Digital Deception

Lies in a Conversation - Barrett & Josh

Where do lies occur in a conversation?

Comments, suggestions, and criticisms are all welcome.

Thanks!
Barrett & Josh

posted by Barrett Amos @ 7:48 AM 2 comments

Digital Deception

Nice to Meet You?
How do you behave in initial interactions?
Comments and questions about my presentation are welcome!
~Erica

posted by Erica @ 5:38 PM 3 comments

I know Something You Don’t Know

Presentation-wise, I thought you did a good job. You didn’t rush through your points, and you were very clear and logical in your progression. I liked your use of an audience member for analysis, since it made the presentation very engaging. I thought there was a lot of text in the presentation, so it could’ve benefited from some alternate visuals like more pictures, illustrations or graphics; especially since you dealt with an idea that could have been displayed easily through visual examples. I thought you could’ve used an overview of your points at times (or how they relate to deception/Nyberg/etc…) and that might’ve been reading from your slides a bit too, but otherwise, I thoroughly enjoyed the presentation.

You deal with a very interesting idea that I felt engaged in immediately. Your content was clear, and I liked how you explained the premise of asymmetric information, your own hypotheses, and then the strategies used in practice and the results for your hypotheses. It would’ve been exciting (though totally unnecessary) to see how people get around the problem of asymmetric information instead of just how they use it. It also would’ve been interesting to see what people think about in terms of “what’s important for deception” (as discussed in class, ie. liking a person). In terms of a confederate,I think this is a great idea. It should be a few confederates (consisting of various characteristics to create more genrealizable results), but controlling for the information known is a good idea because it eliminates different reactions to profile length, profile details (in terms of type of details like personal info categories and basic info categories and specificity of info, like “I like dogs” and “I enjoy household animals”), and controls for reactions by confederates (of course).

posted by Josh P @ 12:51 AM 0 comments

Deception in Photos

You did a great job with your presentation. In terms of the non-content aspect, I really liked that you had a brief overview of your points and explained how they fit together logically to start the presentation. I liked that you used varying media in the presentation, as well as numerous slides to demonstrate each point. You also did not read off your slides, using them only for the audience’s reference, and this helped make your speech engaging. Furthermore, I felt that you did an excellent job speaking clearly, and (changing gears here) connecting your points logically and in an easy way to follow. Lastly, I loved your use of the graphic Jeff pointed out in class. Using a graphic as a means to explain a theoretical point was a great idea that my group will definitely use as well, thanks in part to your group’s pioneering ways!

In terms of content, I thought your presentation was also good. You did a fine job of explaining your main idea. You then did a great job of expanding upon this idea by relating it to Nyberg in interesting ways. You examples were concise and well-illustrated. I thought someone brought up a great point in class that you could have discussed the truth bias and expectations of deception with relation to your project, though this is an extra step for sure. Also, I liked how you critically analyzed the theories you used and your own conclusions. You did a rather effective job at this I might add, though I think you could’ve shown the inherent problems in comparing text-based theory to graphics.

posted by Josh P @ 12:25 AM 0 comments

Comments for our presentation

Hi guys,


Just in case you forgot, our presentation was about applying Nyberg's framework to pictures. We discussed how the different ways of showing and hiding can be applied to pictures.


Thanks for your comments!

Nicole and Kaitlin

posted by Nicole @ 10:11 PM 0 comments

My Presentation

Here's a little post so that you all can comment about my presentation.

A few things I'm thinking about and would love feedback on:
-Should I use a confederate as person B in the experiment? I have many hesitations, but I know there would be benefits too.
-Should I use some kind of task for their conversation? Would an introduction/biographical task work?
Or is there anything else important I didn't cover?

