Heuristics and Modalities in Determining Truth Versus Deception

In potentially deceptive situations, people rely on heuristic cues to help process information. These heuristic cues can often lead to biases concerning how the receiver views the information provided by the sender. One such bias is a truth bias, which has been documented to occur in many potentially deceptive situations (Levine, Parks & McCornack, 1999). It was hypothesized in this study that receivers would make more truthful than deceptive judgments. This study also sought to explore the impact the modality might have on truth bias. It was hypothesized that the truth bias would be strongest in the visual condition, intermediate in the audio condition, and lowest in the text condition. Finally, whether using computer-mediated forms of communication could improve deception accuracy was addressed. It was hypothesized that deception detection would be most accurate in the audio condition. Results supported the first two hypotheses but not the third.

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