Slow Lies: Response Delays Promote Perceptions of Insincerity

Abstract

Evaluating other people’s sincerity is a ubiquitous and important part of social interactions. Eleven experiments (total N = 6965; seven preregistered; seven in the main paper, four in the SOM; with American and British members of the public, and French students) show that response speed is an important cue on which people base their sincerity inferences. Specifically, people systematically judged slower (vs. faster) responses as less sincere for a range of scenarios from trivial daily conversations to high stakes situations such as police interrogations. Our findings suggest that this is because response delays are perceived to be the result of the responder suppressing automatic, truthful thoughts. People also seem to have a rich lay theory of response speed, which takes into account a variety of situational factors. For instance, the effect of response speed on perceived sincerity is smaller if the response is socially undesirable, or if it can be attributed to memory effort. Finally, we showed that even when instructed explicitly, people are only partially able to disregard response speed in making sincerity inferences. Our findings not only help ascertain the role of perceived response speed in interpersonal inference making processes, it also carries important practical implication. In particular, the present study highlights the potential biases that may be observed in judicial settings, since response delays of innocent suspects may mislead people to judge them as insincere and hence guilty.

Slow lies: Response delays promote perceptions of insincerity.

“…Raw data, analyses, complete stimuli and scenario, and preregistrations are available at https://osf.io/pqmz2, Ziano (2020). Studies S1, S2, S3, additional statistical analyses, deviations from the preregistrations, and participant compensation are available in the .…”

Indulgent Consumption Signals Interpersonal Warmth

“…The authenticity of the behavior is defined as “behaving in accord with one's values, preferences, and needs as opposed to acting ‘falsely’ merely to please others or to attain rewards or avoid punishments” (Kernis and Goldman 2005, p. 33). In other words, behavior seems inauthentic if it does not reflect the person's true preferences and instead is driven by impression management motives (e.g., Kim et al 2017; Vohs, Baumeister, and Ciarocco 2005; Ziano and Wang 2021). For example, Ziano and Wang (2021) show that a slower (vs. faster) response in communication is perceived as less authentic because it signals the person's attempt to suppress their true thoughts to gain a favorable impression.…”

“…In other words, behavior seems inauthentic if it does not reflect the person's true preferences and instead is driven by impression management motives (e.g., Kim et al 2017; Vohs, Baumeister, and Ciarocco 2005; Ziano and Wang 2021). For example, Ziano and Wang (2021) show that a slower (vs. faster) response in communication is perceived as less authentic because it signals the person's attempt to suppress their true thoughts to gain a favorable impression. By contrast, Berger and Barasch (2018) show that posting a candid (vs. posed) photo requires less self-presentational effort and thus can make a person appear more authentic.…”