Linguistic Concreteness of Statements of True and False Intentions

• Published in: Journal of applied research in memory and cognition 2023-12, Vol.12 (4), p.531-541
• Main Authors: Calderon, Sofia, Mac Giolla, Erik, Luke, Timothy J., Warmelink, Lara, Ask, Karl, Granhag, Pär Anders, Vrij, Aldert
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Abstraction; Automated Information Coding; Deception; Female; Honesty; Human; Intention; Linguistics; Male; Mirroring; Psychology; Psychology (excluding Applied Psychology); Psykologi; Psykologi (exklusive tillämpad psykologi); Text Analysis
• ISSN: 2211-3681; 2211-369X
• DOI: 10.1037/mac0000077

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, and they should therefore 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 et al., 2014) and linguistic category model scoring (Seih et al., 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. General Audience Summary Previous research shows that people express themselves in different ways depending on whether they are lying or telling the truth. It has, for example, been found that true accounts contain more sensory information and more details that can be checked or verified than false accounts. This study extends the previous literature by examining if concreteness can be used as a cue to deception. We relied on construal-level theory (CLT) that explains how people think about events that are not experienced directly, here and now. Simply put, events that are perceived to be "far away" from oneself are thought of more abstractly than events perceived as "near." For example, an unlikely event should be perceived as further away from oneself than a likely event and thereby thought of in more abstract terms. This should in turn be mirrored in the language people use to describe the different situations. In our study, we analyzed a large number of statements of true and false intentions-that is, lies and truths about the future-based on CLT assumptions. Specifically, since false intentions (lies) refer to unlikely events, they should be thought of and expressed in more abstract terms, whereas true intentions (truths) refer to likely events and should instead be thought of and expressed in more concrete terms. In this study, we reanalyzed statements collected in six previous experiments on true and false intentions. Specifically, we used two automated measures