Promises and lies: can observers detect deception in written messages

Abstract

We design a laboratory experiment to examine predictions of trustworthiness in a novel three-person trust game. We investigate whether and why observers of the game can predict the trustworthiness of hand-written communications. Observers report their perception of the trustworthiness of messages, and make predictions about the senders’ behavior. Using observers’ decisions, we are able to classify messages as “promises” or “empty talk.” Drawing from substantial previous research, we hypothesize that certain factors influence whether a sender is likely to honor a message and/or whether an observer perceives the message as likely to behonored: the mention of money; the use of encompassing words; and message length. We find that observers have more trust in longer messages and “promises”; promises that mention money are significantly more likely to be broken; and observers trust equally in promises that do and do not mention money. Overall, observers perform slightly better than chance at predicting whether a message will be honored. We attribute this result to observers’ ability to distinguish promises from empty talk, and to trust promises more than empty talk. However, within each of these two categories, observers are unable to discern between messages that senders will honor from those that they will not.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10683-016-9488-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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“…We and disregard this aspect in their analyses; similar conclusions can be found in Chen and Houser (2017).…”

“…Other characteristics of messages may also matter. Using a modied two-person trust game with an additional external observer, Chen and Houser (2017) report that other important features of a written message are its length (which increases trust) and the fact of mentioning money (which is associated with untrustworthiness).…”

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“…(That is, participants’ decisions may be affected by their conjectures about future additional surprise rule changes.) We acknowledge this criticism, but note that this technique is not unique to our study (see, for example, the “surprise message opportunity” in Chen and Houser’s [ 60 ] double-message treatment). Also, without such a “surprise”, it would be difficult to argue that proposers in this treatment and those in our baseline treatment faced similar conditions.…”

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“…and Van den Assem et al (2012) analyzea dataset from a high-stake prisoners' dilemma game played in a TV show that females are more likely to share the prize than males, that external observers can accurately predict this gender difference Bicchieri et al (2010),. in turn, find no statistical evidence for gender differences in trust and trustworthiness in a trust game played with different modes of communication (either computer-mediated or face-to-face), and disregard this aspect in their analyses; similar conclusions can be found inChen and Houser (2017).…”

“…Other characteristics may also matter. Using a modified two-person trust game with an additional external observer, Chen and Houser (2017) report that other important features of a written message are its length (which increases trust) and the fact of mentioning money (which is associated with untrustworthiness). Factors such as the use of encompassing words (like "we" or "us"), or the sender's gender, do not seem to matter.…”