Detecting social signals of honesty and fear of appearing deceitful: A methodological proposal

This paper proposes an original methodology designed to single out the speaker's social signals expressing either honesty or anxiety induced by his awareness of being suspected of deceit. 24 participants were randomly assigned to one of the three following experimental conditions (namely A, B and C), manipulated during a face-to-face interview. In condition A, participants could win an undeserved resource, but only by deceiving by dissimulation the researcher. In condition B, participants could win a resource they deserved, but only by persuading their interviewer they were not deceiving her. In condition C (control), researchers awarded a participant with a resource they deserved. All participants in condition A decided not to dissimulate. All participants in condition B debated for earning the resource they deserved. On the base of videos unobtrusively recorded during interactions of researcher-participant dyads, interviews were analyzed both by a multimodal analysis of face-to-face communication and by F.A.C.S. analysis. Social signals detected during honest communication (condition A) significantly differed from social signals shown during defensive communication (condition B). In order to contribute to the study of further behavioral signals of dissimulation, the paper discusses the importance of a finegrained detection of social signals of honesty and fear of being suspected of deceit.