Response Latency and Deception

The purpose of the present study was to examine produced latencies as a cue to deception and the extent to which these were “calibrated” as a function of speaker gender, relationship, seriousness of lie, and lie type. Calibration was defined as the difference between a subject’s produced latency and their average switch pause duration (i.e. the time required for two conversational participants to exchange speaking roles). Male/female dyads were asked to enact a scripted conversation that contained 32 potential lies, with each speaker producing 16 responses. Half of the potential lies were self-oriented (benefiting the self) and the other half were other-oriented (benefiting another) and for each, half were serious and half were trivial. These conversations were digitally recorded and response-latency times were subsequently extracted. The results showed that participants were better calibrated for serious vs. trivial lies and, overall, women were better calibrated than men. In addition, a follow-up questionnaire showed that participants high in Machiavellianism, an interpersonal dimension of manipulativeness, were generally better calibrated for deception. These findings are discussed in terms of a perspective that considers deception relative to self-image