This study hypothesized that observer-judges may require familiarity with a communicator's nonverbal behavior while truthful in order to accurately recognize when this person is lying. Such an assumption is consistent with polygraph research and field applications where measures of physiological arousal during suspected deceit are compared to a baseline for that person. Untrained, inexperienced observers saw videotaped samples (without sound) of interviewees' truthful behavior ("familiarity sample") before deciding whether a subsequent sample (judgment sample") of these same communicators showed truthful or deceptive messages. These videotaped interviewees had been pre-instructed to be totally truthful or to lie to a portion of the interviewer's questions. / Three judgment conditions were arranged, each differing from the other according in the degree of accuracy or completeness of the baseline information which the judges received accompanying the familiarity samples. Group 1 was instructed that the familiarity might be truthful or deceptive and to view it simply to become familiar with the interviewee's repertoire of behaviors. Group 2 was accurately told the sample depicted truthful responding. Group 3 was deceptively told that the (truthful) familiarity sample showed the speaker lying. The study's major hypothesis predicted that group 2 would outperform group 1, whereas an exploratory hypothesis predicted that group 1 would be more accurate than group 3. / Although the performance of each judgement group was in the expected direction, the differences were not statistically significant. However, additional analysis indicated that group 2 were the only judges whose accuracy level exceeded the dictates of chance, and they outperformed the misinformed judges (group 3) at a statistically significant level. It was speculated that inexperienced judges may hold invalid assumptions about what constitutes relevant nonverbal clues and, together with their unhoned observational skills, may be unable to employ available baseline information in an advantageous way. It was proposed that there are still compelling reasons to believe that appropriate baseline information has the potential to enhance judgment accuracy although it may not be a necessary and sufficient condition for accurate detection. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 44-07, Section: B, page: 2254. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1983.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_75156 |
| Contributors | MURRAY, JOHN JOSEPH., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 150 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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