It is easy to imagine creating a system to automatically analyze letters of recommendation. Many companies might be interested in this product. This is both an intriguing and an unsettling idea. For a computerized system to work efficiently, multiple letters of recommendation would need to be collected from each letter writer. It is likely that the computer would do as well or perhaps slightly better than human readers. The real problem is that letters of recommendation are currently not very diagnostic in predicting students’ future performance. A computer program may help in the selection process but the danger is that company executives may start taking the program’s results too seriously. Remember that language analyses are all probabilistic and recommendation letters are often a small part of the decision to hire someone.
THE LANGUAGE OF LYING, LIARS, AND SCOUNDRELS: IN SEARCH OF THE LINGUISTIC LIE DETECTOR
The line between self-deception and all-out deception is not entirely clear. Is the self-deceptive student who claims that the death of his father was not a problem actually trying to deceive his family or friends into thinking he was stronger than he really was? Is the self-deceptive writer of letters of recommendation being deceptive by attempting to influence the people who receive the letters? If there is a linguistic fingerprint for self-deception, is it similar to one that might emerge when people are actively lying to others?
The prospect of a linguistic lie detector has intrigued parents, spouses, teachers, car buyers, people in law enforcement, and just about everyone else for generations. In theory, developing such a system should be possible. Sigmund Freud, for example, suggested that people’s true feelings sometimes leak out and can be seen through subtle speech errors, such as slips of the tongue. Slips of the tongue are most likely to occur when a person is thinking of one thing but having to talk about something else.
Once you start paying attention, slips of the tongue are surprisingly common—in natural conversation, e-mails, online chats, and even formal lectures and speeches. Just last week a friend who works in an office with a domineering boss sent me a message from work: “Are you free for coffee after work? I’d like to have a quit talk with you.” What she meant to say was a “quick talk” rather than a “quit talk.” When we met, I opened our conversation with “So tell me why you want to quit your job.” My friend was amazed at my brilliant psychological insight.
There are many other ways that the words we use can reveal our deceptions. In 1994, Union, South Carolina, residents were horrified to learn that the car of one of their neighbors, Susan Smith, had apparently been hijacked on a nearby country road with her young children still in it. Smith claimed that an African-American male had forced her from the car and had sped away. For over a week, Smith made powerful appeals to the hijacker on national television to return her children. Before she was an official suspect, Smith told the reporters, “My children wanted me. They needed me. And now I can’t help them.”
The FBI agents on the case paid particular attention to that statement. Why had she used past tense when talking about her children? Only someone with knowledge of her own children’s death would talk of them in the past. Several days later Smith confessed to the drowning of her children by driving her car into a lake. Her motive was to get rid of the children so that she could marry a local businessman who didn’t want to be burdened with an instant family.
ON THE SURFACE, building a linguistic lie detector should be simple. Find a large number of instances where people tell the truth and compare their word use with instances where people lie. The problem is that there are dozens of ways that people can deceive. Some are intentional, others are not. Some are large lies with life-changing consequences if the liar is caught, others are no more than parlor games. Some lies involve creating elaborate stories whereas others may simply involve omitting or adding some crucial information to an otherwise true story. Lies also differ in their ultimate goals, which may include gaining status, money, or sex; avoiding shame or punishment; or just having fun. Perhaps most important is the context in which lies are told. A person who is being interrogated by the police is likely to use words differently than the same person who is trying to get an elderly couple to buy some nonexistent ocean-side property. Although the work on linguistic lie detection is in its early stages, some exciting language patterns are beginning to emerge.
CATCHING FALSE STORIES
One reason for Susan Smith’s downfall was that her stories about her missing children didn’t match her language use. Telling a false story is harder than you might think. A convincing lie requires describing events and feelings that you have not directly experienced. In a sense, you don’t “own” a fictional story in the same way you do a true one. Similarly, when constructing a false story you have to make an educated guess about what realistically could have occurred.
