Generalized Communicative Suspicion

Generalized communicative suspicion (GCS) is a predisposition toward believing that other people's messages are deceptive. GCS is conceptually different from state suspicion. A valid instrument was built to measure GCS. Contrary to expectations, GCS scores are not consistently related with deception judgments.

Generalized communicative suspicion was first defined by Timothy R. Levine and Steven McCornack, who established a distinction between GCS and situationally aroused (or state) suspicion. GCS was described as a predisposition toward believing that other people's messages are deceptive. It was conceived as a relatively enduring personality trait. On the contrary, state suspicion is aroused by situational cues that suggest that in a particular context, at a particular time, a particular communication of a particular person may be deceptive. Unlike GCS, state suspicion is transient. While GCS depends on the person, state suspicion depends on the situation.

Levine and McCornack created a scale to measure GCS with 14 Likert-type items. Several validation studies have been conducted. On most occasions, some items have been removed because of low-factor loadings, high cross-loadings, or a small contribution to total-scale reliability. The final scale has been shown to measure a unidimensional construct, with Cronbach's alpha ranging from 0.71 to 0.82 depending on the particular study. The GCS scale has significant positive correlations with related constructs, such as lie acceptability, cynicism, negativism, and verbal aggressiveness, as well as significant negative correlations with trustworthiness, interpersonal trust, specific trust, and locus of control. The correlations are not as high as to suggest that the construct being measured is the same. These correlations make sense theoretically and support the construct validity of GCS. The original English-language scale was translated into Spanish (11 items, alpha equals 0.82) and German (with alphas ranging from 0.77 to 0.85).

[Page 405]

A West Midlands, United Kingdom, police officer gives a driver a breathalyzer test as part of a drunk driving crackdown in 2010. Police officers are repeatedly exposed to suspicion-arousing situations in which distrust is the norm, which may increase their tendency toward generalized communicative suspicion.

Research has shown that state suspicion significantly increases the tendency to judge other people's messages as lies. GCS should have a similar effect; specifically, in comparison with low-GCS individuals, high-GCS individuals should have a stronger tendency to judge other people's messages as lies, or they should at least react more strongly to increases in state suspicion. Several studies have examined these issues.

Levine and McCornack showed that moderate- and high-GCS individuals were more likely to make deception judgments (judging the incoming messages as lies) than low-GCS individuals. This effect held when controlling for state suspicion. Additional analyses revealed that GCS and state suspicion influenced deception judgments in a nonadditive manner. Subsequent research, however, yielded less positive results. Another study by McCornack and Levine showed that whereas state suspicion significantly influenced the number of deception judgments, neither GCS nor the GCS times state suspicion interaction did.