Thanks!

posted by Kate Fenner @ 1:41 PM 3 comments

Two Women in a Lab

Assignment 9 Option 1

I chose to assess the grainy black and white photo of two women in a laboratory for ten minutes. I wrote 409 words mostly about the testing of a new drug intended to help women achieve more pleasurable sex.
My LIWQ scores are as follows:

LIWC dimension
Need for Achievement 7.58 (mine) 5.8 (male average) 5.6 (female average)
Need for Affiliation 0.73- 1.1- 1.3
Need for power 2.93- 1.7- 1.8
Self-references (I, me, my)0.00- 0.5- 0.8
Social words 13.45- 11.4- 12.0
Positive emotions 1.22- 1.8- 2.1
Negative emotions 1.22- 1.5- 1.6
Big words (> 6 letters) 26.16- 18.7- 17.7

Need for Achievement. My results show that I wrote significantly more about achievement-related themes than "the typical person."

Need for Affiliation. Apparently, I don't pay much attention to human relationships. I mentioned in the story that the two women were student and teacher, but didn't provide any insights to their intimate encounters. I also mentioned the student having a sexual encounter with her boyfriend, but I guess this simulation categorized that as more physical than affiliation.

Need for Power. I am a power-hungry beast. Even in a ten minute creative story, I needed someone to clearly be in control. I scored well about the average in this output.

Self-references: While people who use a high rate of self-references tend to be more insecure, nervous, and possibly depressed, and honest, I think it's unlikely to have self-references in a made-up story about two women in a photo. I also think it would be considered self-centered and egotistical to put yourself as a character in the story. I'm happy(?) my score was very low, indicating that I'm not a basket-case.

Social words: I was writing a story about two people. OF COURSE I was going to use social words. Duh. Also, of course I'm outgoing and well-connected to others-->I am a Facebook whore.

Positive emotion words: I think I may have used a few happy/good words in my brilliant piece of literature, but I don't think my creativity indicates anything about my optimism or mood.

Negative emotion words: Similarly, I don't attribute my use of sad/bad words to my pessimism or anxiety.

Big words (words with more than 6 letters): Essentially, I am a genius. I chose to use big words because they are more fun to use than smaller words. I am so so smart and got a perfect score on my SATs and tomorrow I'm being inducted into MENSA. Unfortunately, I'm not very happy about that because I'm distant and have no emotions.

While this assignment was fun and entertaining, it honestly wasn't very indicative of anything. I wrote whatever came off the top of my head and I even had to be reminded to keep typing because I got a little bored with my own made up story.
According to Keila and Skillicorn, my few (zero actually) self-references is supposed to show my "dissasociative" nature. This is dubious to me because the story didn't lend itself to any opportunity to say "me, my, or I." I counted my exclusive words and I had a few, and my story was "less cognitively complex" (it was mostly gibberish), but my story was COMPLETELY fabricated. According to previous research, in 409 words, I shouldn't have had very many (if any at all). Additionally, my task scores don't match up with research regarding negative emotion words; I was well below average, even though I made the story up out of thin air.

posted by Jenna @ 1:57 PM 0 comments

A9 Option 1: The Return of Jeff

This title has nothing to do with anything.

I decided to do Part I, and took the Perceptual Style Experiment (“You Are What You See”). I wrote for five minutes about a picture of a water bottle, though for me at least, it wasn’t quite as boring as it sounds. I got to 175 words, which was reliable enough for the data analysis. But I found the analysis to be unreliable in major ways. I’m sure that’s one of the reasons why it says at the top of the page: “Take what is said with a grain of salt.” When I was ready to write and the timer began, I described the features of the water bottle. I talked about the cap, the color and opacity of the bottle, described the label in the middle, how much water was in it … things like that.

I was shocked and horrified by the results of the analysis. It explained that I was completely normal in every category. Not what I was hoping for. I was glad to see, however, that a PHP page with major coding flaws could tell me what it did. Here were the results:

Visual Dimension	Your data	The average response
Words on the label: Verbal thinking	1.71	1.74
Colors and text: Visual sensitivity	4.57	3.74
Bottle contents: Functional thinking	1.71	1.67
The bottle itself: Tactile sensitivity	2.29	2.91
Light and shadow: Contextual thinking	1.71	0.79

So for one, I found these results to be wrong in almost every way. I spent little time describing the words on the label, just stating that they exist. Maybe this is average, but I’m not too certain. I spent almost the entire time describing the color and opacity of the bottle, label, text, etc… and it still said I was average in every way. Considering this was a percentage of my total text, I highly doubt this was average. I spent almost no words on function, but somehow, I got the average score anyway. Same for tactile sensitivity: I never even described the feel of the bottle. And the most hilarious and telling result to me as the last one: contextual thinking. I never once mentioned the context, but because it picked up the word surrounding, lighting, or something (I had been talking about the logo on the label), it assumed this is what I was doing. Brilliant language analysis.

