The Secret Life of Pronouns (19 page)

We also needed a separate group of people who clearly did not lie on the witness stand but who were found guilty anyway. Fortunately, Denise was able to track down eleven people who were convicted of a crime but were later exonerated because of DNA or other overwhelming evidence. This was an important comparison group because the exonerated sample was made up of people who were clearly poor truth-tellers.

This certainly sounded like a simple project from my perspective. Just get the public records, run them through the computer, and bam! Fame and glory was right around the bend. As often happens, it wasn’t as simple as I had imagined.

Denise spent almost a year tracking down the eleven exonerated cases as well as the thirty-five people convicted of felonies. To qualify for the study, people had to have testified on the witness stand and the full records had to be intact. Denise had a small trailer that she would drive to federal court archive facilities. Every day, she would use the court’s copy machines to make copies of the courtroom records—which were sometimes hundreds of pages in length. At night, she would return to her trailer and then scan the copies into her computer. She would usually spend two weeks at a time in the trailer before taking a few days off. On returning to her home, she spent additional time poring over the court transcripts, pulling out sections that were pivotal to the juries’ decisions and those sections that were uncontested.

Denise’s work eventually paid off. Although the number of cases was somewhat small, the effects were meaningful. Most striking were the differences in pronoun use. As with most of the other studies, the exonerated defendants used first-person singular pronouns at much higher rates than those found guilty of a felony and perjury. I-words (primarily just the single word
I
) signaled innocence. Interestingly, the truly guilty defendants used third-person pronouns at elevated rates. They were trying to shift the blame away from themselves onto others. Also, as with many of the earlier projects, the truth-tellers used bigger words, described events in greater detail, and evidenced more complex thinking.

The pattern and strength of the effects were remarkable. I was thrilled but Denise was disappointed. The computer correctly classified 76 percent of the cases, where 50 percent is chance. This is better than the juries did but was far below the 95 percent that Denise was hoping for. As of this writing, Denise remains optimistic that a language-based deception system is a realistic possibility. She might be right but if she could get a system that reliably identified deception 80 percent of the time, it would be a cosmic breakthrough.

LYING FOR LOVE: EVALUATING HONESTY IN POTENTIAL DATING PARTNERS

Deciding on whether to go on a date with someone doesn’t have the same gravitas as deciding if someone should go to prison for the rest of their lives. Leaving the prison metaphor aside, online dating sites can determine who you may live with the rest of your life. Deception in selecting a date and possibly a mate for life is serious business. And word on the street is that people are sometimes deceptive in terms of what they say about themselves online.

Just ask Jeff Hancock. Hancock and his colleagues at Cornell University conducted a riveting study with eighty online daters in the New York City area. The people—half male and half female—were selected based on their profiles on one of four commercial dating sites. All included a picture; information about their weight, height, and age; and a written description of who they were along with their interests. After agreeing to participate, each visited the research lab, where they completed several questionnaires. Their pictures were taken, their driver’s licenses scanned, and their height and weight measured.

As you can see, Hancock was able to determine how deceptive the daters’ online information was now that he had independently validated age (from the driver’s license), height, and weight. He was also able to get a group of raters to compare the photo he took in the lab with the one displayed on the online posting. Men tended to lie about their height and women their weight. Both sexes posted pictures that were flattering compared to their lab pictures—although some people’s online pictures were much more flattering than others. From all the objective information he collected, Hancock calculated a deception index for each person.

The heart of the research was to determine if the word use in the online ads differed between the daters who were most deceptive and those most honest. Yes, there were differences and they were comparable to the other deception studies. Those who were most honest tended to say more, use bigger words and longer sentences, including fewer emotion words (especially positive emotions). The best general predictor of honesty was, not surprisingly, use of I-words.

Although the function words distinguished honest from deceptive online ads, there were also differences in content words. That is, people who were dishonest about their profiles tended to shift the focus of their self-description away from their sensitive topic. For example, women and men who lied about their weight were the least likely to mention anything about food, restaurants, or eating. Similarly, those whose pictures were the most deceptive tended to focus on topics of work and achievement in a way that built up their status and downplayed their physical appearance.

Do you really need a computer to assess how trustworthy a potential online match might be? Can’t we intuitively pick out the honest from the deceptive people by taking in all of the information that is available to us? Hancock’s research team paints a rather bleak picture. He solicited the help of about fifty students to rate each online profile for trustworthiness. The students’ estimates of honesty were no better than if you chose a trustworthy date by flipping a coin. One reason is that we tend to look at precisely the wrong language cues in guessing who is trustworthy. As raters of online ads, most of us assume that an upbeat, positive, simple, selfless, down-to-earth person is the most honest. And that, my friends, is why our “love detectors” are flawed instruments.