Real and Imaginary Traumas In the 1990s, Melanie Greenberg, Arthur Stone, and Camille Wortman at the State University of New York at Stony Brook ran a wonderfully creative expressive writing study to see if there were health benefits to writing about imaginary traumas. The authors first enlisted approximately seventy people who reported having had a major traumatic experience in their lives. Half of the people who came to the lab wrote about their own traumas. The essence of each trauma was then summarized in a few lines. Soon, the other half of the participants visited the lab, but this group did not write about their own traumas. Instead, each was given a brief trauma summary from someone who had already written about a trauma. The new group was told to imagine that they had experienced that particular trauma and to write about it as if it had happened to them.
Half of the essays, then, were people’s real traumas and the other half were imagined traumas. Both sets of essays were surprisingly powerful. In fact, the researchers discovered that writing about an imaginary trauma was almost as therapeutic as writing about a real one. In reading the essays it is often impossible to know which ones were real and which ones were made up.
However, computer analyses of the two sets of essays revealed a large number of striking differences. First, people writing about their own real traumas simply wrote more words than people writing about imaginary traumas. They were able to supply more details about what they did and didn’t do. They also used first-person singular pronouns more—words such as I, me, and my. Real stories also included fewer emotional words—both positive and negative emotions—than imaginary stories. Finally, the real stories used fewer verbs and cognitive (or thinking) words than the imaginary ones.
This jumble of effects is not that surprising. Consider the meaning of each of the language differences. Writing about real experiences is associated with:
• More words, bigger words, more numbers, more details. If you have experienced a real trauma in your life it is easy for you to describe what happened. You can describe the details of the experience without having to do much thinking. Some of the details include information about time, space, and movement.
• Fewer emotion and cognitive words. If you have lived through a trauma, your emotional state is obvious. For example, if your father died, most people don’t then say “and I was really sad.” It is implicit in the experience. However, people who haven’t experienced the death think to themselves, “Well, if my father died I would feel very sad so I should mention that in my essay.” The person who has had a trauma in the past already has a reasonable story to explain it. The person who is inventing the story must do more thinking—and use more cognitive words to explain it.
• Fewer verbs. There are a number of different types of verbs that can serve different functions in language. When a person uses more verbs it generally tells us that they are referring to more active and dynamic events. For a person who has had a trauma in the past, much of it is over. If you are writing about an imaginary trauma, you are living it as you tell about it. In addition, imaginary traumas cause people to ask themselves, “What would have happened? How would I have felt?” Discrepancy verbs such as would, should, coul
d, and ought were used at particularly high rates in the imaginary traumas.
• More self-references: I-words. Recall that I-words signal that people are paying attention to themselves—their feelings, their pain, themselves as social objects. By the same token, the use of first-person singular pronouns implies a sense of ownership. Not surprisingly, people writing about their own traumatic experiences were more acutely aware of their feelings and, at the same time, embraced their traumas as their own.
These language dimensions do a very nice job in distinguishing the real from the imaginary essays the participants wrote. Using some elegant statistics (a cross-validation strategy), we can estimate that our word categories would accurately classify 74 percent of essays as either real or imaginary. This is an interesting case because no deception was involved.
Real Versus Fabricated Stories: The Case of Stephen Glass In 1995, the magazine the New Republic hired a young and promising writer, Stephen Glass, who had just graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. Within a few months, he began publishing comments and then full-blown articles on a wide range of topics. Between December 1995 and May 1998, Glass published forty-one high-profile and often beautifully written articles. His colleagues and readers often marveled at his ability to find such interesting people to interview and to draw such colorful quotes from them.
Glass, it seems, was able to get such great stories and quotes by just making them up. When he was finally caught by the magazine’s editors, he was fired. An investigation revealed that at least six of his articles were completely invented, another twenty-one were partially fraudulent, and the remaining fourteen were likely trustworthy. An excellent movie on the Glass scandal was eventually made, Shattered Glass. And, in an ironic twist of fate, Glass ended up going to law school, presumably in search of truth and justice.
Is it possible that Glass left a linguistic fingerprint on his fabricated stories? Using our computerized text analysis program, I checked them out. By and large, the language analyses found that the completely fabricated and the likely true stories were quite different from each other and the partially fraudulent fell somewhere between the two. Glass’s real or likely true stories were characterized by the use of the following word categories:
• More words, more details, more numbers
• Fewer emotion (especially positive emotion) and cognitive words
• 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 p
remier 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.
The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us Page 15