How Body Posture Influences Deception Detection and Gazing

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How Body Posture Influences Deception Detection and Gazing Running head: POSTURE AND DECEPTION DETECTION 1 Sitting in judgment: How body posture influences deception detection and gazing behavior Mircea Zloteanu* and Daniel C. Richardson University College London Author Note Mircea Zloteanu, and Daniel C. Richardson, Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, United Kingdom. Mircea is now at the School of Social Sciences, Humanities & Law, Teesside University, United Kingdom. *Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Mircea Zloteanu, School of Social Sciences, Humanities & Law, Teesside University, Middleborough, TS1 3BX, United Kingdom. E-mail: [email protected] Word count: 6,057 (excluding references) Conflict of Interest statement: The authors do not have any conflict of interest to report. POSTURE AND DECEPTION DETECTION 2 Abstract Body postures can affect how we process and attend to information. Here, a novel effect of adopting an open or closed posture on the ability to detect deception was investigated. It was hypothesized that the posture adopted by decoders would affect their social acuity, resulting in differences in the detection of nonverbal behavior and discrimination of deceptive and truthful statements. In Study 1, adopting an open posture produced higher accuracy for detecting naturalistic lies, but no difference in the recognition of brief facial expressions, as compared to adopting a closed posture. Study 2 measured differences in gaze behavior based on posture when detecting both low and high stakes lies. Sitting in an open posture reduced visual attention towards senders, and in particular, the attention given to their hands. The findings suggest that simply shifting posture can impact veracity judgments and the way they attend to visual information. Keywords: facial expressions; deception detection; body postures; eye gaze; accuracy; embodiment POSTURE AND DECEPTION DETECTION 3 1. Introduction Changes in posture appear to have systematic and causal effects on how we see the world and ourselves (Beigel, 1952; Neumann, Förster, & Strack, 2003). Although, it is not yet clear whether posture has these effects by modulating attention, emotion, or some other cognitive processes. Here, we manipulated body posture while asking people to judge if others were lying or being honest, and assessed how their emotion perception, visual attention, and veracity judgments were changed. In this context, our goal was to understand how postural changes might interact with complex social judgments. People are poor at detecting if others are lying or telling the truth, usually being only slightly better than predicted by chance (Aamodt & Custer, 2006; Bond & DePaulo, 2006). They are also overconfident in their judgments regardless of accuracy (Holm & Kawagoe, 2010) and tend to assume most statements people make are honest (i.e. truth-biased; Levine et al., 1999). The majority of past research attempting to improve deception detection accuracy has focused either on differences between decoders (e.g., experience or training; Cleary & Warner, 2016; Hartwig, 2011; Meissner & Kassin, 2002; Vrij, 2008) or between senders (e.g., demeanor or physical characteristics; (Funk & Todorov, 2013; Levine et al., 2011). Here, we raise the possibility that simply changing the decoder’s body posture might affect their ability to perceive and interpret behavioral information from a sender. 1.1. Body Postures Postures are representative of gross affect (Ekman & Friesen, 1967), reflecting dimensions such as friendliness-unfriendliness (Mehrabian & Friar, 1969). Body postures can affect how one perceives, reacts to, and interprets information (Beigel, 1952). Adopting specific postures can influence the likelihood that certain thoughts occur (Neumann et al., POSTURE AND DECEPTION DETECTION 4 2003) and serve as a cue for how individuals view themselves and external stimuli (Bem, 1972; Bull, 1987; D’Mello, Chipman, & Graesser, 2007; Price & Harmon-Jones, 2010; Priester, Cacioppo, & Petty, 1996; Riskind & Gotay, 1982; Stepper & Strack, 1993). Research on the psychological and physiological effects of posture is still in its infancy, and, at times, a highly controversial topic. For instance, the literature on “power posing”—adopting expansive postures to increase feelings of power (Carney, Cuddy, & Yap, 2015)—has recently come under fire, with reexaminations reporting much weaker and more limited effects (Ranehill et al., 2015; Simmons & Simonsohn, 2017). In the past, research has linked the posture a person adopts with how they interact with the world. For instance, adopting an upright posture has been associated with improved mood, higher self-esteem, and increased arousal (Nair, Sagar, Sollers, Consedine, & Broadbent, 