to use such indicators in assessing the truthfulness of reports but nonetheless practical implications for different types of situations are outlined. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Interpersonal deception theory (IDT) represents a merger of interpersonal communication and deception principles designed to better account for deception in interactive contexts. At the same time, it bas the potential to enlighten theories related to (a) credibility and truthful communication and (b) interpersonal communication. Presented here are key definitions, assumptions related to the critical attributes and key features of interpersonal communication and deception, and 18 general propositions from which specific testable hypotheses can be derived. Research findings relevant to the propositions are also summarized.
An important issue in irony comprehension concerns when and how listeners integrate extra-linguistic and linguistic information to compute the speaker's intended meaning. To assess whether knowledge about the speaker's communicative style impacts the brain response to irony, ERPs were recorded as participants read short passages that ended either with literal or ironic statements made by one of two speakers. The experiment was carried out in two sessions in which each speaker's use of irony was manipulated. In Session 1, 70% of ironic statements were made by the ironic speaker, while the non-ironic speaker expressed 30% of them. For irony by the non-ironic speaker, an increased P600 was observed relative to literal utterances. By contrast, both ironic and literal statements made by the ironic speaker elicited similar P600 amplitudes. In Session 2, conducted 1 day later, both speakers' use of irony was balanced (i.e. 50% ironic, 50% literal). ERPs for Session 2 showed an irony-related P600 for the ironic speaker but not for the non-ironic speaker. Moreover, P200 amplitude was larger for sentences congruent with each speaker's communicative style (i.e. for irony made by the ironic speaker, and for literal statements made by the non-ironic speaker). These findings indicate that pragmatic knowledge about speakers can affect language comprehension 200 ms after the onset of a critical word, as well as neurocognitive processes underlying the later stages of comprehension (500-900 ms post-onset). Thus perceived speakers' characteristics dynamically impact the construction of appropriate interpretations of ironic utterances.
Extending affective speech communication research in the context of authentic, spontaneous utterances, the present study investigates two signals of affect defined by extreme levels of physiological arousal—Passion and Indifference. Exemplars were mined from podcasts conducted in informal, unstructured contexts to examine communication at extreme levels of perceived hyper- and hypo-arousal. Utterances from twenty native speakers of Canadian/American English were submitted for perceptual validation for judgments of affective meaning (Passion, Indifference, or Neutrality) and level of arousal (“Not At All” to “Very Much”). Arousal ratings, acoustic patterns, and linguistic cues (affect/emotion words and expletives) were analyzed. In comparison to neutral utterances, Passion was communicated with the highest maximum pitch and pitch range, and highest maximum and mean amplitude, while Indifference was communicated via decreases in these measures in comparison to neutral affect. Interestingly, Passion and Neutrality were expressed with comparable absolute ranges of amplitude, while the minimum amplitudes of both Passion and Indifference were greater than those of Neutral expressions. Linguistically, Indifference was marked by significantly greater use of explicit expressions of affect (e.g. I don't care…), suggesting a linguistic encoding preference in this context. Passion was expressed with greater use of expletives; yet, their presence was not necessary to facilitate perception of a speaker's level of arousal. These findings shed new light upon the paralinguistic and linguistic features of spontaneous expressions at the extremes of the arousal continuum, highlighting key distinctions between Indifference and Neutrality with implications for vocal communication research in healthy and clinical populations.
