Detecting social signals of honesty and fear of appearing deceitful: A methodological proposal

Abstract

This paper proposes an original methodology designed to single out the speaker's social signals expressing either honesty or anxiety induced by his awareness of being suspected of deceit. 24 participants were randomly assigned to one of the three following experimental conditions (namely A, B and C), manipulated during a face-to-face interview. In condition A, participants could win an undeserved resource, but only by deceiving by dissimulation the researcher. In condition B, participants could win a resource they deserved, but only by persuading their interviewer they were not deceiving her. In condition C (control), researchers awarded a participant with a resource they deserved. All participants in condition A decided not to dissimulate. All participants in condition B debated for earning the resource they deserved. On the base of videos unobtrusively recorded during interactions of researcher-participant dyads, interviews were analyzed both by a multimodal analysis of face-to-face communication and by F.A.C.S. analysis. Social signals detected during honest communication (condition A) significantly differed from social signals shown during defensive communication (condition B). In order to contribute to the study of further behavioral signals of dissimulation, the paper discusses the importance of a finegrained detection of social signals of honesty and fear of being suspected of deceit

Decolonising Reactions to Material Traces of the European Past: The Case of an Italian Colonial Food

“…Another interesting result is the fact that this interaction between the colonial text and the image of the 'African Moor' cannot trigger the moral emotion of guilt. This evidence suggests that a better distinction must be conducted between the moral emotions of guilt and shame, especially when referring to events that happened before the birth of respondents (Leone et al, 2018). Finally, very interesting results emerged from the comparison among participants of different ages.…”

Attachment Styles and Communication of Displeasing Truths

“…Some studies investigate how attachment relates to the self-assessed habit of lying (Cole, 2001;Ennis et al, 2008;Gillath et al, 2010), but they do not directly observe the actual deceptive communication of people with secure or insecure attachment styles. Moreover, from a methodological point of view, self-report measures are commonly used to study deception, but the use of such selfassessed evaluations has been criticized because, for reasons of social desirability, participants' self-assessments may be distorted (Elaad et al, 2012); to overcome the limitations of self-report measures, a new methodological approach is needed (Leone et al, 2016;Migliorisi, 2019). The goal of our research is therefore to assess the relationship between attachment style and the communication of a displeasing truth, by observing how people with secure or insecure attachment styles actually cope with the experimental task of telling negative evaluative information to a receiver they did not formerly know.…”