The Secret Life of Pronouns (18 page)

•  Fewer verbs

•  Fewer self-references: I-words

Sound familiar? With the exception of self-references, Glass’s honest stories used language that was similar to people writing about their own traumas. His fabricated stories had virtually identical language fingerprints to the study where students wrote about imaginary traumas.

The one interesting and very important exception was the use of I-words. Recall that people writing about their own traumas used I-words at higher rates than people writing about imagined traumas. The explanation was that writing about your own traumas provokes more genuine emotion and is associated with a greater sense of ownership. Relying on these processes, it is easy to see why Stephen Glass used more I-words when fabricating his stories. Look at the lead for his last known likely true story:

“Test 1, 2, 3, 4,” Alec Baldwin says, clearing his throat. “Test 1, 2, 3, 4.” The star of such films as
The Hunt for Red October
and
Glengarry Glen Ross
holds the microphone a few inches away from his mouth and stares at it with a sense of pride. “This bus has a microphone,” he says to the few of us who have gathered to watch his debut into grassroots politics.

—
New Republic
, December 8, 1997

Compare this with the beginning of his final and completely fabricated story:

Ian Restil, a 15-year-old computer hacker who looks like an even more adolescent version of Bill Gates, is throwing a tantrum. “I want more money. I want a Miata. I want a trip to Disney World. I want X-Man comic book number one. I want a lifetime subscription to ‘Playboy,’ and throw in ‘Penthouse.’ Show me the money! Show me the money!” Over and over again, the boy, who is wearing a frayed Cal Ripken Jr. t-shirt, is shouting his demands.

—
New Republic
, May 18, 1998

In his fake stories, Glass is far more flamboyant in his writing style than when writing about true events. You can sense his excitement in confabulating experiences that can’t possibly be true. You feel his pride and his ownership of the story—even his excitement from creating such daring and deceptive stories. In his completely fabricated stories, Glass uses I-words both in his fake quotations and as the “impartial” author at dizzying rates. When lying, Glass exudes earnest pride and self-focus, the way most people do when they are telling the truth.

CATCHING FALSE ATTITUDES AND BELIEFS

People in sales, candidates for political office, administrators, and many others in positions of authority sometimes proclaim beliefs that we later discover were not entirely true. The art of espousing deceptive beliefs is practiced by more than just politicians and crime bosses. How many of us have proclaimed attitudes that we didn’t believe in order to curry favor with an attractive, powerful, or potentially helpful friend? We should be ashamed of ourselves. Fortunately, our abilities at self-deception are sufficiently intact that we know that the
real problem
is when other people are deceiving us by their deceptive statements.

Attitudes About a Hot Topic: Abortion and Choice
    How well can a computer program detect if people are expressing their true beliefs about an emotional topic? Several years ago, Matt Newman, Diane Berry, Jane Richards, and I ran a series of experiments to answer the question. We recruited about two hundred students and asked them to provide us with two opinions on the highly emotional topic of abortion—one that they believed and another that they did not believe. Some of the students were asked to write the two essays at home and to mail them in to us at a later time. Another group simply typed out two essays in a laboratory cubicle in the psychology department. And yet another group was asked to state their true and false beliefs out loud while they were videotaped.

If you are like most people, you have a fairly well-articulated view of the abortion issue. Some readers believe it is a woman’s choice and others are against its ever being performed. Imagine now that you are asked to write a persuasive essay supporting your belief as well as an essay that argued against your true belief. It might be a distasteful task but most people can do it.

Can human judges tell which is your true belief? We recruited several students to read each of the four hundred essays and guess if each one was the writer’s true belief or not. The student judges were accurate 52 percent of the time—where 50 percent is chance. In other words, it can be difficult for a reader to discern people’s true beliefs on the abortion issue.

The computer did a far better job, accurately predicting people’s real beliefs about 67 percent of the time. The word markers of honesty overlapped considerably with some of our other studies. When expressing their true beliefs, students said more words, used bigger words, and relied on longer and more complex sentences. Their arguments were more nuanced and less emotional. Particularly interesting was their relatively heavy use of exclusive words (e.g.,
except
,
but
,
without
). Exclusive words are used when people are making a distinction between what is in a category and what is not; “I did this but not that.” When people were describing their own beliefs using exclusive words, they tried to circumscribe them in a way that clarified what they believed and what they didn’t.

When telling the truth about their beliefs, people relied on more self-references, using the word
I
at much higher rates. When being deceptive about their beliefs, the students expressed more positive emotion.

Turning Up the Heat: Attitudes With Consequences
    Writing or talking about your own view of an emotional topic versus the opposite view is not exactly a high-stakes test of deception. Some might argue that this isn’t an example of deception at all. A more compelling approach was developed several years ago by Paul Ekman, Maureen O’Sullivan, and Mark Frank. Ekman has been considered the premier expert on nonverbal communication for the last generation. In addition to mapping cross-cultural displays of emotion, he has studied changes in facial expressions when people are induced to lie. Several years ago, I heard Ekman deliver a spellbinding lecture on his recent research with lie detection. He had conducted an experiment with about twenty people that was a delicious mix of science and theater.

Imagine you read about an experiment that will take an hour or so that will pay you money. You call to sign up, and in the mail, you receive a questionnaire that asks your beliefs about a number of current topics—things like capital punishment, smoking, the environmental movement. A few days later, someone calls to make an appointment for you to participate in the study. You are told that you will meet Professor Ekman for a brief interview about one of the topics on which you reported holding a strong belief. Some people are asked to tell their true beliefs and the others told to falsely claim the opposite of what they had reported on the questionnaire. You are told that Ekman will talk with you for a few minutes and try to determine if you are expressing your true belief.