Feeling of knowing (or expressed confidence) reflects a speaker's certainty or commitment to a statement and can be associated with one's trustworthiness or persuasiveness in social interaction. We investigated the perceptual-acoustic correlates of expressed confidence and doubt in spoken language, with a focus on both linguistic and vocal speech cues. In Experiment 1, utterances subserving different communicative functions (e.g., stating facts, making judgments) produced in a confident, close-to-confident, unconfident, and neutral-intending voice by six speakers, were then rated for perceived confidence by 72 native listeners. As expected, speaker confidence ratings increased with the intended level of expressed confidence; neutral-intending statements were frequently judged as relatively high in confidence. The communicative function of the statement, and the presence vs. absence of an utterance-initial probability phrase (e.g., Maybe, I'm sure), further modulated speaker confidence ratings. In Experiment 2, acoustic analysis of perceptually valid tokens rated in Expt. 1 revealed distinct patterns of pitch, intensity and temporal features according to perceived confidence levels; confident expressions were highest in fundamental frequency (f0) range, mean amplitude, and amplitude range, whereas unconfident expressions were highest in mean f0, slowest in speaking rate, with more frequent pauses. Dynamic analyses of f0 and intensity changes across the utterance uncovered distinctive patterns in expression as a function of confidence level at different positions of the utterance. Our findings provide new information on how metacognitive states such as confidence and doubt are communicated by vocal and linguistic cues which permit listeners to arrive at graded impressions of a speaker's feeling of (un)knowing.
Philosophers, psychologists, and economists have long asserted that deception harms trust. We challenge this claim. Across four studies, we demonstrate that deception can increase trust. Specifically, prosocial lies increase the willingness to pass money in the trust game, a behavioral measure of benevolence-based trust. In Studies 1a and 1b, we find that altruistic lies increase trust when deception is directly experienced and when it is merely observed. In Study 2, we demonstrate that mutually beneficial lies also increase trust. In Study 3, we disentangle the effects of intentions and deception; intentions are far more important than deception for building benevolence-based trust. In Study 4, we examine how prosocial lies influence integrity-based trust. We introduce a new economic game, the Rely-or-Verify game, to measure integrity-based trust. Prosocial lies increase benevolence-based trust, but harm integrity-based trust. Our findings expand our understanding of deception and deepen our insight into the mechanics of trust.
The role of communication barriers in the reflected appraisal process is examined for boys and girls in fourth through eighth grades. Children were asked how often their peers had told them to their face and through third parties that they were or were not physically attractive. These communication variables were examined as mediators of the relationship between actual and perceived peer appraisals. There was clear evidence of communication barriers: third party communications were more likey than direct communications from source to target, positive communications were more likely than negative communications, and "expressions given" (as opposed to "expressions given off") accounted for only part of the relationship between actual and perceived appraisal. Boys reported receiving more negative messages than girls, and there was some indirect evidence that boys were more likely to deliver and receive negative messages than girls.
In this paper we distinguish between two types of white lies: those that help others at the expense of the person telling the lie, which we term altruistic white lies, and those that help both others and the liar, which we term Pareto white lies. We find that a large fraction of participants are reluctant to tell even a Pareto white lie, demonstrating a pure lie aversion independent of any social preferences for outcomes. In contrast, a nonnegligible fraction of participants are willing to tell an altruistic white lie that hurts them a bit but significantly helps others. Comparing white lies to those where lying increases the liar's payoff at the expense of another reveals important insights into the interaction of incentives, lying aversion, and preferences for payoff distributions. Finally, in line with previous findings, women are less likely to lie when it is costly to the other side. Interestingly though, we find that women are more likely to tell an altruistic lie.
This paper was accepted by Teck Ho, decision analysis.
Twenty students participated in this study in which white lies were collected and coded for analysis. Overall, findings confirm previous findings that lies are often used to cope with difficulties in unequal power relationships. (PD)
It is well known that languages differ greatly from one another in their patterns and norms of interaction. Up to now, however, there has been very little systematic comparison of language from the points of view of speech acts and rules of speaking. The speech act of complimenting, as an example of the kind of sociolinguistic information needed in order to understand the problems of language learners, is here examined in some detail. The semantic and syntactic structure of compliments in American English is described and comparisons are made with complimenting behavior in other cultures.
