Sender Demeanor

Sender demeanor refers to a person's tendency to convey a certain impression. Some people convey an impression of honesty; others, an impression of dishonesty. Senders convey these impressions to most people in most settings, whether they are lying or telling the truth.

The first evidence of sender demeanor was uncovered in a laboratory study in which participants were videotaped while telling lies and truths. Later, other participants viewed the resulting tapes. They judged which of the earlier participants had been lying and which had been telling the truth. Results showed large differences in sender credibility. Some senders appeared truthful to virtually all the judges, and other senders were almost always judged to be untruthful. Significantly, the senders who appeared most honest when they were lying were the very senders who appeared most honest when telling the truth. The investigators termed this pattern of results a demeanor bias.

A later analysis of results from hundreds of studies attempted to quantify the impact of individual differences on deception judgments. Of several individual differences considered, differences in judgment ability were smallest, and differences in sender demeanor were largest. People differ in the honesty of their demeanor at least 14 times as much as they differ in the ability to detect lies. As these results imply, judges agree on who appears honest and who appears dishonest; they agree even when their judgments are wrong.

Individual differences in apparent honesty are large in every situation in which the differences have been studied. People differ widely in [Page 844]apparent honesty when they tell motivated lies as well as white lies. They differ widely in apparent honesty when they engage in deceptive interactions and when their honesty is judged from a videotape. They differ widely in apparent honesty when (on average) their lies are detectable and when their lies are not. When Person A judges Person B's truthfulness, the largest single determinant of the judgment is Person B's demeanor, research suggests.

A recent series of experiments underscores the importance of individual differences in apparent honesty. Researchers began by videotaping people who were telling lies and truths, and solicited deception judgments of these videotapes from undergraduates. Using the undergraduates' judgments, they identified the people on the videotape who were perceived as most and least honest. The researchers then created two videotapes: a veracity-matched tape and a veracity-mismatched tape. On the veracity-matched tape were people who appeared honest and were telling the truth as well as people who appeared dishonest and were lying. On the veracity-mismatched tape were people who were telling the truth but appeared dishonest, as well as people who were lying but appeared honest.

The investigators solicited deception judgments to these two specially constructed tapes from a variety of judges: American undergraduates, Koreans, and U.S. government security agents. Without exception, judges were highly accurate in discriminating lies from truths on the veracity-matched tape. Without exception, they were highly inaccurate when judging the veracity-mismatched tape. Deception judgments can be more strongly affected by a sender's apparent truthfulness than the sender's actual truthfulness, as this research dramatically shows.

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