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Justifications Offered, Questions Asked, and Linguistic Patterns in Deceptive and Truthful Monetary Interactions

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Abstract

In this study, we investigate verbal production in people playing a monetary negotiation game who freely chose to lie or tell the truth. Participants were randomly assigned to the role of allocator or recipient; the allocator divided a small amount of money and was tasked with convincing the recipient to accept their share. Allocators were free to lie, and 30 % did. Our goal is to investigate the use of justifications, questions, and linguistics to assess if these factors differ between those telling the truth, lying by omission, and lying by commission. We find that liars were more likely to use some types of justifications, while truth-tellers were more likely to assert that their offer was fair. Recipient questions were unrelated to successful detection of deception, and linguistic patterns were largely non-significant, with the exception of liars using more negations. We also find no connection between emotions felt by allocators (more guilt for liars) and linguistic patterns, replicating past results. We discuss how these results mesh with past findings, offer discussion about what this means for the field, and consider where research on linguistic differences between liars and truth-tellers should go next.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Children and Family Research Center, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    Michael T. Braun

  2. Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA

    Lyn M. Van Swol

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  1. Michael T. Braun
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  2. Lyn M. Van Swol
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Correspondence to Michael T. Braun.

Additional information

Special thanks and gratitude to undergraduate research assistants Chris Clark, Bailey Fencil, Paulina Gralow, Brennan Harris, Ellen Meinholz, Amelia Rufer, Heena Shin, Melany Stout, Melissa Stout, and Olivia Weyers for their help with running the experiment, transcribing interactions, preparing transcripts for analysis, and coding interactions. This project was funded by a grant from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and from the Hamel family.

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Braun, M.T., Van Swol, L.M. Justifications Offered, Questions Asked, and Linguistic Patterns in Deceptive and Truthful Monetary Interactions. Group Decis Negot 25, 641–661 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10726-015-9455-5

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