Significance of Gazes or Stare in
Detecting Deceit
(An Analysis about a Nonverbal communication act and
Interpersonal Deception Theory)
Nonverbal behaviors that enhance or decrease intimacy and involvement are also intertwined with affect and are natural responses in our interactions with others (Edinger & Patterson, 1983). For example, attraction toward someone is expressed nonverbally, often automatically and unconsciously, through increased eye contact, closer approach distances, increased touching, and positive facial expressions, all of which may induce positive affect in the target. Nonverbal deception then is any and all nonverbal cues which accompany deception that is not the worded lie. This nonverbal deception can be any nonverbal communication and a simple example of this is looking into one’s eyes.
Of all the areas of the body that can reveal deception cues, the face is probably the most important one. Just the eyes alone can tell one a great deal about the truthfulness of an answer. Gaze avoidance for instance is not an excellent nonverbal cue. If one is lying and doesn’t make eye contact when he/she should, then a lie could be taking place. Of course, many learn as children to look at someone when you lie to them to make them believe you are truthful. And, if one is looking at something else while talking to you, does that mean they are lying? One could be distracted by something else, or simply positioned in a way with an inability to face you. So, simple gaze avoidance may or may not be useful in lie detection.
Why do we say, “Are you really telling the truth? If you are, then look directly into my eyes”? This paper aims to elaborate the effectiveness of eye contact in delivering information to a receiver. Also, how eye contact is used to detect deception from a deceiver to the receiver. A Gaze or a stare is a variation of an eye contact. Eye contact is referred as looking directly into the eyes of another person. It is such a powerful, emotionally loaded act of communication that we normally restrict it to very brief glances. Eye contact has several levels. These is the “across the room”, conversational and prolonged eye contact. These types of eye contact may not be applicable in every situation. But in this particular communication act, it is certainly applicable due to the interference of flirtation in the process. This will then lead us into focusing a particular type which is commonly called the conversational eye contact.
I will analyze a communication act that is common nowadays. A man and a woman are both soaked in a Jacuzzi (Just the two of them) with the man asking the girl if she likes him or not. The girl seems to say things opposite to what she shows with the use of her eyes. Since it’s just the two of them, it is expected that the conversation is intimate and is focused in each other’s responses. Since it is the man who initiated the conversation, he is expected to ask more questions than the woman. In this communication act, it is quite apparent that the man’s questions are greatly affected by the woman’s stare during the conversation.
Nonverbal cues to deception are simply any messages that send clues that deception is taking place. These cues are, of course, nonverbal and the initiator is usually not aware of the information that is leaking out simply because of the nonverbal cues.
Nonverbal cues are just natural actions that accompany deceptive communication. Although everyone is guilty of sending these cues, they aren’t guilty of doing it on purpose. These cues aren’t an effect of conscious effort, but rather of subconscious doings. Whether one is telling the truth or telling a lie, the body sends out different cues for each that can be more revealing then the spoken words.
Most people aren’t really that good in picking lies. For there are things that must be taken into consideration that are neglected. The first is how credible the statement is, the second is its consistency with other statements and other things the person being lied to knows. People note that the movement of the eyes or simply looking into someone’s eyes as indicators of truthfulness or lies. However people only use it to confirm whatever they think anyway, to feel more secure about thinking it’s a lie, or to feel more secure about thinking it’s the truth. Furthermore the average individual judges statement accuracy on how plausible it is, which for obvious reasons isn’t especially accurate.
This communication act is supported by The Interpersonal Deception Theory by David B. Buller and Judee K. Burgoon. I will also identify the types of eye contact and the deception strategy used in the conversation. Lying is complicated and it is considered as complicated because the receiver/s is/are not able to discover the truth unless he/she tries to ask the deceiver and/or if the deceiver would really reveal the truth.
For a specific analysis, the conversation and the gazing points are noted:
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(The man stares at the woman for approximately, 15 seconds and the woman stares back )
Woman: what? Man: Nothing.. (he whispered something to the woman) Woman: don’t look at me. Just leave anyway (with a glance and a smile) : (stares) Are you okay? It seems like you are waiting for me. Man: What then if I am? (glances) Woman: Why? You’re my friend. Man: I feel like our friendship is outside the boundaries. Woman: No (but stares with eyes slowly blinking) Man: We’re just friends? Woman: Yeah. You make me feel comfortable. (stares at him again eye to eye, approximately 5-10 seconds with her eyes slowly blinking) Man: Friends? : Nothing more nothing less? Woman: yeah (sighs, closes her eyes and lets the man stare at her) : (initiates an eye to eye contact with the man and slowly looks away) Man: Do you wanna say anything to me? Seriously? Woman: It wouldn’t matter now, we’re good friends. Man: okay then. Friends. |
Conversational eye contact is characterized by a few glances (more often than the across the room eye contact) and most importantly, the “looking away” technique. This type of eye contact is apparently performed in the presented communication act. First, we must take note that the subjects has reached the 2nd level of Eye contact strategy (Across the room as the 1st level and Prolonged as the 3rd) since they are already friends when the conversation took place. And so, It is noticeable that they were already able to establish a relationship however, not yet platonic.
