Um … they were wearing …: The effect of deception on specific hand gestures

Purpose. Non-verbal communication researchers have identified specific categories of hand gestures but deception researchers typically ignore these. This experiment refined and developed some of these categories and examined whether there is a difference in the frequency of speech prompting and rhythmic pulsing gestures between liars and truth tellers. Methods. Twenty truth tellers and 20 liars (all undergraduate students) described a person who entered a room where they were playing a game with a confederate. Truth tellers gave a truthful description of an event they had participated in. Liars had previously taken money from a wallet in the room but had not played a game with the confederate, or seen anybody enter the room, they just pretended they did during their interview. Results. Truth tellers made more rhythmic pulsing gestures than liars indicating this type of gesture may be connected with the prosodic flow of speech. Liars made significantly more speech prompting gestures than truth tellers, supporting the notion that greater cognitive load may be experienced during deceptive accounts. Conclusions. This study demonstrates the benefit of examining subcategories of gestures when investigating deceptive behaviour.

[1]  Marino Bonaiuto,et al.  THE IMPACT OF DECEPTION AND SUSPICION ON DIFFERENT HAND MOVEMENTS , 2006 .

[2]  D. McNeill.  So you think gestures are nonverbal , 1985 .

[3]  Ray Bull,et al.  Will the Truth Come Out? The Effect of Deception, Age, Status, Coaching, and Social Skills on CBCA Scores , 2002, Law and human behavior.

[4]  R. Krauss,et al.  Gesture, Speech, and Lexical Access: The Role of Lexical Movements in Speech Production , 1996 .

[5]  Donna Frick-Horbury.  The use of hand gestures as self-generated cues for recall of verbally associated targets. , 2002, The American journal of psychology.

[6]  Jacob Cohen,et al.  A power primer. , 1992, Psychological bulletin.

[7]  Robert M. Krauss,et al.  Gesture and Speech in Spontaneous and Rehearsed Narratives , 1994 .

[8]  J. Burgoon,et al.  Interpersonal Deception Theory , 1996 .

[9]  A. Kendon.  Do Gestures Communicate? A Review , 1994 .

[10]  James J. Lindsay,et al.  Cues to deception. , 2003, Psychological bulletin.

[11]  N. Freedman,et al.  Chapter 8 – The Analysis of Movement Behavior During the Clinical Interview1 , 1972 .

[12]  M. Alibali,et al.  Gesture and the process of speech production: We think, therefore we gesture , 2000 .

[13]  Judith Holler,et al.  Pragmatic aspects of representational gestures: Do speakers use them to clarify verbal ambiguity for the listener? , 2003 .

[14]  R. Krauss.  Why Do We Gesture When We Speak? , 1998 .

[15]  E A Franz,et al.  Bimanual gestures: Expressions of spatial representations that accompany speech processes , 2005, Laterality.

[16]  Susan Goldin-Meadow,et al.  Illuminating Mental Representations Through Speech and Gesture , 1999 .

[17]  R. Krauss,et al.  Nonverbal Behavior and Nonverbal Communication: What do Conversational Hand Gestures Tell Us? , 1996 .

[18]  S. Porter,et al.  Pitfalls and Opportunities in Nonverbal and Verbal Lie Detection , 2010, Psychological science in the public interest : a journal of the American Psychological Society.

[19]  Ray Bull,et al.  Increasing Cognitive Load to Facilitate Lie Detection: The Benefit of Recalling an Event in Reverse Order , 2008, Law and human behavior.

[20]  Aldert Vrij,et al.  Outsmarting the Liars: Toward a Cognitive Lie Detection Approach , 2011 .

[21]  Pierre Feyereisen.  Temporal Distribution of Co-verbal Hand Movements , 1982 .

[22]  Pierre Feyereisen,et al.  Manual Activity During Speaking in Aphasic Subjects , 1983 .

[23]  Justine Cassell,et al.  Communicative Effects of Speech-Mismatched Gestures , 1994 .