Fantasy proneness as a confounder of verbal lie detection tools

Untangling a Web of Lies: Exploring Automated Detection of Deception in Computer-Mediated Communication

“…Regarding flattering, our field study confirms Zhou et al's [80] by showing that linguistic elements of flattery and praise indicate severe deception. However, contrary to Fuller et al [31] as well as Schelleman-Offermans and Merckelbach [64], we did not find a negative relation between contextual embedding and deception in CMC by business partners. This speech act describes the spatial location and timely occurrence of an event; apparently, given the expectations in business communication, even severe deceivers cannot avoid contextualizing the place and time of the event that "entitled" them to request benefits.…”

Are you as good as me at telling a story? Individual differences in interpersonal reality monitoring

“…The richer their statements were compared to the other person's statement, the more critical they were when evaluating the other person's statement. Previous research has already demonstrated that a good story teller is more likely to be judged as more truthful than a poor story teller (Merckelbach, 2004;Ruby & Brigham, 1997;Schelleman-Offermans & Merckelbach, 2010). Our results present a more complicated pattern, by showing that the perception of a person as a good or a poor story teller depends on the ability of the receivers themselves to tell a good story.…”

“…Indeed, the few studies that have examined individual differences have revealed significant effects. For example, public self-consciousness and ability to act were negatively correlated with RM scores (Vrij, Edward, & Bull, 2001), and high and low fantasy-prone individuals gave different descriptions (in terms of content qualities) of incidents they had experienced (Merckelbach, 2004;Schelleman-Offermans & Merckelbach, 2010). In the present experiment, we explored whether the tendency to provide rich or poor statements is stable across situations, that is, stable when discussing different topics.…”

Systematic errors (biases) in applying verbal lie detection tools: richness in detail as a test case

“…Indeed, the few studies that have examined individual differences have revealed significant effects. For example, public self-consciousness and ability to act were negatively correlated with RM scores (Vrij, Edward, & Bull, 2001), and high and low fantasy prone individuals gave different descriptions (in terms of content qualities) of incidents they had experienced (Merckelbach, 2004;Schelleman-Offermans & Merckelbach, 2010). Newman, Groom, Handelman, and Pennebaker (2008), who analyzed 14,000 texts collected from females and males, showed that texts provided by females included more senses (e.g., touch, hold, feel), sound details (e.g., heard, listen, sounds), motion verbs (e.g., walk, go), and emotions than texts provided by males.…”