dc.description |
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. |