The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [72]
In fact, the very same Jeff Hancock who studied deception in online dating analyzed the CPI data bank. The Cornell group compiled 532 statements that contained at least one objectively false claim along with an equal number of true claims from the same sources. The statements, which were made between September 11, 2001, and September 11, 2003, were from eight senior Bush administration insiders: Bush himself, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and White House Press Secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan.
An example of information from the CPI database is an interview of Vice President Cheney on CNN’s Late Edition on March 24, 2002. The interviewer, Wolf Blitzer, asked Cheney if he supported the United Nations sending weapons inspectors into Iraq to try to find any evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Cheney responded (note that the highlighted sections were identified by CPI as deceptive; those not highlighted are presumed to be truthful):
What we said, Wolf, if you go back and look at the record is, the issue’s not inspectors. The issue is that he has chemical weapons and he’s used them. The issue is that he’s developing and has biological weapons. The issue is that he’s pursuing nuclear weapons. It’s the weapons of mass destruction and what he’s already done with them. There’s a devastating story in this week’s New Yorker magazine on his use of chemical weapons against the Kurds of northern Iraq back in 1988; may have hit as many as 200 separate towns and villages. Killed upwards of 100,000 people, according to the article, if it’s to be believed.
This is a man of great evil, as the president said. And he is actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time, and we think that’s cause for concern for us and for everybody in the region. And I found during the course of my travels that it is indeed a problem of great concern for our friends out there as well too.
Computer text analyses comparing the truthful with the deceptive statements resulted in findings comparable to the others reported. Truthful statements were associated with higher rates of I-words. In addition, they were more nuanced, focused on more detail, and tended to be associated with fewer emotions. The above quotation is a good example of these differences. In the truthful section, Cheney is more detailed in his information, uses more complex sentences, and uses I-words.
As with the other deception projects, it is possible to estimate how well the computer could have picked out truthful versus deceptive statements. Hancock’s group reports that the computer could accurately distinguish between the true and false statements at a rate of 76 percent, where 50 percent is chance.
Be careful in interpreting these numbers, however. The ability to distinguish the truth from a lie is much easier after the fact when we know that deception was going on. If we are trying to guess the trustworthiness of statements of people for whom we have no evidence of deception, our guesses will likely be uninterpretable. There are two overlapping problems in determining deception—the first is that we don’t know what “ground truth” is. That is, what parts are, in fact, truthful. Second, we don’t know the base rate of truth. If we know that 50 percent of Cheney’s clauses are deceptive, we will interpret our computer output differently than if only 2 percent are deceptive. In the months leading up to the Iraq War, there was no reliable ground truth and certainly no sense of the degree of deception. And, to make issues even more troublesome, many of the deceptive statements made by the administration were likely believed by the people telling them.
WATCHWORDS: WHICH WORDS BEST PREDICT HONESTY AND DECEPTION
This chapter has described several types of deception