Here’s the interesting part of the deal: If you tell him the truth and he believes you are telling the truth, you will receive a $10 bonus. If you lie and he thinks you are telling the truth, you will receive a $50 bonus. However, if he thinks you are lying you will receive no bonus and, in fact, you may be punished by a trip to the Noise Room. The Noise Room is a small dark room where you must sit alone for an hour or so while you listen to occasional bursts of loud noise. In other words, it is to your advantage to try to convince Ekman that you are telling the truth.

Ekman’s group made videotapes of the interviews and ultimately showed the tapes to a wide array of people, including psychologists, local and state law enforcement personnel, and high-level federal officers with training in interrogation, and asked them to distinguish those who were lying from those being truthful. Overall, the accuracy rates ranged from 51 to 73 percent accurate, where 50 percent was chance.

After hearing Ekman’s presentation, I asked if he would be willing to share the transcripts of the interviews so that I could subject them to our computer program. Our arrangement was that he would send the transcripts but not tell us who was truthful. I would then send back a list of my conclusions about who were the liars and who were the truth tellers. A few weeks later I had analyzed his data and made my determinations. His co-author Maureen O’Sullivan responded almost immediately saying that I had done an amazing job. With this small sample, the computer accurately predicted between 65 and 75 percent.

The Ekman project revealed that pretty much the same group of words were related to deception as the other studies found. That is, those who were honest in their discussions with Ekman used more and bigger words, had longer and more complex sentences, and expressed less positive emotion than did the liars. And, as before, the truth-tellers relied on more I-words.

Sweating It Out After Committing a “Crime”
    The Ekman project required people to try to deceive someone else in a face-to-face interaction. In a sense, it was a test of wills concerning the students’ beliefs about a particular topic. The students hadn’t done anything wrong nor had they behaved in a way that called into question their basic honesty. A slightly edgier method to study deception in the laboratory is to actually induce people to engage in a questionable behavior and then, with their permission, lie to an interrogator about what they have done. One standard technique to accomplish this is called the “mock crime.” The idea is that participants agree to “steal” something—usually money—and then when “caught,” they agree to lie to a researcher who doesn’t know if they stole the money or not.

Working with Matt Newman a few years ago, we did such a study. Students who had signed up for an experiment were first met by Matt, who explained that they would be sent to a room for several minutes. Once seated in the room, they were to look in a book by their chair and go to page 160. If there was any money on that page, they should steal it and then put the book back. Later, they were informed, someone would enter the room and ask if they took the money. They were to deny taking the money. Everyone agreed to the rules.

Once in the room, half of the students found the money (a single dollar bill) and for the other half, no money existed. Another experimenter then came in, looked at page 160, and said, “There’s no money here, did you take it?” All said no. The experimenter then announced that they would be taken to another room and interrogated to determine if they were telling the truth. The interrogation was fairly minor and simply asked students to say in detail what they did when they entered the room. The transcripts of the students’ statements were later computer analyzed, and as with our other projects, we did much better than chance at catching the liars.

The mock-crime study and the various attitude studies all found similar effects: There are reliable “tells” in language that provide clues to deception. Soon afterward, several labs began testing the language-deception link. Judee Burgoon, one of the most respected researchers in the field of communication, conducted a striking number of experiments demonstrating that different types of deception—especially deception in natural interactions—have their own language fingerprints. She has repeatedly shown that lab-based deception studies generalize to groups other than college students. Gary Bond and his colleagues have found similar language effects with deception tasks among men and women prisoners across different prisons in the United States.

Although these studies are impressive, a recurring criticism of the various deception projects has been that virtually all are based on highly contrived laboratory studies. In fact, most of the studies are remarkably similar to parlor games. At the very worst, if any of the participants had been “caught” in these studies, they would have lost a few dollars—probably the equivalent of a single hand in a moderate-stakes poker game. What about language markers of deception when the stakes are real and potentially life changing?

CATCHING DECEPTION WHEN IT MATTERS: AVOIDING PRISON, HEARTBREAK, AND WAR

The advantage of running controlled experiments is that the researchers can get a nice clean picture of what causes what. Conducting real-world projects with life-and-death consequences is far messier. Researchers generally have no control over the situation and it is often hard to find situations where you know with certainty that people are lying and others where they are telling the truth.

LYING ON THE WITNESS STAND: PERJURY AND EXONERATION

After publishing some of our deception studies, I received one of the most interesting graduate school applications I’ve ever seen. The applicant, Denise Huddle, had run her own successful private investigation firm for the previous twenty-one years. She was ready to retire and felt she needed to go to graduate school to get the knowledge to build a foolproof lie-detection system based on language analysis. Everything in her application pointed to the fact that she was brilliantly smart and fiercely tenacious. We soon met and agreed that graduate school was not the way to go. Instead, I would work with her in developing a more real-world-tested language lie detector.

Denise’s idea was to find a real-world analog of the mock-crime study Matt Newman and I had conducted. Having spent thousands of hours in courthouses, Denise had watched hundreds of people testify in trials—many of whom were lying. Over several weeks, she and I hatched an imaginative study. We (meaning Denise) would track down the court transcripts of a large number of people who had been convicted of a major crime and who had clearly lied on the witness stand. In certain cases in the United States justice system, defendants who have been convicted of a major crime can also be subsequently convicted of perjury. The perjury conviction is usually the result of overwhelming evidence that the defendant lied on the stand. (Note to future criminals: If you are on trial for a crime you have committed and there is very strong evidence against you,
do not lie
. Just say, “I refuse to answer that question.” You’ll thank me for this advice.)