Linguistic Concreteness of True and False Intentions: A Mega-Analysis

Abstract

Our aim was to examine how people communicate their true and false intentions. Based on construal level theory (Trope & Liberman, 2010), we predicted that statements of true intentions would be more concretely phrased than statements of false intentions. True intentions refer to more likely future events than false intentions, they should be mentally represented at a lower level of mental construal. This should be mirrored in more concrete language use. Transcripts of truthful and deceptive statements about intentions from six previous experimental studies (total N = 528) were analyzed using two automated verbal content analysis approaches: a folk-conceptual measure of concreteness (Brysbaert, Warriner, and Kuperman, 2014) and linguistic category model scoring (Seih, Beier, & Pennebaker, 2017). Contrary to our hypotheses, veracity did not predict statements’ concreteness scores, suggesting that automated verbal analysis of linguistic concreteness is not a viable deception-detection technique for intentions.

A concrete example of construct construction in natural language

“…Researchers in organizational behavior has begun to incorporate concreteness as a framework to understand how people pursue many kinds of personal and organizational goals (Wiesenfeld, Reyt, Brockner & Trope, 2017). For example, the linguistic expression of concreteness has been studied in a diverse set of goal pursuit domains, including deception detection (Kleinberg et al, 2019;Calderon et al, 2019),…”