2015; Wilkes, Kydd, Sagar, & Broadbent, 2017). Posture can also affect information processing and attention. Riskind (1983) reported quicker recall for pleasant memories when participants sat in an upright posture, but quicker recall for negative events (both in quantity and intensity) when in a slumped posture. Similar effects on cognition and memory have been found, where the posture adopted by an individual (upright or slumped) directly affected performance on valence words tasks (Michalak, Mischnat, & Teismann, 2014), and mood-recovery interventions (Veenstra, Schneider, & Koole, 2017). Our manipulation rests on open and closed postures. Open postures are expansive physical displays adopted by individuals when feeling relaxed and willing to engage in social interaction (Wood, Saltzberg, & Goldsamt, 1990); they can produce power-related feelings and cognitions (Riskind & Gotay, 1982; Tiedens & Fragale, 2003). Typically, an open posture has individuals sitting with their arms uncrossed and legs uncrossed, in a relaxed recline. A closed posture, in contrast, typically has individuals sitting with their arms and legs crossed, in a rigid position; it is adopted when feeling threatened or dismissive of another, POSTURE AND DECEPTION DETECTION 5 signaling a lack of desire to interact. Adopting a closed posture increases one’s sensitivity to how others evaluate you (Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003), and can activate the behavioral inhibition system (Anderson & Galinsky, 2006), resulting in reduced expressivity, gesturing, and contact with the environment (Anderson & Berdahl, 2002; Bernstein, 1973). These postures are argued to reflect the embodied concept of the “openness” dimension of social interaction, lying at opposite ends of the spectrum (Mehrabian & Friar, 1969). We propose that adopting a closed posture results in social information being ignored or processed to a lesser extent (Schwarz & Clore, 1996). Conversely, an open posture reflects that the individual feels relaxed, and primes them to be open to interaction, preparing them to be more responsive and attentive to social cues (Machotka, 1965). 1.2. Facial Expressions When judging the veracity of others, people tend to rely on nonverbal behavior to help make their decisions (Bogaard, Meijer, Vrij, & Merckelbach, 2016; The Global Deception Research Team [GDRT], 2006; Vrij & Semin, 1996). Several prevalent cross- cultural beliefs exist about cues to detecting deceit, such as liars self-touch, avert their gaze, and fidget more than truth-tellers (GDRT, 2006). Regardless of their diagnostic value (which is usually quite poor; DePaulo et al., 2003; Hartwig & Bond, 2014), people’s beliefs regarding such nonverbal behaviors are strong (GDRT, 2006). As the current interest is on how postures can impact the decoding of behavioral cues, we focused on the recognition of facial expression of emotions—specifically microexpressions—proposed in the deception literature as a source of diagnostic information (Ekman, 2003; Ekman & Friesen, 1969; Hurley & Frank, 2011; Porter, ten Brinke, & Wallace, 2012). Microexpressions are involuntary full-faced expressions occurring at less than 0.5 of a second, said to reflect the genuine emotional state of the sender (Ekman, 2003; POSTURE AND DECEPTION DETECTION 6 Ekman & Friesen, 1969; Frank & Svetieva, 2015; Porter & ten Brinke, 2008). It is argued that liars and truth-tellers experience different emotions which result in differences in the facial expressions each produces (Ekman, 2003; Ekman & Friesen, 1969; Porter & ten Brinke, 2008; Porter et al., 2012). Thus, the assumption is that a perceptive decoder can utilize these cues to accurately determine the veracity of a sender (Ekman, 2003; Ekman, O’Sullivan, Friesen, & Scherer, 1991). However, the literature on the emotion-based approach to lie detection is highly contentious. While some studies indicate that, in specific scenarios, the ability to detect microexpressions is positively related to deception detection performance (Ekman & O’Sullivan, 1991; Frank & Ekman, 1997; Matsumoto, Hwang, Skinner, & Frank, 2014; Warren, Schertler, & Bull, 2009), more recent evaluations find no link between emotional cues and improvements in accuracy (Burgoon, 2018; Hartwig & Bond, 2014). At present, the inclusion of a microexpression task was considered for two reasons. First, out of all nonverbal channels, facial expressions receive preferential attention and mental processing relative to other nonverbal channels (Alpers & Gerdes, 2007; Vuilleumier, Armony, Driver, & Dolan, 2001). If the posture manipulation has an effect of social acuity, a difference in facial expression recognition ability may be most evident. Second, while the evidence on microexpression and deception detection is mixed (especially regarding human
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