Digital Deception

TAT test

For this assignment, I decided to do the projective test (The TAT). This test showed me a picture from the Thematic Apperception Test, and asked me to describe it. The purpose is to see how individuals reveal parts of their own personalities while looking at an ambiguous picture. The words that I typed were analyzed using the LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) program developed at the University of Texas and University of Auckland in New Zealand.

These are my results:

Need for Achievement 6.96

Need for Affiliation 0.28

Need for power 0.56

Self-references (I, me, my) 0.00

Social words 6.69

Positive emotions 1.95

Negative emotions 0.84

Big words (> 6 letters) 18.11

The results of my story showed that I was just about average with the other females who have taken this test. I ranked higher on the dimensions for “need for achievement” and “big words”, but everything else was either average, or slightly below average. Based on my results, I am not really sure how accurate this kind of approach to language really is. I received below average scores on certain categories that I thought I had included in my story. For example, I received a low score for “need for affiliation”, which is about the attention to human relationships in the story. I got a 0.28, and the average was a 1.3. I thought this was strange, though, because I did talk about the relationship between the women a lot. I do not think that this approach can pick up subtle ideas from the text, and that it can only detect explicit use of language.

This approach could be used to detect deception in the ways that Keila and Skillicorn did their study on the Enron emails. They used the factors of fewer first person pronouns, exclusive words, and more negative emotion words and action verbs to detect a lie. The TAT test’s categories look at negative emotions, positive emotions, social words, self-references, and big words, which could be used to detect deception. This method could also backfire because of the way in which they ask people to tell a story. Since I was telling a story about these two women, I did not reference myself at all; therefore I did not use any first-person pronouns. Keila and Skillicorn also ran into this problem since their emails were mostly business related, and using first-person pronouns in a business context is usually not appropriate.

The Interpersonal deception theory (IDT) attempts to explain deception from an interpersonal and conversational perspective, rather than an individual and psychological perspective. It says that deceivers will display strategic modifications of behavior in response to a receiver’s suspicions, but may also display inadvertent behavior, or leakage cues, indicating that deception is occurring. I think that the projective test using the TAT would be good at detecting the leakage cues that are talked about in the IDT theory. When people write about an event, they use certain words without thinking about it, and this test would be able to find which of those words, such as first-person pronouns, are signs of deception or not. The projective test could also look at the use of negative and positive words to detect deception, since those are usually used by people without them realizing it.

Overall, I think that since I was asked to make up a story, it did not reveal much about what a lie would look like. I was being creative, and believed in the story I was writing, as opposed to trying to deceive someone about something that did not actually happen. I think if I tried to lie about an actual experience, my results might have appeared to be more deceptive.

posted by Nicole @ 3:18 PM