Reality Monitoring in Politics

‘Sleepy Joe’ and ‘Donald, King of Whoppers’: Reality Monitoring and Verbal Deception in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election Debates

“…It was an election that was characterized as ‘one of the nastiest presidential campaigns in recent memory’ (Gambino, 2020), partly because the general election debates were highly contentious (the first debate featured frequent interruptions by Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden snapped ‘will you shut up man?’ and the second debate featured several ‘insults and invectives’ between candidates; Thrush & Stevens, 2021). In this research as in Bond et al (2017, 2019), we compared the language used in the debates to fact-checked truths and lies using an RM deception detection algorithm in LIWC to investigate the veracity of real-life high-stakes verbal messages. We found that overall RM scores were lower and not significantly different between debate language and fact-checked lies, and RM scores were significantly higher in fact-checked truth statements, indicating that most debate language expressed was deceptive.…”

“…This might contribute to higher counts of negative emotion words. Many of his lies were told to enhance himself and to belittle others—one political tactic that serves to enhance self-representation (Arendt, 1968; Bond et al, 2019). However, in this study there was no significant main effect for Statement Type (lie, truth), so based on results, Mr. Trump generally expressed negative emotions in both truth and lie statements.…”

From political self-deception to self-deception in political theory

“…There are several bodies of empirical research that potentially cast light on when political lying is most likely to occur, how we might spot it, and what we might do to reduce it. For example, psychological research into the characteristic speech patterns of liars is now being applied to political speech (Bond et al 2019). Outside of the political sphere, there is a growing body of work in behavioural economics and experimental psychology exploring when, why and how much we lie (for example, Abeler et al 2014;Cappelen, Sørensen, and Tungodden 2013).…”

Political Self-Deception revisited: reply to comments

“…Actually, it is not clear whether such conditions make lying predictable or just detectable. Certainly, the study of political speech pattern for lie detector is not useful for predicting lying (Bond et al 2019), but also the list of conditions that Baderin gets from behavioural economics, which are tailored on individuals and not on groups, says more about how to discover a lie than how to predict it. 2 Thus, while I cannot rule out the possibility of predicting lying in general, it seems to me that political SD, which is a collective product, is more clearly predictable than lying, which is an individual act.…”