Deception experiment
Deception experimentAbstract
We often give nonverbal cues as to whether or not we are trying to deceive someone. These nonverbal actions are involuntary. Subjects were asked three questions provided with no reason to lie. They were then asked three questions they were asked to lie about. Nonverbal cues were measured both, during the truthful answers, and again during the deceptive answers. The intention of this experiment was to prove that the dependent variables in this experiment would occur more frequently during deception than in truthfulness. This was not proven.
Nonverbal cues in deception as opposed to nonverbal cues in truthful responses.
Everyday life presents us with many temptations to lie to others. And in fact, research findings indicate that all to often we yield to these temptations. (DePaulo et al., 1996) found that college students tell about two lies per day, most of which are designed to enhance their social image or advance their social interests. Given these facts it seems important to tell whether another person is lying. Fortunately the findings of a large body of research on nonverbal communication can prove very useful in this respect.
(DePaulo, Epstein, & Wyer, 1993) showed that is virtually impossible to find anyone who can control or manage the many different channels of nonverbal communication. For this reason even persons who lie frequently and are highly practiced at this task, often reveal the fact that they are lying through some channel of nonverbal cues.
Some of the deception detectors are microexpressions, or fleeting facial expressions that last only a few tenths of a second. These expressions are very quick and according to (Ekman, 1985) are very are very difficult to oppress.
Another cue is inter-channel discrepancies. This is when there inconsistencies between nonverbal cues from different basic channels. For example, When a defendant is lying on the witness stand, while he/she might concentrate on maintaining eye contact; they may demonstrate postural shifts or body movements that show high levels of anxiety.
A third nonverbal cue involves nonverbal aspects of a person�s speech called paralanguage. (Zuckerman, DePaulo & Rosenthal, 1981) shows that when people lie, the pitch of their voice often changes and they tend to speak more slowly and with less fluency. In addition, they may engage in more sentence repairs-in which they start a sentence, interrupt it, and start again (Stiff et al., 1989).
In this experiment the occurrence of the Independent Variables (nonverbal cues) were tested to see if they occurred more often in lying. Viewing past research, it would be reasonable to assume certain nonverbal cues would occur more frequently in deceptive responses.
Method
Subjects
Three subjects were selected randomly from the experimenter's personal acquaintances. All of which were under-graduate students, one male, and two female.
Materials
Subjects� responses to all questions were recorded on video by the experimenter. The experimenter possessed two sets of questions she would ask the three subjects....
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