Two studies provided evidence that people hide their negative evaluations of their romantic partner's physical attractiveness. This pattern was found using self-reports of concealment (Study 1) and a behavioral observation measure (Study 2). Participants who engaged in this deception also exhibited elevated speech disfluencies, which is a deception cue. Moderators of concealment were examined. Concealment was especially pronounced for participants high in care for the partner's welfare (Studies 1 and 2), low in commitment (Studies 1 and 2), and high in attractiveness ideals (Study 2). Results suggest that people use deception to regulate their romantic partner's feelings, but that long-term orientation or desire to maintain closeness may curtail use of this strategy.
Facial expressions and vocal cues (filtered speech) of honest and deceptive messages were examined in posed and spontaneous situations. The question of interest was the degree to which nonverbal cues transmit information about deception. Results indicated that (a) for both the facial and vocal channels, posing (as compared to spontaneous behavior) produced a higher level of communication accuracy; (b) facial expressions of deceptive (as compared to honest) messages were rated as less pleasant, while vocal expressions of deception were rated as less honest, less assertive, and less dominant, particularly in the posed condition; (c) the sender's ability to convey honesty was negatively correlated with his/her ability to convey deception, suggesting the existence of a demeanor bias—individual senders tend to appear and sound consistently honest (or dishonest) regardless of whether they deliver an honest or a deceptive message; (d) in the posing condition, the sender's abilities to convey honesty/deception via facial and vocal cues were positively and significantly correlated, whereas in the spontaneous condition they were not; and (e) senders whose full (unfiltered) speech indicated more involvement with their responses were judged as more honest from both their vocal (filtered speech) and facial cues, in both the honest and deceptive conditions.
This study explored the degree to which deception is perceived to be a socially acceptable form of communication. It was suspected that a liar's motivation for deceiving, a perceiver's cultural background, and the type of relationship between a liar and the target of a lie (e.g., spouse, friend, stranger, etc.) would affect the perceived acceptability of deceptive messages. Students from China and the United States rated the degree to which they perceived deceptive acts depicted in written scenarios as acceptable or unacceptable. Results indicated that 1) lies told for malicious or self‐benefiting purposes were perceived as less acceptable than mutually‐benefiting lies and lies that benefit others; and 2) culture and the type of relationship between liars and targets of lies interacted with motive for lying to affect the perceived acceptability of deception. These results, their implications, and avenues for future research are discussed.
Compliments are often viewed within the framework of politeness theory. Work on politeness, such as that of Brown and Levinson (1987), has, however, often been infected with a western ethnocentrism, such that cross cultural variations are assumed to be captured within a single politeness model. Recent research on cultures such as Chinese and Japanese have challenged this ethnocentric perspective, and the present work extends the critique in relation to Egyptian Arabic. In the paper, we argue that compliments are culture specific objects. In the case of Egyptian Arabic, any understanding of compliment behavior must take account of such things as values, tact, courtesy, and general group, as opposed to individual, values. Working with a range of compliment behaviours we introduce a model of a 'social contract of values' which allows us to move beyond western ethnocentrism, and to capture more directly the process of Egyptian complimenting behavior.
Previous research suggests that liars are not aware that they tend to decrease their movements during deception. Moreover, it is unclear how liars will behave if someone informs them about their behavioral rigidity during deception, and to what extent several processes (tension, attempted behavioral control, and cognitive effort) are associated with deception. In the present experiment, subjects were interviewed twice. During one interview, they told the truth, and during the other interview, they lied. In the information-present condition, before both interviews, subjects were told that deception is usually associated with a decrease in movements. In the information-absent condition, no information was given. The results revealed that whereas subjects believed that they increased their movements during deception, a decrease in movements, in fact, occurred. Provision of information about deceptive behavior had no effect. The results also showed that a decrease in movements was associated with attempted control and cognitive load processes, and occurred independently from the tension experienced by deceivers.
