• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The Ekman project revealed that pretty much the same group of words were related to deception as the other studies found. That is, those who were honest in their discussions with Ekman used more and bigger words, had longer and more complex sentences, and expressed less positive emotion than did the liars. And, as before, the truth-tellers relied on more I-words.

Sweating It Out After Committing a “Crime” The Ekman project required people to try to deceive someone else in a face-to-face interaction. In a sense, it was a test of wills concerning the students’ beliefs about a particular topic. The students hadn’t done anything wrong nor had they behaved in a way that called into question their basic honesty. A slightly edgier method to study deception in the laboratory is to actually induce people to engage in a questionable behavior and then, with their permission, lie to an interrogator about what they have done. One standard technique to accomplish this is called the “mock crime.” The idea is that participants agree to “steal” something—usually money—and then when “caught,” they agree to lie to a researcher who doesn’t know if they stole the money or not.

Working with Matt Newman a few years ago, we did such a study. Students who had signed up for an experiment were first met by Matt, who explained that they would be sent to a room for several minutes. Once seated in the room, they were to look in a book by their chair and go to page 160. If there was any money on that page, they should steal it and then put the book back. Later, they were informed, someone would enter the room and ask if they took the money. They were to deny taking the money. Everyone agreed to the rules.

Once in the room, half of the students found the money (a single dollar bill) and for the other half, no money existed. Another experimenter then came in, looked at page 160, and said, “There’s no money here, did you take it?” All said no. The experimenter then announced that they would be taken to another room and interrogated to determine if they were telling the truth. The interrogation was fairly minor and simply asked students to say in detail what they did when they entered the room. The transcripts of the students’ statements were later computer analyzed, and as with our other projects, we did much better than chance at catching the liars.

The mock-crime study and the various attitude studies all found similar effects: There are reliable “tells” in language that provide clues to deception. Soon afterward, several labs began testing the language-deception link. Judee Burgoon, one of the most respected researchers in the field of communication, conducted a striking number of experiments demonstrating that different types of deception—especially deception in natural interactions—have their own language fingerprints. She has repeatedly shown that lab-based deception studies generalize to groups other than college students. Gary Bond and his colleagues have found similar language effects with deception tasks among men and women prisoners across different prisons in the United States.

Although these studies are impressive, a recurring criticism of the various deception projects has been that virtually all are based on highly contrived laboratory studies. In fact, most of the studies are remarkably similar to parlor games. At the very worst, if any of the participants had been “caught” in these studies, they would have lost a few dollars—probably the equivalent of a single hand in a moderate-stakes poker game. What about language markers of deception when the stakes are real and potentially life changing?

CATCHING DECEPTION WHEN IT MATTERS: AVOIDING PRISON, HEARTBREAK, AND WAR

The advantage of running controlled experiments is that the researchers can get a nice clean picture of what causes what. Conducting real-world projects with life-and-death consequences is far messier. Researchers generally have no control over the situation and it is often hard to find situations where you know with