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—from the self-deception associated with the denial of emotions and overconfidence to the intentional deception people employ to avoid prison. Even though the motives, strategies, and people associated with these various types of lies are all quite different, the language patterns are surprisingly similar.
Every project, of course, is unique. However, as the studies have mounted, we can stand back and take the Squint Test. The Squint Test is a nonscientific way of trying to assess if there are reliable patterns to deception across the various studies. As you can see in the chart on page 162, there are five general word categories. Each word is associated with a bar on the right. The closer the bar is to the right of the page, the more that word category is associated with honesty and telling the truth. Bars on the far left indicate words that typically occur with people who are lying or being deceptive. Words linked to bars in the middle tend to be either unrelated to deception or are too unreliable to classify.
SELF-REFERENCES: THE I-WORDS
In virtually every chapter of this book, first-person singular pronouns are important. In deception research, the word I (including I’m, I’ll, I’d, I’ve, and related contractions) is the best single marker of a person’s being honest.
The use of I-words has tremendous social and psychological significance. By definition, it is an identity statement. Using I in conversation is announcing to your speaking companion that you are aware of yourself, that you are paying attention to yourself. There is a certain degree of vulnerability in doing this—especially if there is a chance that your companion is judging you or seeking to harm you in some way. I’ve often thought of the use of I as a subtle submissive gesture—much like the lower-status dog rolling over and baring his belly to the bigger, more dangerous dog. “Hey, I’m not a problem. I’m at your service. I’m not a threat.”
There have been several studies that suggest that when people are forced to pay attention to themselves, they become more humble and honest. Robert Wicklund, who is now at the University of Bergen in Norway, pioneered a theory of self-awareness in the 1970s. He and his colleagues devised dozens of imaginative studies where people would have to do some kind of task in one of two conditions—in front of a mirror or away from a mirror. If they completed a questionnaire in front of a mirror, they reported having lower self-esteem and generally less positive moods. More intriguing, their answers to questions tended to be more honest—their reports of their weight, grades, and behaviors tended to match objective measures of their true weight, grades, and behaviors. Also, completing questionnaires in front of a mirror caused people to use the word I more.
Why does self-attention make people more honest? Wicklund posited that paying attention to the self made people briefly ponder who they ideally wanted to be. Perhaps their lifelong dreams were to be strong, honest, beautiful, brave, and compassionate. Looking in the mirror made them realize that they had not attained these ideals. Ultimately, then, people would see the gulf between their ideal and real selves, which made them feel bad about themselves but, at the same time, motivated them to try to be better people. Self-awareness, in Wicklund’s view, drives us all to be the people we always wanted to be.
Indeed, most of us usually want to be honest with others and with ourselves. Self-attention provokes honesty. I-words simply reflect self-attention. Across the multiple studies, when we see the use of I-words increase, it is likely that self-attention is higher. And, with self-attention, people tend to be more honest.
COGNITIVE COMPLEXITY
The stories that people generate when telling the truth are generally more complex than false stories. Not only do people say more when telling the truth but each sentence they put together is longer and more complex. Their words are bigger, suggesting that their statements are more precise and nuanced. The statements of truth-tellers also come across as more thoughtful, using insight words such as realize, understand, think, and the like.
Note that words with bars on the left side of the table are reliably associated with deception. The farther to the left, the less trustworthy. Those on the right side are markers of honesty. Those words with bars close to the center line are not reliably associated with either truth or deception.
One reason truth-tellers have longer sentences is that they are linking multiple phrases with conjunctions. Conjunctions include words such as and, or, but, because, etc. Many of these conjunctions are exclusive words such as but, or, except, without, excluding. As described in previous chapters, exclusive words are used when people are making distinctions. They are distinguishing what did happen versus what did not, what they were thinking and what they were not thinking about, what was in the category and what was not in the category.
The ability to talk about what you did not do, did not see, or did not think about is a remarkably difficult task when you are lying. If you are telling a completely fabricated story, everything you are saying is something you didn’t experience. In making up a false story, you can quickly get a headache trying to add what you didn’t not do. Most lies, then, are made up of simple and straightforward statements about what the person presumably did or saw. Relatively few specific comments are about what they did not do.