Under some circumstances, gaze leads to increased feelings of attraction or liking, as increased eye gaze has in some cases been associated with more favorable socio-emotional evaluations toward the gazer (Goldberg, Kiesler, and Collins, 1969). Finally, it has been suggested that gaze increases compliance only when the appropriate course of action is clear and unambiguous (Ellsworth & Langer, 1976).
As the conversation progresses, it is evident that the man is greatly affected by the woman’s answers especially when she seems to convey an intricate meaning when she looks at him. It is said that, sometimes, it is more important how a message was said than what was actually said. This is where IDT enters. IDT is a theory that describes deception that is used in conversation between two people (Mahajan, 1). Deception is defined as an untruthful message that a sender tells to a receiver (Funk and Wagnalls, 164). All dishonesty should be considered within two contexts, who is (possibly) deceived, and the dimensions of the deception. There are two people that can be deceived by deception. The first is the party other than the person being deceptive. The second is the person who is making the lie.
A deceiver is knowingly manipulating information, which is usually presented in a sincere way. The deceiver may be unconscious of this, but he/she, may not realize that they are practicing “leakage”. Receivers usually look about 70-75% of the time, with each gaze averaging 7.8 seconds. If receivers look for only 15% of the time, they might be considered cold, pessimistic, cautious, defensive, immature, evasive or indifferent. If they look over 80% of the time, they might be considered friendly, self-confident, natural or sincere (Burgoon, 20).
Since I have determined the type of eye contact used by the deceiver and the receiver, it would then be necessary to identify the deception strategy used by the woman. Since the deceiver (in this case, the woman) is the one who conveys vague messages pertaining to her verbal and nonverbal communication gestures, it is manifested that she performs the deception strategy called Concealment. Concealment is described as deception strategy that hides a secret (Mahajan, 8).
The receiver (the man) perhaps is able to detect deception and so he repetitively asks his question, “We’re just friends?”. In this case, the woman is obviously showing different things. When she says, “Yeah, we’re just friends” she then follows it with an eye contact that is flirtatious.
According to Buller and Burgoon, messages related to credibility are a central feature of interpersonal exchanges and deviations from truthful behavior cause receivers to become suspicious (Buller, Strzyzewski, & Hunsaker, 1991). This suspicion is manifested in a combination of strategic and nonstrategic behavior which can be detected by senders (i.e., truthtellers or deceivers). When senders perceive suspicion, they alter their behavior to convey a truthful demeanor and allay suspicion. Thus, deceptive interactions contain strategic moves and countermoves by both deceiver and deceived. Consequently, research on observers of deceptive conversations may not be entirely applicable to conversational participants (Buller, Strzyzewski, & Hunsaker, 1991; Hunsaker, 1991). In this case, the may have detected that the deceiver is trying to deceive him and so, he develops suspicion.
In IDT, receivers’ suspicions are an important aspect of deceptive conversations. Suspicion affects receivers’ actions and reactions to messages from senders in interpersonal exchanges altering probing questions (Buller, Strzyzewski, & Comstock, 1991). Conversational participants may be at a greater disadvantage relative to observers when their suspicions are aroused. Suspicion places additional cognitive demands on participants who already have many conversational responsibilities. Consequently, participants may be less capable of surveying in-coming communication and judging its veracity while maintaining a smooth, coherent conversation than are observers.
According to Buller, Strzyzewski, & Hunsaker, A potentially important difference between conversational participants and observers is participants’ tendency to attribute more honesty to another than observers. In this case, I am the observer. Participants may base their judgments on conventions or heuristics- A mental short cut used to bypass the huge clutter of verbal and nonverbal signals which bombard us throughout every conversation- rather than on the behaviors manifested by senders. Truthfulness is a fundamental and essential maxim of conversation, allowing communicators to infer indirect meaning rather than relying entirely on what is made explicit.
Conversational participants actually are a form of observer, because they are evaluating the behavior of the conversational partner, not their own behavior. However, several studies on interpersonal interaction have shown that the fundamental attribution error also produces more favorable attributions by conversational participants than by observers (Buller, Strzyzewski, & Hunsaker, 1991; Burgoon & Newton, 1991; Street, Mulac, & Wiemann, 1988).
