Familiarity and Unfamiliarity in Interpersonal Deception Theory

PSY457 Term Paper
Debidatta Dwibedi

Detection of deception in familiar
and unfamiliar persons : when will
deception detection be more accurate

The Debate

Traditionally deception detection experiments were carried out by studying
verbal and non verbal cues of strangers.(DePaulo & DePaulo, 1989; DePaulo,
1988;DePaulo, Stone, & Lassiter, 1985; Ekman, 1985; Ekman & O'Sullivan,1991; Kraut, 1980;
Zuckerman, DePaulo, & Rosenthal, 1981; Zuckerman & Driver, 1985)

However, a great deal of deception occurs between friends
and intimates (Millar & Tesser,1987). In fact deception has been demonstrated to
play an important role in maintaining close interpersonal relationships.

People tend to give a different set of verbal and more noticeably facial cues
while trying to deceive friends as compared to strangers. (Wagner & Smith,
1991;Buller & Aune, 1987)

Keeping Interpersonal Deception Theory in view, when do we expect greater
accuracy in deception detection?

Importance of this Debate

Interrogation process
✔
Inclusion/exclusion of family members/friends in the interrogation scene
✔
Interrogation by friends/family

Marriage Counseling
✔
A number of studies have indicated that intimates exhibit more truth-bias
towards each other than strangers (e.g., McComack & Levine, 1990; McCornack
& Parks, 1986). That is, trusting an intimate may be an essential part of
maintaining intimacy. If this is the case we would expect friends/intimates to
be less accurate in detecting deception than strangers because friends would
not be suspicious enough to search for deception cues. [2]

Pro Familiarity

Interpersonal deception theory (IDT)[1] attempts to explain the manner in
which individuals deal with actual or perceived deception on the conscious
and subconscious levels.

Some of its empirically verified propositions supporting familiarity are:

✔
Initial and ongoing detection accuracy are positively related to (d)
informational and behavioral familiarity, (e) receiver decoding skills, and (f)
deviations of sender communication from expected patterns.

Pro Familiarity

As receivers' informational, behavioral, and relational familiarity increase,
deceivers not only (a) experience more detection apprehension and (b)
exhibit more strategic information, behavior, and image management but also
(c) more nonstrategic leakage behavior.

These point towards a better accuracy in deception detection in case of
familiar dyads.

Pro Familiarity

Friends obviously have more exposure to each other than strangers.
Perhaps during these exposures the person has learned the idiosyncratic
pattern of responses the friend emits during deception
(Zuckerman, Koestner, & Alton, 1984; Zuckerman, Koestner, & Colella, 1985).

One is familiar with the verbal and non verbal cues that the deceiver uses
while lying or bluffing and can detect the lie.

Pro Familiarity

Under certain conditions familiarity becomes a ma jor factor in detection of
lies :
✔
Increased suspicion in case of intimate relationships has resulted in
successful detection of deceptions [3]

However, the relationship between suspicion and deception detection accuracy
is not entirely clear. Some research has found that increased suspicion either
failed to increase detection accuracy (McCornack & Parks, 1986; Toffs & De-
Paulo, 1985) or actually decreased detection accuracy (Zuckerrnan,Spiegel,
DePaulo, & Rosenthal, 1982).

✔
The guilt of deceiving a close/familiar person makes it all the more difficult
for deceiver to deceive. He succumbs to the guilt and exhibits non strategic
leakage behaviour and the truth leaks out. [4]

Pro Unfamiliarity

The deceptions of familiar persons may be more difficult to detect because
they are associated with a greater amount of information than those of
strangers. A familiar person the detector knows a great deal about the target's
normal behavioral pattern and with strangers the detector knows little about
the target's normal behavioral pattern.

The great amount of information available when attempting to detect a
familiar person's deception may cause the detector to selectively or
heuristically process the information instead of carefully searching for real
deceptive cues (Bauchner, Brandt, & Miller, 1977; Brandt et al., 1980).

There is a large amount of evidence that persons often resort to simple
decision rules or heuristics when confronted by a variety of complex stimuli
(Tversky & Kahneman, 1974, 1983). This follows from the cognitive miser theory of
social cognition.