There are entire CS classes devoted language parsing and analysis, so I was pretty skeptical coming in, considering PHP is not exactly well-equipped for proper analysis techniques. Sure enough, the script does something very simple, and very flawed: it looks for key words. My buddy Killer Cam (aka Cameron Hall) is right: we could make this page and it might even be better. The whole time I was writing, I wanted to analyze the visual aspect of the bottle, but my score ended up being average for everything.

So this relates to deception in a couple of ways. For one, time to construct thoughts and write played a crucial role in the experiment and in all analysis. If you write for an extended period of time, it’s possible to start acting out of character. This is why there was a cap on time for the experiment. More to the point, having more time would allow you to have more time to tailor your message and deceive others. So, it seems to me there is a balance that needs to be struck between thee two factors when it comes to detecting deception through literary (or any) analysis. Moreover, message length (somewhat related to time) needs to reach a certain point to be sufficiently analyszed. Many people barely reach 50 words (the site’s stated minimum word count) in their text communications. Another deceptive thing people can do is selectively choose what we write about in our analysis, which of course, would effect what someone reading our description would think the bottle looks like. Someone below “stole” my point that it’s even possible to describe things in such a way that it might seem like a totally different object.

Finally, there is a fair amount of research about writing styles between various subgroups of people (ie. genders), but not as much about deception. It is believed that linguistics can be used to catch a liar because by investing in lying, your writing style, which is subconscious, changes because you can’t control it. People practicing deception generally use fewer first person pronouns and exclusive words, and more negative emotions and action verbs. Deceptive messages are also more informal and expressive, and are less complex in their syntax and verbiage. All of these things can be used in language analysis to find deceptive messages. However, until we learn to better analyze these things with more advanced tools, analysis will remain fairly imprecise and inaccurate.

posted by Josh P @ 11:50 AM 0 comments

Normal is so boring

The TAT test basically flies in the face of everything I’ve ever been told, or believe, about myself. I wrote a 387 word story about a woman in science…which may or may not have been a take-off on the life story of Madame Curie. Anyway, perhaps because the story was not actually about me, the analysis was entirely out of whack.

On the Need for Achievement scale, the higher the number, the more you felt a need to achieve. It is undeniable that I have a serious need for achievement; it reaches unhealthy levels periodically. But according to the LIWC test, I have relatively little drive. While I did get cut-off before I got to the part where my fictional character wins her second Nobel Prize, I am surprised that the mentioning of the first did not send my score into the higher regions of the scale. Further, my entire story was about women breaking down science barriers and taking a lead in the field. I think something must have been off in the analysis.

I’m also low in a need for affiliation and power (both clearly untrue), and it’s kind of a toss-up whether I’m a positive or negative person (mid-scale on each).

Although it seems to have failed in the case of my own, personal, analysis, I think the LIWC test does have some predictive validity for deception. As Keila and Skillicorn point out, deception theory suggests that deceptive writings include a reduced frequency of first-person pronouns and exclusive words. Two of the LIWC dimensions are Self-references and Social Words.

Using fewer first-person pronouns enables individuals to dissociate themselves from their lie. Interestingly, according to the fine folks at LIWC, the use of big words has the same effect. While I did use a fair amount of big words, I made no first person references. Thing is, the directions for this exercise did not include that the story had to be about yourself. I was writing about one of the most influential women in the history of chemistry and physics, clearly not an undergraduate Communication major. Had I been given instructions to write a story about me and not an imaginative story with relation the provided picture, I might have lied. And research suggests that in that case, I would have used fewer first-person pronouns and bigger words.

Exclusive words are also indications of deception. Words such as “without,” and “but,” indicate a cognitively complex story, while lies are frequently not as complex. I used a lot of inclusive, or social, words in my story. Pennebaker et al. would say that this means I am outgoing and socially connected with other people; Keila and Zhou would each say this means I am a liar.

posted by Erica @ 11:08 AM 0 comments

Assignment 9: I shouldn't be a graphics designer.