Previous research has shown both that speech can reliably reveal whether or not deception is occurring and that perceivers are often strongly influenced by speech in their judgments about deceit. Nonetheless, there are relatively few studies of verbal cues to deceit. In the present study, we examined specific verbal and paralinguistic cues that might reveal when deception is occurring or that might be used by perceivers in their attempts to detect deception; also, we examined quantitatively the correspondence between actual cues to deception and perceived cues to deception. For the cues that we studied, the degree to which the cues actually were associated with deception corresponded significantly to the degree to which perceivers used those cues as signs of deceit. When senders pretended to like people they really disliked, their descriptions were less positive and more neutral than when they honestly described people they really did like. When feigning disliking, senders uttered more nonfluences than when expressing honest disliking. All of these cues were used by perceivers in their judgments of deceptiveness; in addition, perceivers judged as deceptive descriptions that were spoken slowly and contained many um's and er's. Expressions of liking that contained many other references, few self-references, and many nonspecific (undifferentiating) descriptors were also perceived to be deceptive. To facilitate the study of actual and perceived cues deception, and their correspondence, a heuristic model was proposed.
Although there are various ways in which people can be deceptive, there is little empirical evidence that directly examines the nonverbal and verbal behavioral correlates of various deception types. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of deception type on the verbal and nonverbal behaviors identified in previous literature as associated with deception. Specifically, falsifications and misdirections were compared with true statements and statements that implied the truth. Undergraduates enacted four different interviewlike situations where each participant (who played the role of interviewee) told the truth directly, implied the truth, told a falsehood directly, and implied a falsehood to a confederate (who played the part of interviewer). Results indicated that deceivers engage in both nonstrategic and strategic management duringdeception. Deceivers revealed their nervousness and difficulty in sustaining a competent communication performance by swiveling in their chairs and speaking at a slower rate. Deceivers strategically managed their deceptive performance by sometimes engaging in more uncertainty behaviors and nonimmediacy through the use of more group references, more modifiers, fewer presenttense verbs, and fewer self-references than nondeceivers, whereas people who were indirect conveyed vagueness through the use of more past-tense verbs than people who were direct. The findings suggest that behavioral profiles of deception may be highly influenced by the directness of the message and the scenario used to elicit the deception.
The role of on-the-job experience in fostering skill at detecting deception was examined. A deception-detection test was administered to three samples of more than 100 subjects each: a group of undergraduates with no special experiences at detecting deceit; a group of new recruits to a federal law enforcement training program, who had some limited on-the-job experience at detecting deceit; and a group of advanced federal law enforcement officers, with years of experience working at jobs in which the detection of deception is very important. Although the officer samples were more confident about their judgments of deceptiveness than were the students, they were no more accurate than the students. None of the three groups showed a significant improvement in deception-detection success from the first half to the second half of the test; however, the advanced officers felt increasingly confident about their performance as they progressed through the test. Correlational analyses of the relationship between accuracy and confidence provided further evidence that experience does not improve people's awareness oi the accuracy or inaccuracy of their judgments. The findings from this research are compared to the results of research on other kinds of professional decision-makers (e.g., clinical psychologists), and several theoretical perspectives on the role of experience in decision making are discussed.
Lying and lie detection are the two components that, together, make up the exchange called as the “communication of deception.” Deception is an act that is intended to foster in another person a belief or understanding that the deceiver considers false. This chapter presents a primarily psychological point of view and a relatively microanalysis of the verbal and nonverbal exchange between the deceiver and the lie detector. The chapter discusses the definition of deception. It describes the deceiver's perspective in lie-detection, including the strategies of deception and behaviors associated with lie-telling. The lie-detector's perspective is also discussed in the chapter, and it has described behaviors associated with the judgments of deception and strategies of lie detection. The chapter discusses the outcomes of the deceptive communication process—that is, the accuracy of lie detection—and explores methodological issues, channel effects in the detection of deception, and other factors affecting the accuracy of lie detection.