Pro Unfamiliarity

In fact Murray Miller and Karen Muller ,
carried out experiments to prove that
information restriction can lead to
increased accuracy in deception
detection in case of familiar dyads as
compared to unrestricted availability of
information.

However, decisions about unfamiliar
persons made with fewer cues tend to
be less accurate than decisions made
with more cues.

Also note that when both full
information is present strangers detect
lies more accurately. [2]

Pro Unfamiliarity

One theory that supports familiarity in deception detection is that one can
learns the patterns of deception of a person and can detect their lies better.

But as familiarity increases the deceiver also learns new ways to avoid
detection of deception by strategic behaviour displays.

Interpersonal Deception Theory states that initial and ongoing receiver
judgments of sender credibility are positively related to (a) receiver truth
biases, (b) context interactivity, and (c) sender encoding skills; they are
inversely related to (d) deviations of sender communication from expected
patterns.

Pro Unfamiliarity

Stiff and his colleagues (Miller & Stiff, 1993; Stiff, Kim, & Ramesh, 1992) have
conceptualized the truth bias associated With familiar persons as a cognitive
heuristic. Stiff proposed that as a relationship develops the decision rule that
"my partner has been truthful in the past, therefore he or she is being truthful
now" becomes available in memory because of constant use.

Mc-Cornack and Parks (1986) proposed that the truth bias helps maintain the
relationship by avoiding the costs associated with accusing a familiar per-
son of deception.

This gives unfamiliar persons an edge in deception detection as they would be
free from truth biases and free to study/notice whatever cues they can.

Experimental Issues

In typical deception studies, including those with professional lie catchers,
observers detect truths and lies told by college students who are asked to lie
and tell the truth for the sake of the experiment in university laboratories.
Perhaps in these laboratory studies the stakes (negative consequences of
being caught and positive consequences of getting away with the lie) are not
high enough for the liar to exhibit clear deceptive cues to deception (Miller &
Stiff, 1993), which makes the lie detection task virtually impossible for the
observer. [5]

Although DePaulo, Anderson and Cooper (1999) demonstrated that motivation
does not improve performance in a lie detection task. [5]

Conclusion

According to the psychologist, Paul Ekman, the average person lies 3 times per
10 minutes of conversation. People tend to be more truthful and more deceptive
with those they love.
Hence detecting lies becomes a very difficult task so much so that the accuracy
achieved with even the most capable human lie detectors is slightly greater
than half. [5]
Familiar or unfamiliar, deception detection is in itself a very tough task. However
Interpersonal Deception Theory although supports both familiar and unfamiliar
detectors , provides a conclusive theory to deception detection.
While not denying that IDT captures much of the complexities of the question
raised in their 18 propositions,if fails to provide an explanatory glue that binds
them together. We cannot find the answer to “why” in IDT. That is because
deception detection involves interactive contexts, strategic manipulation of
language , non verbal leakage, truth biases, suspicious probes and
behavioural adaptation among other theories

References

[1] . Buller, D.B. and J.K. Burgoon (1996). Interpersonal Deception Theory.
Communication Theory.

[2] . Murray Millar and Karen Millar . Detection of deception in familiar and In
familiar persons: The effects of information restriction.

[3] . McCornack, S. A., & Levine, T. R. (1990). When lovers become Leery: The
relationship between suspicion and accuracy in detecting deception.
Communication Monographs.

[4] . Francesca Gino and Catherine Shea. Too Guilty to Deceive: How Feeling
Burdened Can Reduce Deception in Negotiation

[5] . Detecting True Lies: Police Officers' Ability to Detect Suspects' Lies
Samantha Mann, Aldert Vrij, Ray Bull (University of Portsmouth)

Familiarity and Unfamiliarity in Interpersonal Deception Theory

More Related Content

Similar to Familiarity and Unfamiliarity in Interpersonal Deception Theory (20)

Recently uploaded (20)

Familiarity and Unfamiliarity in Interpersonal Deception Theory