Relatively stable perceptions of truthfulness tend to develop in relationships, although situations may arise causing partners to become suspicious of one another. The truth bias that grows as relationships develop was conceptualized as a cognitive heuristic for judging a partner's veracity. This study of relational partners investigates the influence of the truth bias and aroused suspicion on judgments of truthfulness. Using a 2 × 2 × 2 experimental design, one partner was assigned the role of interviewee who responded either truthfully or deceptively to questions about his or her emotional reactions to a pair of film clips. The other partner was assigned to the role of an interviewer who was either suspicious or not suspicious and made judgments about his or her partner's veracity. Findings were consistent with the truth bias hypothesis. Partners in well-developed relationships demonstrated a strong truth bias, resulting in greater judgments of truthfulness and (somewhat) lower detection accuracy. Suspicion aroused by a third party served to offset this heuristic and lead to greater judgments of deceptiveness. The implications of these findings for research on social cognition and deceptive communication are discussed.

This paper develops an empirical means of tracking involvement in a relational double‐bind in hostage negotiations as a means of monitoring the extent to which the hostage takers developed more cooperative or competitive relational parameters with police negotiators. Verbal immediacy was used to track the hostage takers double bind problems across nine different hostage negotiations. The results indicated that the purpose for taking hostages greatly influenced the kinds of paradoxes displayed by the hostage takers. Mentally ill hostage takers became cooperative early in the negotiation, but then turned more competitive as the negotiation unfolded. Hostage takers caught in the act of committing a crime became competitive early and then became more cooperative as time elapsed The hostage takers involved in domestic violence remained competitive throughout the interaction.

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