For this assignment I did the perceptual analysis test. I was shown an image of a plastic water bottle, and asked to describe it to someone who couldn’t see the image, to try to give them the best understanding I could of what the image looked like. My description was then analyzed using LIWC, and it was used to make a (semi-accurate) prediction of my personality.

This process is known as Meaning Extraction. Before this study was done, a large number of people were given this task, and their text was analyzed. The researchers found 5 different clusters of words, and these 5 clusters are what they look for when someone now performs this task. The 5 dimensions were: Words on the label: Verbal thinking, Colors and text: Visual sensitivity, Bottle contents: Functional thinking, The bottle itself: Tactile sensitivity, and Light and shadow: Contextual thinking. So when someone now performs this test, they search through the text to find words that fit into each of these 5 categories.

Your results are then compared the average responses in each category, and then they gave a brief “prediction” of your personality based on how you compared to the average. Because of a high score on contextual thinking, they predicted “This is healthy in the sense that it suggests you can stand back and look at objects in a broader perspective.” From a low score on tactile sensitivity they predicted “Extending this reasoning a bit, you don't automatically imagine how an object feels. Touch is not your dominant sense. I just can't see you as a sculptor, a painter of still lifes, or a postmodern architect.” As the researchers said themselves, this part of the analysis was kind of “made up.”

The importance of this analysis, however, isn’t in predicting that “Graphic design may not be a wise career choice,” but in being able to analyze the text of a message. The researchers were able to accurately categorize my text into different categories, and correctly noted which categories I did tend to use more frequently than others. Now, none of these characteristics (to my knowledge) are related to deception detection, so this specific analysis probably would not be helpful for someone trying to find deceptive messages.

This method of analysis, however, is done in the style of many successful deception detection techniques. Zhou et al notes that when doing a linguistic analysis, accuracy rates increase greatly when only known important cues are studied, and the irrelevant cues are disregarded. I believe that the researchers followed this in their analysis, by looking only at words in certain groupings or styles to figure out which category the text belonged in. Also, they only looked for the relevant words that they noticed in their pilot study, and therefore in the current analysis the results are not muddled by other words which may or may not be relevant to the analysis. I believe that the researchers would also agree with Keila et al that different types of situations (like deception) leave a linguistic signature. Deception obviously is not studied in this analysis, but the researchers do imply that through linguistic analysis you are able to tell certain things about the person or the situation. I believe that this type of analysis is very effective, and could be adapted to deception if specific words that are identified as being related to deception are searched for.

posted by Kate Fenner @ 10:30 PM 0 comments

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 0 comments

Assignment 9: Lit Review/Hypotheses

Literature Review & Hypotheses:

There are many areas which relate to these ideas of initial conversations and information flow. First we have the concept of asymmetric information – a situation where there is differing amounts/pieces of knowledge held by the conversation partners. In 1969, Ekman and Friesen wrote a paper primarily regarding potential cues to deception. They discussed a range of deceptive situations, one of which being an asymmetrical salience of deception, where the deceiver has more information (particularly that they are lying) while the receiver isn’t aware of this information. The authors predict that this type of asymmetric information will lead to less detection of deception. Hypothesis 1 – Asymmetric information will lead to an increase in deception.

A closely related concept is information control. Multiple studies have been done where participants have engaged in different tasks, and the participants who had the most control over the flow of information reported the most satisfaction at the end of the task (Bavelas, 1950; Leavitt, 1951). This result was shown not only in those who knowingly controlled the information, but even in those participants who were unaware of their central role (Leavitt, 1951). Hypothesis 2 – Those who control or hold more knowledge of the situation will be more satisfied at the completion of the conversation, and will rate their partner more favorably.

