Linguistic concreteness of statements of true and false intentions.

Abstract

Our aim was to examine how people communicate their true and false intentions. Based on construal-level theory (Trope & Liberman, 2010), we predicted that statements of true intentions would be more concretely phrased than statements of false intentions. True intentions refer to more likely future events than false intentions, and they should therefore be mentally represented at a lower level of mental construal. This should be mirrored in more concrete language use. Transcripts of truthful and deceptive statements about intentions from six previous experimental studies (total N = 528) were analyzed using two automated verbal content analysis approaches: a folk-conceptual measure of concreteness (Brysbaert et al., 2014) and linguistic category model scoring (Seih et al., 2017). Contrary to our hypotheses, veracity did not predict statements' concreteness scores, suggesting that automated verbal analysis of linguistic concreteness is not a viable deception detection technique for intentions.

Temporal distance and veracity effects on the level of detail in statements about intentions

“…There is also no evidence that veracity and temporal distance interact or that completion of the intention is associated with level of detail in participants' statements. The results support Calderon et al's (2017; 2022) findings that veracity does not affect construal level, but contradict Calderon et al's (2018) and Kleinberg et al (2019) finding that veracity does affect construal level.…”

“…Another possible explanation for the lack of a veracity effect found in these studies and in Calderon et al (2017, 2022) is that construal level may simply not be a good cue to deception. Truthful and deceptive intentions may not differ in their construal level, perhaps because veracity should not be equated with likelihood.…”

“…Another possible explanation for the lack of a veracity effect found in these studies and in Calderon et al (2017Calderon et al ( , 2022…”

“…However, Calderon et al (2017) found that, contrary to what would be predicted based on construal level theory, veracity did not affect a video segmentation task or the level of abstraction of verbal descriptions of the intentions. Similarly, Calderon et al (2022) found that there was no difference in concreteness between verbal descriptions of true and false intentions. Conversely, Kleinberg et al (2019) did find that true statements about future weekend plans were more concrete than false statements, which is in line with construal level theory.…”

“…The aim of this research field is to understand the differences between true and false intentions and to help detect people who are lying about their intentions. Calderon et al (2017Calderon et al ( , 2018Calderon et al ( , 2022) investigated how construal level theory can be applied to detecting lies about intentions. Calderon et al (2018) found that, consistent with construal level theory, false intentions (i.e.…”