Abstract
Videoconferencing (VC) is changing the way people communicate in a variety of fields including education, medicine, business, and even interpersonal relationships. In this study, we investigate the effects of the modality of communication, whether through face-to-face (FtF) or VC, on the ability of interactants to develop and maintain nonverbal synchrony. This study is an analysis of 101 interviews between students and professional interviewers in which some of the participants were induced to cheat on a task with a confederate. The results revealed that the VC modality hampered the interactional synchrony of the dyads, especially during the phases of questioning when suspicion-inducing or accusatory questioning was used. For global ratings of synchrony, the greatest impact of modality was for participants whose lies were not sanctioned by the interviewer, suggesting that the VC modality negatively affected the most skilled deceivers. In addition, interactional synchrony improved in the final, accusatory, phase of the interview when subjects confessed, particularly in the FtF modality. The effects of the interviewer and the question type are also discussed.
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Notes
Analyses were conducted on the total counts of synchrony behaviors but as this was redundant with the results of global synchrony and the individual codes allowed for a more nuanced analysis, they are not reported here.
A score of 1 on the transformed counts indicates that there were no recorded observations of synchrony.
It should be noted that interviewer effects were controlled in all subsequent analyses but, due to space considerations, are not reported here.
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Acknowledgments
This research was funded by a grant from the Center for Information Technology Research, a National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center. The authors would like to thank their student research assistants, Bradley Adame, Kylie J. Harrison, Katherine M. Kelley, Lindsey Harvell, and Abigail Allums Kauffman for their assistance with the coding and data collection.
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Dunbar, N.E., Jensen, M.L., Tower, D.C. et al. Synchronization of Nonverbal Behaviors in Detecting Mediated and Non-mediated Deception. J Nonverbal Behav 38, 355–376 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-014-0179-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-014-0179-z