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Factors that Facilitate or Impair Kinesic and Vocalic Nonverbal Behaviors During Interpersonal Deception

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Social Intelligence and Nonverbal Communication

Abstract

This chapter presents results of an original interactive experiment in which truthful or deceptive interviewees were highly motivated (or not) and interviewed in one of three interaction modalities: face-to-face, audio, or text. Participants committed or observed a mock crime and then were interviewed by trained interviewers. Motivated interviewees became more animated facially and posturally and used more vocalized pauses and dysfluencies, regardless of veracity. Deceivers reduced gestures and movement and used more vocalized fillers, which became more prevalent over time. Deceivers reported higher motivation, negative arousal, cognitive effort, and behavioral control than truth tellers, especially in nonverbal modalities. Adaptation across phases of the interview challenges overreliance on nonverbal behaviors as deception signals.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Proponents of the MIE perspective might argue that the text-only condition offers the purest test of the verbal facilitation aspect of the MIE. However, modality did not interact with veracity, so the motivation and veracity effects generalize across text, audio, and face-to-face modalities. These results do not fit a motivation-facilitates-deceptive performance narrative.

  2. 2.

    Not reported in Burgoon (2018), the directionality of effects was such that relative to the other modalities, text included (a) longest words, (b) the most content word diversity, (c) fewest “you” pronouns, (d) fewest third-person plural pronouns, (e) fewest references to “others,” (f) fewest total pronouns, (g) most imagery, (h) most extreme positive pleasantness terms, (i) most positive activation terms, (j) most extreme negative pleasantness terms, (k) least extreme negative imagery, (l) intermediate on affect terms, (m) intermediate on temporal immediacy, (n) intermediate on spatial nonimmediacy, and (o) intermediate on extreme positive imagery.

  3. 3.

    For factorial effects, partial η2 is reported as the effect size because it provides an estimate of a variable’s effect independent of the number of other variables in the models or the variance accounted for by them. For one-way analyses and simple effects, η2 is reported. For frequency of illustrators, the repeated measures ANOVA produced a main effect for motivation, F(1,52) = 4.45, p = .04, ηp2 = .079, and a significant effect for phase, F(1,52) = 74.39, p < .001, Wilks’ Λ = .411, but neither a main effect for deception, F(1,52) = .01, p > .20, ηp2 < .001, nor an interaction between deception and motivation.

  4. 4.

    The analysis on frequency of head movement produced significant main effects for motivation, F(1,57) = 4.18, p = .46, ηp2 = .068, and phase, F(1,57) = 413.51, p < .001, ηp2 = .878, but not for deception. A near-significant interaction between deception and motivation on percent of time spent in head movement, F(1,57) = 3.48, p = .067, ηp2 = .058, showed that low-motivation deceivers and high-motivation truth tellers moved their heads a higher percentage of their talk time. Exploratory correlation analysis showed that, as with gestures, higher self-reported motivation was associated with more frequent head movement, r(64) = .29, p = .011, one-tailed, and longer head movements, r(64) = .25, p = .022, one-tailed, during the baseline as well as during the theft interview phase, r(64), = .33, p = .004, one-tailed, for frequency; r(64) = .33, p = .004, one-tailed, for duration.

  5. 5.

    The repeated measures ANOVA on the mean duration of adaptors produced a near-significant two-way interaction between phase and deception, F(1,57) = 3.92, p = .053, ηp2 = .064, and a three-way interaction among phase, deception, and motivation, F(1,57) = 4.80, p = .033, ηp2 = .078. Exploratory correlation analysis produced no discernible patterns. The analysis for the frequency of postural shifts produced a main effect for phase, F(1,57) = 87.96, p < .001, ηp2 = .607; a phase by motivation interaction, F(1,57) = 4.93, p = .030, ηp2 = .080; a near-significant phase by deception interaction (p = .070) and near-significant between-subject effects for motivation (p = .082) and deception by motivation (p = .092). The exploratory correlational analysis revealed that more motivated deceivers significantly suppressed the frequency of postural shifts, r(31) = –.41, p = .011, one-tailed. Comparatively, truth tellers were more active; they exhibited both more frequent postural shifts during the baseline period, r(33) = .40, p = .011, one-tailed, and ones of longer duration, r(33) = .34, p = .027, one-tailed.

  6. 6.

    The analysis produced significant main effect for deception, Wilks’ Λ = .79, F (4, 166) = 11.14, p < .001, partial ηp2 = .21, and a deception by modality interaction, that did not override the deception main effect. Follow-up univariate tests showed that the deception main effects were significant for all four dependent measures.

  7. 7.

    The analysis produced a main effect for modality, Wilks’ Λ = .89, F (8, 332) = 2.40, p = .016, ηp2 = .06; and a deception by modality interaction, Wilks’ Λ = .87, F (8,332) = 3.07, p = .002, ηp2 = .07. Testing this hypothesis required further focused univariate contrast tests. Results revealed monotonic increases in arousal, F(1, 181) = 7.94, p = .005, η2 = .04, and behavioral control, F(1, 180) = 11.03, p = .001, η2 = .06, as modality richness increased from text to audio to face-to-face (see Table 4.2). The deception and modality effects were qualified by a significant interaction, Wilks’ Λ = .87, F (8, 332) = 3.07 p = .002, ηp2 = .07. Significant effects emerged at the univariate level for negative arousal, F(2, 169) = 4.54, p = .012, ηp2 = .05, and cognitive effort, F(2, 169) = 11.83, p < .001, ηp2 = .12.

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Acknowledgments

Portions of this research were supported by funding from the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research under the U.S. Department of Defense University Research Initiative (Grant #F49620-01-1-0394) awarded to Judee K. Burgoon. The views, opinions, and/or findings in this report are those of the authors and should not be construed as an official Department of Defense position, policy, or decision. An earlier report of the research (Burgoon, Blair, Hamel, Qin & Twyman, 2006) was presented at the Interpersonal Communication Division, International Communication Association annual meeting, Dresden, Germany, June 2006, where it received Top Paper honors. A partial, earlier overview of the entire project was presented to the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Kona, January 2016.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for the Management of Information, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Judee K. Burgoon

  2. Department of Oncology, School of Medicine, Wayne State University/Karmanos Cancer Institute, Detroit, MI, USA

    Lauren M. Hamel

  3. School of Criminal Justice, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX, USA

    J. Pete Blair

  4. Management Information Systems, Brigham Young University, Salt Lake City, UT, USA

    Nathan W. Twyman

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    Robert J. Sternberg

  2. Faculty of Philosophy, Department of Psychology, The University of Niš, Niš, Serbia

    Aleksandra Kostić

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Burgoon, J.K., Hamel, L.M., Blair, J.P., Twyman, N.W. (2020). Factors that Facilitate or Impair Kinesic and Vocalic Nonverbal Behaviors During Interpersonal Deception. In: Sternberg, R.J., Kostić, A. (eds) Social Intelligence and Nonverbal Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34964-6_4

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