The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [93]
TALKING TO LIARS
The tone and direction of a conversation changes drastically as soon as one of the people starts to lie. Jeff Hancock, the Cornell researcher who studies the language of deception, has conducted some experiments that demonstrate this. In one project, he brought pairs of students into his lab and told them that they would have four online conversations on four different topics. In other words, their chatting would be from computers in different rooms so that they couldn’t actually see each other. So that both partners knew how the system worked, they were first asked to chat in a get-to-know-you kind of way for about five minutes. Once both were comfortable with the online chat systems, the experimenter gave both partners a list of the official conversational topics that they were to discuss for five minutes each. The sneaky part of the study was that one of the two partners received the topic list and, for two of the four topics, was instructed to blatantly lie about their views. Their partners never knew about this and so assumed that all of the conversations were, in fact, honest and straightforward.
We already know that when people lie, their language changes. You might have thought that style matching would drop during the deception topics. In fact, partners’ style matching increased during the deception topics. Yes, the liars’ language changed when they were deceptive but the innocent truth-tellers’ language changed as much or more.
Think what is happening in this situation. Once the study starts, the innocent partner has already had at least one honest conversation with the person and then, out of nowhere, the other person starts speaking differently. Our brains are highly attentive to change. In this situation, the innocent person is detecting that something is “off” or not making sense. Consequently, he or she starts paying closer attention, resulting in higher style matching. This is clearly not a conscious process because most innocent partners later report that they thought the deceptive conversations seemed normal.
There is something about this study that has always puzzled me. Think back to the dilemma of the surprise birthday party. If I have to lie to my friend to convince her to stay home the next evening, I have to think fast and come up with a reasonable story. Lying is hard work and during my lie, I won’t be paying much attention to my friend. Instead, she will be paying attention to me. Hancock’s findings indicate that my friend’s language use will accommodate to my deceptive way of speaking.
There is an interesting paradox about LSM. In the case of deceptiveness, one of the speakers—the person who is lying—is actually paying less attention to the other person. Intuitively, you would think that this would result in lower levels of style matching. Apparently when we talk with liars we start paying more attention in an attempt to decode their odd language change. In the case of deception, as one person becomes less attentive, the other becomes more attentive. Surprisingly, this occurs far more frequently than you might think.
TALKING WITH DISTRACTED MULTITASKERS
Recent studies indicate that multitasking is both quite common and surprisingly ineffective. When people multitask, they are attempting to do several things at once with the net effect that the quality of their work across all tasks is diminished. We have all had the experience of talking with someone who, at the same time, was reading a text message, watching something on television, or pondering a deep existential question. The deception research hints that conversations with multitaskers would