It may be particularly constructive to participants as they administer on-going conversations. Participants have several conversational tasks: They must determine and interpret messages, provide related comments, stay on topic, discuss relational dynamics, handle their images, and uphold conversational continuity through appropriate turn-taking. On the other hand, observers have few conversational responsibilities, save the decoding of incoming messages. This makes them more capable of focusing on the sender’s performance when judging veracity, while participants choose to assume truthfulness in order to cope with conversational demands.
They speculated that the conversational demands on participants instantiated the truth-bias-Our persistent expectation that people will tell the truth- heuristic and caused them to overlook cues to deception. By contrast, the fewer conversational demands on observers, the lack of the truth-bias heuristic, and the observational setting may have made observers more sensitive to behavioral changes linked to deception. Notably, participants relied more on facial cues, which may be more conspicuous due to their close physical proximity to the sender (Hall, 1973), whereas observers relied more on vocal cues when judging truthfulness.
It is perceived that in the given situation, the woman who is the suspicious participant and the one who provides seemingly intricate information has longer response latencies, were more conscious in her verbal presentation, and made more speech errors than non-suspicious participants. It is also noticeable that she provides the reverse of her answers through her gazes to the deceived. These competing strains placed on conversational participants by suspicion and the resulting uncertainty caused by their limited ability to judge truthfulness may cause participants to dump their truth-bias and rely instead on a heuristic that assumes dishonesty, thereby manifesting a lie-bias.
It is possible, though, for suspicion to aid conversational participants. Suspicion may elicit detection strategies unavailable to outside observers, like exerting more control over the conversation (Burgoon et al., 1992; Toris & DePaulo, 1985) or attempting to mislead the partner into believing that the participant is not suspicious of them (Buller, Strzyzewski, & Comstock, 1991). Such detection strategies provide less, or erroneous, feedback on deception success to the sender and reduce the sender’s ability to hide deceit. However, such moves increase conversational complexity, nullifying their benefits to participants.
The effects of suspicion were disappointing but may not be too surprising given the earlier discussion of how communicators often ignore information suggesting that conversational maxims have been violated (Kraut & Higgins, 1984). During the conversations, suspicion neither aided observers by increasing their surveillance of interviewee behavior nor did it help participants enact successful detection strategies (although Buller, Strzyzewski, and Comstock, 1991, did report that suspicious participants in the original experiment encoded less skeptical probing questions.
Contrary to popular belief, past studies have provided little evidence for the benefits of suspicion in deception detection. It seems that the most common effect of suspicion on receivers is to evoke a lie-bias. It does not appear that greater detection motivation and vigilance (the two aspects of suspicion most strongly manipulated in this study) produce real improvements in people’s abilities to evaluate a source’s honesty or dishonesty. Instead, the expectation of deceit may have the most pervasive effect on attributions.
Notably, the truth-bias created by conversational participation countermanded the lie-bias associated with suspicion. Participants were unaffected by the suspicion induction. It may be that the conversational tasks required them to assume truth in order to enact a smooth conversation. Or, it may be that the anti-detection strategies enacted by senders mislead participants.
Suspicious observers, however, showed the lie-bias characteristic of suspicion, but interestingly only when watching truth tellers. Perhaps, truth tellers engaged in fewer anti-detection strategies than deceivers (Buller, Strzyzewski, & Comstock, 1991) and, therefore, exhibited some behaviors that observers consider signs of dishonesty, like more random body movement, reinforcing the lie-bias. Deceivers, though, may have attenuated observers’ lie-bias, because they muted their bodily activity.
Reliance on facial cues particularly eye contact is likely to mislead a receiver when judging deception, because they are well controlled by communicators (Buller & Burgoon, in press; Ekman & Friesen, 1969; Zuckerman et al., 1981; Zuckerman & Driver, 1985). Participants believe that most conversational partners are truthful because they focus on the channel which provides the least accurate cues to honesty.
Spotting a liar is difficult, and some say that it is nearly impossible. According to professor of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco, few people are able to spot deception more than 50% of the time. His study also reported that federal officials performed best at lie detecting, being able to correctly guess 73% of the time. This is because of their Training, experience, and motivation. Therefore, not many can actually distinguish between truth and fallacy unless they are looking for a sign of deception, and unless they have significant amounts of practice doing so.
A few signs that give a liar away are that they either stare at you or can’t seem to meet your gaze. Often a liar doesn’t know what to do with his or her eyes, lest it becomes obvious they are lying. As a result, they overdo one or the other: staring or gazing off into space. Therefore according to this, if the person in front of you is staring at you until they absolutely have to blink, and is speaking exceptionally quickly, you could, with about 50% accuracy say that he or she is lying.
Therefore, the woman in the communication act really shows actions that are subjected to suspicion. She may not be aware of these actions but the receiver of information is somehow given non-verbal cues to detect her deceit.
The references will be posted in a few days..
there’s just a technical failure.,
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