The relationship between people's beliefs and their actual lying behaviour has received minimal attention in the literature. In the current study, we examined whether people's beliefs about vocal pitch were related to their pitch behaviour during deception. Thirty-nine university students participated in audio-taped interviews where, in a within-subjects design, both their true and false opinions of common social issues were elicited. Vocal pitch (fundamental frequency; F0) was calculated for each audio sample. Following the interview, participants completed a questionnaire designed to determine their beliefs about the behavioural indicators of deception. It was found that participants' pitch increased when they lied. Furthermore, participants who believed that pitch increases during deception, produced significantly higher pitch in their lying compared to their truthful utterances. Importantly, these findings emphasise the utility of pitch as a marker of deception because it may be less susceptible to behavioural control than physical markers such as gaze behaviour.
The goal of the present research was to determine whether certain speaker intentions conveyed through prosody in an unfamiliar language can be accurately recognized. English and Cantonese utterances expressing sarcasm, sincerity, humorous irony, or neutrality through prosody were presented to English and Cantonese listeners unfamiliar with the other language. Listeners identified the communicative intent of utterances in both languages in a crossed design. Participants successfully identified sarcasm spoken in their native language but identified sarcasm at near-chance levels in the unfamiliar language. Both groups were relatively more successful at recognizing the other attitudes when listening to the unfamiliar language (in addition to the native language). Our data suggest that while sarcastic utterances in Cantonese and English share certain acoustic features, these cues are insufficient to recognize sarcasm between languages; rather, this ability depends on (native) language experience.
This study explored whether people expect to experience guilt and shame following acts of deception, and whether such expectations are mediated by the deceivers' motivation, culture, sex, and/or the type of relationship between the deceiver and deceived. Students from China and the United States imagined themselves in several deception scenarios and rated the degree to which they would expect to experience guilt and shame following the deception. The scenarios depicted messages told for different reasons (e.g., to avoid conflict, to appear better) and with various relational partners (e.g., friends, spouses, strangers). Results indicated that motive, culture, and relationship affect emotional expectations following deception. No sex differences were found. These results and their implications are discussed.
Common ground between speaker and addressee is thought to be important to comprehension of verbal irony (e.g., Gibbs, 1986). We investigated the effects of one type of common ground (solidary relationships, which are close, liking, and mutually supportive) on production and interpretation of ironic insults and ironic compliments. The relationship manipulation (solidary vs. nonsolidary) influenced participants' ratings of several pragmatic functions of irony, including humor and teasing. This manipulation was particularly important to the interpretation and production of ironic compliments and less important to ironic insults. We argue that a solidary relationship between speaker and addressee facilitates the metarepresentational inferences needed to understand irony.
This study tested the hypothesis that people with accurate beliefs about the cues that predict deception are better at detecting deception only when those beliefs are cognitively available and activated. To test the hypothesis, participants viewed video fragments of people who were being either honest or dishonest. A questionnaire assessed participants' beliefs about the cues involved in deception, and activation of participants' belief cues was accomplished by manipulating suspicion. The results provided support for the hypothesis, where participants whose beliefs were activated and had accurate beliefs were better at detecting deception compared to other participants. Gender differences were also found, where lies communicated by women were more accurately detected than were lies communicated by men.
Everyday lie detectors lack the necessary knowledge to use nonverbal cues that discriminate lies from truthful communications. Instead, they rely on general heuristics like infreqtuency of reported events or falsifiability. Lie detectors judged the veracity of 40 reports on minor delinquency that were either truthful or not and referred either to falsifiable manifest actions or to nonfalsifiable subjective feelings. In the uninformed condition, detectors were free to use their intuitive strategies. In the informed condition, they were given detailed instructions about valid nonverbal cues. In the informed feedback condition, they received additional outcome feedback. Performance was generally above chance but further improved through cue information and feedback. Falsifiability caused a bias toward reduced veracity judgments. A lens model analysis supports the interpretation that naive lie detectors follow content-related heuristics but can flexibly change their strategy as they learn about authentic nonverbal cues.
