The Truth About Deception: How Social Awareness Affects Deception Detection
Presenter(s)
Bridget Allen, Kelly Boris, Faith Plummer
Files
Description
Dr. Susan Davis, Kelly Boris, Faith Plummer, & Bridget Allen The Truth About Deception: How Social Awareness Affects Deception Detection According to Ulatwski (2013), the wording of a question can bias someone’s perception of another person. The present research focuses on the differences between indirect and direct questioning in affecting a person’s ability to detect deception. Our first hypothesis is that indirect questioning as compared to direct questioning of an interviewee's dishonest responses will produce more accurate determinations of dishonesty (see Brinke et al., 2016). Data we have gathered thus far have supported this hypothesis. Female and male college students viewed four different videos of student actors giving either truthful or deceitful responses to an interviewer. The participants responded to questionnaires designed to determine the participants’ perception of the actors’ honesty. Our second hypothesis is that social awareness plays a role in the ability to accurately detect facial and body language cues related to deception. Sheldon (1996) has defined social awareness as an ability to understand others’ emotions and respond to their body language and facial expressions. Participants in this research study completed the Social Awareness Inventory (SAI) developed by Sheldon. There was a positive correlation between accurate deception detection and performance on the SAI. Despite the advantage that social awareness added to accurate detection, participants were highly overconfident in their abilities to correctly determine deception.
Publication Date
4-22-2020
Project Designation
Independent Research
Primary Advisor
Susan T. Davis
Primary Advisor's Department
Psychology
Keywords
Stander Symposium project, College of Arts and Sciences
Recommended Citation
"The Truth About Deception: How Social Awareness Affects Deception Detection" (2020). Stander Symposium Projects. 1823.
https://ecommons.udayton.edu/stander_posters/1823
