Sitan Chen

On the Cognitive Complexity and Specificity of Honesty in Lying

In his Secret Life of Pronouns, Pennebaker (2011) argues that the problem of
understanding the underlying emotional and social content of human communication can be
reduced to one of simply determining the frequency with which different classes of words occur.
One of the main tools with which he has carried out his scheme is the LIWC program, a piece of
software that classifies text along a wide spectrum of dimensions by the frequency of words in
categories ranging from first-person pronouns to "positive emotion words." In chapter six of his
book, he applies this program to the domain of deception, arguing that one of the universal
properties of deception is the use of words rich in cognitive complexity and detail, which could
take the form of big words, precise references to time, place, and motion, or "insight words" like
understand, think, conclude.
Such indicators will form the focus of our discussion. Specifically, we suggest the
following possible extension to Pennebaker's theory, namely that while the detail/ complexity of
false statements liars make may be low, that of the truthful statements they use to buttress these
lies may actually be higher than that of statements they make when completely telling the truth.
The intuition is that while speaking at length about the truth is admittedly much easier than
fashioning elaborate falsehoods, it's not necessarily easier than obfuscating vague falsehoods
with particularly specific, sophisticated truths.
Our first motivation comes from Hancock's work (2008) on analyzing the rhetoric US
officials used to justify the invasion of Iraq. Hancock finds that in interviews with these officials,
the use of "motion verbs" (indicating specificity) and "exclusives" (indicating cognitive
complexity) in objectively untrue parts of these interviews was markedly less than in the truthful
parts. Pennebaker cites this study and points to a prime example of such an interview to
illustrate, in which Dick Cheney claimed vaguely that Iraq was amassing nuclear weapons and
backed this with a detailed (truthful) account of Hussein's chemical attacks on Kurdish towns in
1988, referencing the locations of these attacks and even estimates of casualties. While this
certainly makes a strong case for Pennebaker's theory, we are left with the natural question:
would Cheney have gone into such detail had he presented the situation in Iraq honestly to begin
with?
According to one study that Pennebaker conducted, the answer seems to be no. He and a
collaborator conducted a "mock-crime" experiment in which the non-control participants were
told to steal something from a journal and then lie to the experimenter when asked about it.
Beyond concluding that the subjects' language was key to determining deception, the researchers
noted that whereas the innocent subjects commonly answered with a simple "no", the guilty ones
went off on a tangent, coming up with cognitively intricate denials involving references to time
and motion by claiming "I don't believe in stealingI did it once a long time ago " and "I would
never even think to look in the book to look for a dollarwas just writing in my journal for my
freshman seminar" (Pennebaker 243-244). The point is that the guilty subjects' detailed, nuanced
explanations seem to be just as big a giveaway as their avoidance of the question.
In search of more such evidence, we turned to the phenomenon of academic fraud,
reasoning that fraudulent papers probably exhibit just as much, if not more, detail/complexity as
legitimate ones in order to distract from any untruths that they gloss over (e.g. fudged data,
logical holes). Going through a sheaf of retracted papers by the wildly infamous Diederik Stapel,
we ran the openly available demo of LIWC on these articles and determined an average
"cognition words" valuation (indicating cognitive complexity) of 7.19 and an average "big
words" valuation (indicating specificity) of 31.55, both significantly higher than Pennebaker's
benchmarks of 5.4 and 19.6, respectively. While running LIWC on entire articles at a time is a
bit too crude, this does support our notion that liars do not lack the ability to incorporate complex
words and logical constructs into their arguments so much as they choose to allocate these things
away from their lies and towards the truths concealing them.
One experiment that could help verify our hypothesis would be a modification of another
study Pennebaker cites: there, half the subjects were instructed to write about a real trauma they
experienced; the other half were instructed to write about a certain imaginary one. One of their
conclusions was actually that the imaginary trauma group used more cognitive words, but as
usual they found they also mentioned fewer specifics. The main issue with this study in our
setting is that unlike in the real world where the set of personal experiences that a liar could craft
into coherent details is usually nonempty, most subjects in the imaginary trauma group have no
material to work with whatsoever.
The workaround we propose is to have the imaginary trauma group instead write about a
trauma very similar to one they've actually experienced, modulo enough key points that writing
about it still feels like lying, but not enough that any specific fact they mention would have to
come completely out of the blue. Now that it's reasonable to expect details from both
experimental groups, we could try running Pennebaker's language analysis and ideally conclude
that liars not only use more cognitive words but also include more specifics in their truthful
statements.
Overall, Pennebaker's thesis on the universal power of frequency-based language analysis
is a compellingly robust one, especially with regards to deception. That said, if we can extend
Hancock's result that true statements told by liars are more specific and nuanced than their false
counterparts to one that they are more complex and detailed even compared to true statements
told by honest people, this would have interesting ramifications in better understanding a variety
of problems ranging from how academic frauds try to fool their referees, to what government
leaders say that can tame public opinion so effectively.
Title
Cognition
Words
Big
Words
"The Influence of Mood on Attribution" 6.6 31.07
"Moods as Spotlights: The Influence of Mood on Accessibility" 7.99 29.70
"The Three Selves Model of Social Comparison Assimilation and Contrast" 7.32 31.05
"Information to Go: Fluency Enhances the Usability of Primed
Information"
6.90 29.24
"When Different is Better: Performance Following Upward Comparison" 6.57 38.50
"Coping with Chaos: How Disordered Contexts Promote Stereotyping and
Discrimination"
6.95 28.67
"The Downside of Feeling Better: Self-Regard Repair Harms Performance" 6.13 29.94
"The Secret Life of Emotions" 6.38 31.07
"How to Heat Up From the Cold: Examining the Preconditions for
(Unconscious) Mood Effects"
9.52 33.26
"When Nothing Compares to Me: How Defensive Motivations and
Similarity Shape Social Comparison Effects
7.54 32.96
Table 1: LIWC results on some fraudulent papers by Diederik Stapel
References
Hancock, J., Bazarova, N., & Markowitz, B. (2008). Language, Lies and Politics: A Linguistic
Analysis of the Justifications for the Iraq War. Manuscript: Cornell University.
Pennebaker, J. (2011). The secret life of pronouns: What our words say about us. New York:
Bloomsbury Press.