DECEIVING FOR WAR: THE LANGUAGE OF LEADERS PRIOR TO THE IRAQ WAR

Any student of history will undoubtedly look back on the relationship between the United States and Iraq after about 1950 and ask, “What were they thinking?” The “they” will refer to both countries. Perhaps the most puzzling turn of events in this relationship was the decision by the United States to invade Iraq in March 2003.

Immediately after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001, the administration of George W. Bush was convinced that Iraq may have played some role in the attacks. Without detailing the intricate history between the United States and Iraq, it should be noted that there was already some bad blood between the countries. Over the next year and a half, the Bush administration began raising more and more concerns about Iraq—including claims that it was harboring terrorists, building weapons of mass destruction, and planning for attacks on the West. With the benefit of hindsight, most of these concerns were unfounded. There were no terrorist training sites, no weapons of mass destruction, and no plans to attack anyone. Nevertheless, the increasing rhetoric about the danger of Iraq helped to propel the invasion and occupation of Iraq in March 2003.

The social dynamics of a democratic government starting a war are tremendously complex. During periods of high anxiety, rumors spread quickly and people are vulnerable to distorted information. Rumors and speculation, with enough repeating, slowly transform themselves into firmly held beliefs. The distinctions between deception and self-deception can quickly erode.

The Center for Public Integrity (CPI), an independent watchdog agency, is a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization that supports investigative journalism on a wide range of issues (www.publicintegrity.org). In the months and years after the Iraq invasion, CPI began to comb through all of the public statements by key administration officials about Iraq in the time between 9/11 and the war. Indeed, anyone can access the hundreds of statements from speeches, press conferences, op-ed pieces, and television and radio interviews. For the researcher, the task is made even easier in that those portions of text that have been verified to be false are highlighted. It makes you think … A word count researcher could simply compare the words in the nonhighlighted sections with the highlighted sections.

In fact, the very same Jeff Hancock who studied deception in online dating analyzed the CPI data bank. The Cornell group compiled 532 statements that contained at least one objectively false claim along with an equal number of true claims from the same sources. The statements, which were made between September 11, 2001, and September 11, 2003, were from eight senior Bush administration insiders: Bush himself, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and White House Press Secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan.

An example of information from the CPI database is an interview of Vice President Cheney on CNN’s
Late Edition
on March 24, 2002. The interviewer, Wolf Blitzer, asked Cheney if he supported the United Nations sending weapons inspectors into Iraq to try to find any evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Cheney responded (note that the highlighted sections were identified by CPI as deceptive; those not highlighted are presumed to be truthful):

What we said, Wolf, if you go back and look at the record is, the issue’s not inspectors. The issue is that he has chemical weapons and he’s used them. The issue is that he’s developing and has biological weapons. The issue is that he’s pursuing nuclear weapons.
It’s the weapons of mass destruction and what he’s already done with them. There’s a devastating story in this week’s
New Yorker
magazine on his use of chemical weapons against the Kurds of northern Iraq back in 1988; may have hit as many as 200 separate towns and villages. Killed upwards of 100,000 people, according to the article, if it’s to be believed.

This is a man of great evil, as the president said. And he is actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time, and we think that’s cause for concern for us and for everybody in the region.
And I found during the course of my travels that it is indeed a problem of great concern for our friends out there as well too.

Computer text analyses comparing the truthful with the deceptive statements resulted in findings comparable to the others reported. Truthful statements were associated with higher rates of I-words. In addition, they were more nuanced, focused on more detail, and tended to be associated with fewer emotions. The above quotation is a good example of these differences. In the truthful section, Cheney is more detailed in his information, uses more complex sentences, and uses I-words.

As with the other deception projects, it is possible to estimate how well the computer could have picked out truthful versus deceptive statements. Hancock’s group reports that the computer could accurately distinguish between the true and false statements at a rate of 76 percent, where 50 percent is chance.

Be careful in interpreting these numbers, however. The ability to distinguish the truth from a lie is much easier after the fact when we know that deception was going on. If we are trying to guess the trustworthiness of statements of people for whom we have no evidence of deception, our guesses will likely be uninterpretable. There are two overlapping problems in determining deception—the first is that we don’t know what “ground truth” is. That is, what parts are, in fact, truthful. Second, we don’t know the base rate of truth. If we know that 50 percent of Cheney’s clauses are deceptive, we will interpret our computer output differently than if only 2 percent are deceptive. In the months leading up to the Iraq War, there was no reliable ground truth and certainly no sense of the degree of deception. And, to make issues even more troublesome, many of the deceptive statements made by the administration were likely believed by the people telling them.

WATCHWORDS: WHICH WORDS BEST PREDICT HONESTY AND DECEPTION