This study is about the principles for constructing polite speech. We describe and account for some remarkable parallelisms in the linguistic construction of utterances with which people express themselves in different languges and cultures. A motive for these parallels is isolated - politeness, broadly defined to include both polite friendliness and polite formality - and a universal model is constructed outlining the abstract principles underlying polite usages. This is based on the detailed study of three unrelated languages and cultures: the Tamil of south India, the Tzeltal spoken by Mayan Indians in Chiapas, Mexico, and the English of the USA and England, supplemented by examples from other cultures. Of general interest is the point that underneaath the apparent diversity of polite behaviour in different societies lie some general pan-human principles of social interaction, and the model of politenss provides a tool for analysing the quality of social relations in any society.
The most commonly recognized function of American English compliments and compliment responses is the expression and maintenance of solidarity between interlocutors. An analysis of Polish compliments and compliment responses collected in natural settings leads to the adoption of a distinction between procedural and relational solidarity. It is argued that many Polish compliments which are used in a manipulative or instrumental way are only procedurally solidary but not relationally solidary. Poles do not insist on establishing solidarity with each other by relying on formulaic speech patterns to the same degree that Americans do. Instead, they prefer other ways of maintaining (relational) solidarity, e.g. exchange of goods, services and information. Such exchanges may be, in part, triggered by the use of compliments.
Investigated the process of personality inference from voice quality using 24 male American stimulus persons who served as subjects in simulated jury discussions. Applying a Brunswikian lens model of the inference process, criteria, distal cues, proximal cues and attributions were measured by independent groups of judges: personality criteria by three peers of each stimulus person and, on the basis of content-masked voice samples, distal voice quality indicator cues by six phoneticians, proximal voice percept by ten naive judges, personality attributions by nine naive judges. Only extroversion attributions correlate significantly with the criterion, replicating earlier findings. For the inference of extroversion, contrary to other traits which apparently cannot be inferred accurately from voice quality, the following conditions are met: (a) the criterion is associated with ecologically valid voice energy cues (vocal effort and dynamic range), (b) these indicator cues are adequately represented as proximal voice percepts (particularly loudness and sharpness), and(c) percept utilization in the judges' inferential strategy corresponds to the association between criterion and distal indicator cues. Path-analytic procedures are used to test empirically the adequacy of the inference model to (a) account for the variance in the attributions, and (b) explain significant correlations between criteria and attributions in terms of mediating variables.
Beliefs about behavioral clues to deception were investigated in 212 people, consisting of prisoners, police detectives, patrol police officers, prison guards, customs officers, and college students. Previous studies, mainly conducted with college students as subjects, showed that people have some incorrect beliefs about behavioral clues to deception. It was hypothesized that prisoners would have the best notion about clues of deception, due to the fact that they receive the most adequate feedback about successful deception strategies. The results supported this hypothesis.
Studies based on mean accuracy of a group of subjects suggest that most observers do no better than chance in detecting the lies of others. We argue that a case-by-case methodology, like that used in polygraphy studies may be more useful. Three behavioral measures (two kinds of smiles and pitch) were used to make predictions about the lying or truthfulness of each of 31 subjects. A case-by-case analysis of the hits and misses achieved in this way yielded an over-all accuracy of 86%. The effect on lie detection accuracy of individual differences in the use and control of different behavioral channels is discussed.
Buller and Burgoon (in press) propose that deceivers attempt to encode strategically nonverbal cues which indicate nonimmediacy and project a positive image. At the same time, deceivers leak arousal and negative affect via their nonverbal display. This experiment tested these predictions, while examining the influence of relational history on deception cues and the stability of deception cues within deceptive conversations. The nonverbal behavior of 130 strangers, friends, and intimates was measured. Results indicated that deceivers signalled nonimmediacy, arousal, and negative affect, but they did not appear to project a positive image. Deception cues were mediated by relational history and showed considerable temporal variation. Strangers leaked more arousal and negative affect than friends and intimates. Further, deceivers, particularly deceiving friends and intimates, seemed to monitor and control their nonverbal behavior during deception by suppressing arousal and negative affect cues and moderating nonimmediate behavior.