Experiments on behavioral lie detection have indicated that observers can detect a communicator's lies with above‐chance accuracy, and that detection accuracy may be enhanced when observers pay special attention to certain vocal and body‐movement cues. The present experiment asked whether deception in (simulated) sales communications by retail salespersons and automobile customers could likewise be detected nonverbally. Contrary to much of the prior literature, deception‐detection in this study was not above chance, apparently because the salespersons' and customers' nonverbal cues simply were not correlated with lying. Though the observers seemed quite suspicious and did not give communicators the “benefit of the doubt”, they could not discriminate the communicators' deceptive communications from their truthful ones. Many—perhaps most—of the lies in sales communications may be told by confident, well‐practiced deceivers whose nonverbal behavior is unlikely to reveal their lying.

Khaki Campbell ducklings were raised in groups of 10, 6, and 3 subjects for 1 week. When the groups were intact, the birds seldom emitted distress calls. When, however, various numbers of birds were systematically removed from each of the groups, the fewer the number of birds remaining in a given group the greater the number of distress calls. Further, a given number of birds remaining from a large group emitted more distress calls than when the same number of birds remained from a smaller group. Subsequent experiments revealed that neither adding birds to a group nor interchanging birds between groups induced distress calling; hence, the distress calling induced by reduction in group size was not simply a reaction to stimulus change. Finally, when ducklings that had been living in a group of a given size were permitted to live in a larger or smaller group for more than 24 hours, they subsequently reacted to reductions of their new group in the same manner as ducklings that had lived in a group of that size all along. These findings are consistent with naturalistic observations of the reactions of immature precocial birds to changes in the composition of their brood.Laboratory studies of imprinting and attachment have typically focused on dyadic relationships: the interactions between a young animal and its mother (or mother surrogate) or the interactions between two peers. Though there are clear advantages to such an experimental strategy, there are reasons to suspect that this approach causes one to miss much of the richness of an animal's social interactions. In a natural setting a young animal typically interacts both with its mother and with a group of conspecifics. A number of investigators (e.g., Harlow & Harlow, 1969;Lorenz, 1935) have shown that an animal's social and emotional development is affected by numerous social inputs.

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