Motivational cues: The role of perceived senders' self‐control ability in raters' deception judgements

Abstract

Previous studies have found that senders' personal traits may be used by others to make judgements about the senders' truthfulness. Two studies were conducted to examine whether perceived self-control ability has an effect on deception judgement. Perceived self-control was hypothesized to act as a motivational cue that participants would use to assess the sender's motivation to lie, which in turn would influence their deception judgement. Results revealed that when participants assessed the sender as having higher self-control ability, they would consider the sender to be less motivated to lie in daily life (Study 1), and judge the sender more truthful in a text-based deception judgement task (Study 2). However, the effect of perceived self-control ability disappeared in a video-based task (Study 2), likely due to the multitude of various cues available in audio-visual stimuli. The theoretical and applied implications of the results are discussed.

The role of the oath in credibility assessment

“…Both phenomena can be explained to some extent by using too much context‐general information. Second, most studies about context‐general information have concentrated on people's traits, such as their abilities (Wu et al, ) or appearance (Masip et al, ). The present study demonstrated that a person's words can also be regarded as context‐general information.…”

“…Other researchers have proposed a very similar hypothesis, which we call the deception cue hypothesis here, that there are two different cues in deception judgments: informational cues and motivational cues (Wu, Cai, Zou, & Jin, ; Wu, Zou, Cai, Wang, & Jin, ). Informational cues, just like the individuating information, refer to verbal or nonverbal information that can be used to judge whether a specific statement is true or not.…”

“…Although the ALIED theory and the deception cue hypothesis use different terminologies, both theories suggest that individuating information (or informational cues) is restricted to specific statements, whereas context-general information (or motivational cues) is generalised across statements. More important, both theories propose that when individuating information (or informational cues) is weak or low in a diagnostic sense, people will rely on context-general information (or motivational cues) to make a decision (Street, 2015;Street, Bischof, Vadillo, & Kingstone, 2016;Wu et al, 2014). A notable example of context-general information is demeanour bias-namely, that some individuals are always judged as truth tellers and others as liars, regardless of whether they actually lie (Bond, Kahler, & Paolicelli, 1985;Masip, Garrido, & Herrero, 2003).…”

“…This effect suggests that certain context-general information plays an important role in making decision about a person's credibility. For example, individuals with better self-control (Wu et al, 2014), baby-like faces (Masip, Garrido, & Herrero, 2004), and more attractive appearances (Reinhard & Sporer, 2010) were often judged to be more credible.…”

The relationship between the adult attachment and the tendency to judge others as liars

“…Research on this topic can be divided into two approaches. The first focuses on characteristics of the sender, such as verbal content or nonverbal behaviours (Reinhard & Sporer, ), physical appearance (Berry & McArthur, ; Masip, Garrido, & Herrero, ), social skills (Riggio, Tucker, & Throckmorton, ), and abilities (Wu, Cai, Zou, & Jin, ; Wu, Zou, Cai, Wang, & Jin, ). The second approach focuses on characteristics of the receiver, such as motivation (Wu, Cai, & Jin, ), involvement (Reinhard & Sporer, ), and personal traits (Ein‐Dor & Perry, ).…”