DETAILED INFORMATION
When conveying a true incident, we have access to a rich group of memories about the event and exactly where we were as it unfolded. More specifically, we have knowledge of precisely where our bodies were at the time. Our bodies and the relevant events existed in three-dimensional space that unfolded in real time. It is not surprising, then, that when we describe an event that really happened, we naturally include information about time, space, and motion. Together, these dimensions are captured by relativity words. As can be seen in the table, truth-tellers are far more likely to include words that invoke time (e.g., before, ten o’clock, morning), space (e.g., above, next, around), and movements (e.g., went, put, leap). Along the same dimensions, truth-tellers are more specific in usin
g numbers and quantifiers, which include words like more, less, few, larger.
The use of words signifying greater cognitive complexity and detailed information fits nicely with recent research on statements found in the questioning of witnesses. Aldert Vrij, one of the world’s experts on the analysis of interviews of people suspected of crimes, points out that the detection of lying depends on the ways people are asked questions. A policeman, parent, or friend who is accusatory in their interview will likely just get brief statements full of denials—which can be extremely difficult to evaluate. Instead, Vrij and his colleagues recommend that interrogations or interviews should be more open-ended, less judgmental, and aimed at information gathering. The more that a suspect is allowed to say, the more likely that their stories will exonerate or convict them.
Although Vrij and other law enforcement researchers have only recently started to use computer-based methods, they have independently discovered that truth-tellers make statements that are more complex and more detailed.
SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL DIMENSIONS
Many forms of deception are associated with optimism and overconfidence. The person trying to sell you a new rug, a new religion, or a new war often brims with the certainty of truth. Part of the effective salesperson’s approach is convincing you that once you buy the product there is absolutely no doubt that you too will be as happy and confident as the salesperson.
Counter to common sense, people who are deceptive make more references to other people and rely on more positive emotion words. The stereotype of the liar is the lonely, furtive, shifty, self-loathing, treacherous, and nervous person who is desperately avoiding capture. There may be a few such liars around but I would urge you to hang on to your wallet more tightly when you happen upon the bubbly, enthusiastic, outgoing, warm, and self-assured person who has a great deal just for you.
Social words, by the way, are a mix of words that indicate a social relationship—including nouns like friend, pal, and mother as well as actions such as talking, calling, and listening. In reading over many of the deception transcripts, it is impressive how frequently people bring up other individuals to try to validate their own statements or to shift the blame to someone else.
VERBS AND ACTIONS
Verbs are complicated. Hang around a language expert such as Steven Pinker for a few hours and your head will soon be swimming with an ocean of verb types. Regular verbs generally express a particular action and can distinguish between past tense and present (but not future). Auxiliary verbs, sometimes called helping verbs, are really only a handful of verbs such as to be, to have, and to do. Auxiliary verbs are associated with a passive voice and are frowned on in American English classes but celebrated in British English classes. Another type, called discrepancy verbs (or modal verbs), includes words like should, could, ought, must, and would. Discrepancy verbs are used when people suggest some kind of subtle discrepancy between how the world is and how it could, should, or ought to be.
As you can see in the chart, people who use verbs at high rates tend to be more deceptive than people who use fewer verbs. This pattern is particularly strong for auxiliary verbs and discrepancies. Let’s say that you are a grade school teacher and three of your students give practically the same excuse:
1. I finished my homework but the dog ate it.
2. I had finished the homework but the dog must have eaten it.
3. The homework was finished but must have been eaten by the dog.
The first excuse is far more likely to be true. It includes two past-tense verbs that indicate that the actions were specific and were completely finished. The second excuse relies on five verbs that hint that the actions were not completed and, with the word must, may not have even happened. And the third person’s excuse is the most scurrilous lie of the three—six verbs, past tense, and not a single I-word.
In English, verbs provide a remarkable amount of information about actions. They hint at whether an action is ongoing, partly completed, or completely finished. Some verbs, such as discrepancies, subtly assert that an action may have occurred—but possibly didn’t. Saying that dog could or must have eaten the homework strongly implies something about the dog’s behavior but, at the same time, distances the speaker from asserting that the behavior actually occurred.
