Lying and Truth-Telling in Social Interaction: Basic Mechanisms

16:30 - 18:00

Semantic and Social Aspects of Language Production

Room: HSZ - 7E02

Chair/s:

Kirsten Stark, Rasha Abdel Rahman

Language production––far from happening in the vacuum––is shaped by socio-emotional and thematic contexts and the goals and qualities of social interactions. This symposium explores how semantic, social, and emotional aspects shape language production at different levels of granularity, from the access to the mental lexicon to free verbal interactions. The symposium kicks off with three talks exploring the continuous naming paradigm, known to induce cumulative semantic interference (CSI), i.e., slower naming with each additional member of a (semantic) category being named. Marisha Herb presents pooled analyses of seven experiments and introduces cosine similarity as a unifying measure to quantify different types of semantic relations. The next two talks use browser-based applications of the same paradigm to examine subtypes of thematic relations that have received comparably little empirical attention so far: Dimitra Tsiapou investigates emotional language production, exploring how emotional action verbs (related to basic emotions happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, surprise) elicit an emotion-specific CSI effect. Annika Speckhahn examines social context in language production, demonstrating how words from associatively related social categories (children’s play, conflict, parenthood) shape the CSI effect. Shifting focus to interactive language use, Kirsten Stark presents findings from three online experiments on verbal deception and honesty. She shows that while lying is slower than truth-telling, truth-telling is far from being immune to the social-deceptive context, highlighting the role of planning, control, and monitoring processes involved. Finally, Giusy Cirillo takes a further turn towards real-life interactions and explores how early vocabulary acquirement is shaped by social alignment between toddlers and caregivers: Using a multiphase experimental paradigm with free interaction, referential, and object recognition tasks, she explores how 22- and 30 month-old toddlers’ early language acquisition is modulated by the way caregivers adapt their language to the toddler’s age and knowledge. Throughout these talks, the symposium aims to showcase innovative experimental, browser-based, and response-time sensitive methods for studying language production in both experimental and real-life contexts and various age groups.

The symposium will be chaired by Kirsten Stark and Prof. Dr. Rasha Abdel Rahman¹ (rasha.abdel.rahman@hu-berlin.de). Prof. Abdel Rahman will not give a talk herself.

Submission 231

Lying and Truth-Telling in Social Interaction: Basic Mechanisms

SymposiumTalk-01

Presented by: Kirsten Stark

Kirsten Stark ^{1, 2}, Rasha Abdel Rahman ^{1, 2}

¹ Department of Neurocognitive Psychology, Humboldt-University Berlin and Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Germany

² Einstein Center for Neurosciences, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany

Although deception mostly occurs in the spoken or written language, verbal deception––lying–– has received comparably little attention from both deception and language production research. Here we present three pre-registered online experiments (total N=118, aged 18-35) using a novel paradigm to investigate lying and truth-telling in a socially interactive setting. Participants engaged in a picture-naming card game with a simulated task partner, sometimes choosing to lie strategically by producing the name of a card associated with their current card. Across experiments, they were slower to initiate lying than truth-telling, as shown by linear mixed-effects regression models. Interestingly though, response times (RT) and typing durations (analyzed across experiments) of truth-responses were relatively more affected by the social lying context than lie-responses, as shown by a comparison to a control task. In Experiments 2 and 3, we additionally manipulated memory load by displaying the potential lie underneath the current card (Experiment 2) and by comparing semantically related and unrelated truths and lies (e.g., skirt-pants vs. skirt-fork; Experiment 3). Here, lying was more strongly affected by task-associated memory load than truth-telling, but to a similar degree as non-deceptive responses in the control task. Taken together, while underscoring the robustness of RT-slowing in lying, these results hint at a special role of the truth and limited specificity for the effects observed in lying. Indicating influences of planning, control, and monitoring processes, the results can inform and integrate theories of deception and language production. Studying (verbal) lying offers novel perspectives to both research fields.

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