OTHER COMMON DECEPTION MARKERS
The use of discrepancy verbs points to one of several ways we all try to mislead others while, at the same time, not technically lying. Some of my favorites:
Passive constructions: “Mistakes were made.” In a delightful book on misinformation, Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson examine how people frequently avoid responsibility through ingenious linguistic maneuvers. For example, historians are in general agreement that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger frequently deceived the American people about the direction and scope of the Vietnam War during the 1970s. Years later, in an interview, Tavris and Aronson quote Kissinger as saying, “Mistakes were quite possibly made by the administrations in which I served.” Note his wording. Obviously, Kissinger didn’t make any mistakes. Rather, someone probably did.
Avoiding answering a question. In the mock-crime experiment where students were asked to “steal” a dollar, we asked each person point-blank: “Did you steal the dollar that was in the book?” People who actually did take the money said things such as:
I don’t believe in stealing. I have a problem with it. I did it once a long time ago; I was … younger. I really didn’t like the feeling of knowing they’re going to catch me. I just, you know, especially you said for a dollar? I wouldn’t have taken it.
Why would I? I would never even think to look in the book to look for a dollar. I was just writing in my journal for my freshman seminar.
It really offends me that you would accuse me of something like that. I would never do something like that.
The most common response of people who were telling the truth was “No, I didn’t take your dollar.” Unlike the liars, the truth-tellers answered the question directly without any embellishment. As these examples attest, when someone doesn’t directly answer your question, there is a good chance they are hiding something no matter how earnest they may sound.
Let me be clear about that: performatives. Linguists and philosophers have long been intrigued by a language device called a performative. Performatives are statements about statements. In the statement “I promise you that I did not steal the money,” the phrase “I promise you” is a performative. It is simply claiming “I say to you” or “I am uttering the following words to you.” What is interesting about performative statements is that they cannot be assessed on their truthfulness. In the sentence starting with “I promise you,” the claim “I did not steal the money” is not directly asserted. The truth of the phrase is that the speaker is merely saying that he or she promises that they didn’t steal the money. It’s a fine distinction but one used surprisingly frequently.
Toward the end of his term, President Bill Clinton was being hounded by the press concerning rumors of sexual misconduct with a White House aide, Monica Lewinsky. In a January 26, 1998, press conference, Clinton announced:
I’m going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.
A naïve human being would think that the president did not have sex with Lewinsky. Actually, the statement he said is true: “I’m going to say this again …” In fact, it is technically correct. He was saying it again. OK, so he later admitted that he had had sexual relations with “that woman” but in the press conference, he was not officially lying.
One of the great baseball pitchers of all time, Roger Clemens, was accused by former teammates of taking performance-enhancing drugs during his baseball career. In a press conference several months before later admitting that he had, in fact, taken drugs, Clemens said:
I want to state clearly and without qualification: I did not take steroids, human growth hormone or any other banned substances at
any time in my baseball career or, in fact, my entire life …
There again, you can see that Mr. Clemens was technically honest. He did, in fact, state clearly and without qualification. What he stated was a lie but it was truthfully a statement.
WE ALL TELL lies to ourselves, to our friends, and to the world at large. Most of these are innocent lies intended to avoid hurting others’ feelings or to try to make ourselves look a bit better than we should. In the same way, we are constant victims of deception from friends, politicians, advertisers, and just about everyone else. Lies, of course, are not entirely bad. They make our lives more interesting. As the writer, director, and star of the movie The Invention of Lying, Ricky Gervais, claims, without lies we would have no fiction, no good stories. In other words, without lies and deception, there would be very little need for art, literature, philosophy, and psychology.
One of the primary vehicles for the art of deceiving others is language. Not surprisingly, the language of lies is generally seen in the function words we use. As noted in other chapters, function words are essentially social. They tell us about our relationships with objects, events, and most importantly other people. As we’ve seen, lies ultimately reflect a subtle shift in the relationship between the speaker and the listener. At the moment of deception, the human relationship changes, which is reflected in the function words being used.
The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us Page 17