Once someone has this “extra” knowledge, there have been many studies looking at how and why people manage or conceal this information. Many people believe they have the right to conceal information from others (Imber-Black, 2003), and in fact most people would agree that lying is often done to save face for yourself or your partner. Withholding some knowledge or truth is how the world often functions, and doing anything differently could create dissonance, a feeling that you are actually doing something “wrong” by telling the truth (Schein, 2004). People have developed many different strategies for hiding or managing information. One woman studied how teens manage information they tell to their parents, and reported strategies including telling information only if the parent specifically asks, telling only partial information to give an acceptable answer but still leave out crucial information, or telling all information when they feel it is necessary for safety, punishment, or other reasons (Marshall, 2005). Hypothesis 3 – People with more knowledge will develop strategies to control this information, in order to avoid dissonance or other uncomfortable feelings.

Susan Fussel has done work regarding peoples’ biases and assumptions about their conversation partners. She has shown that these biases were found to unconsciously affect the way they constructed their verbal messages to their partner (1991, 1992). Hypothesis 4 – People with more knowledge about the situation/their partner will use different strategies for conveying information in their conversation than those less or no knowledge.

Finally, Robert Feldman conducted an experiment where he studied how a person’s self-presentational goals affected their amount of deception. He found that someone with a goal of self-presenting themselves (as likable or competent) told more lies than someone without a goal (2002). Hypothesis 5 – People with a goal of appearing likable will tell more lies, and will also achieve their self-presentation goal and appear more likable than those without a goal.

Overall, I believe these five hypotheses can be summarized in two. Hypothesis A – A person who has more knowledge (asymmetric information) will engage in more deceptive strategies, and will be more liked by their partner. Hypothesis B – A person with a self-presentational goal of being likable will engage in more deceptive strategies and will achieve their goal.

posted by Kate Fenner @ 7:18 PM 0 comments

Assignment 9......again

The first known photograph was made by a French physicist named Joseph Nicéphore in 1816. Little did he know that his work, along with that of others’, would result in the creation of a communication tool that was to become as powerful and significant as the printing press. Photographs were considered incontestable proof of an event, experience, or state of being. But what if pictures weren’t what they seemed? What if they were capable of deceiving the untrained eye? By the end of the 20th century, digital imaging and processing and computer-based techniques made it possible to manipulate images in many ways, creating revolutionary changes in photography. The ability to manipulate pictures has major implications for the concept of truth.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but what good are those words if they’re not true? Social psychological studies have shown that lying is a frequent part of everyday social interactions. In fact, research suggests that as many as one third of these typical daily interactions involve some form of deception (Hancock, Thom-Santelli, Ritchie, 2004). Deception can range anywhere from a slight exaggeration to an outright lie. According to Nyberg a lie can be classified as a subcategory of deception, though it has its own complexity as an adaptive behavior (Nyberg 1993). Photo-manipulation presents an interesting predicament because there are varying degrees of modification. It is possible to slightly alter a picture to better “capture the moment,” but it is also possible to merge photos in order to create documentation for situations that never took place. Nyberg further describes deception as the controlling of what is perceived, assumed, or understood by means of showing or hiding information (Nyberg, 1993). In his book, “The Varnished Truth,” Nyberg explains that an actual lie has four parts: a written or spoken statement, the speaker’s belief that the statement is false, the intention to lie, and the character or rights of the person being lied to. Some photos that have been manipulated may be deceiving in the sense that they don’t necessarily represent truth, but would this equate to a verbal lie? Blurring the background in a basketball action photo to create a sense of movement has different implications of truth than digitally removing blemishes from pictures of furniture meant to be sold on eBay, which may be more associated with a verbal lie.

Nyberg’s description of deception as “the shrewd and somber art of ‘showing and hiding’” brings up some interesting details. “The point is to present a situation in a way that will encourage a person to develop a confident, but mistaken hypothesis, which in some way serves our purpose” (Nyberg, 1993). The various ways of hiding and showing are relevant to deception in photographs because they involve many of the techniques used to manipulate a photo. Nyberg cites various ways to hide (disappear, disguise, distract) and show (mimic, counterfeit, misdirect). This framework was originally designed for verbal communication, but with the introduction of photo manipulation, could this framework also be adapted for visual communication? Nyberg’s framework will help us define when a photograph is being deceptive, or if the information in the photograph is just being managed improperly.

Manipulating a photograph has not always been easy to do. Altering pictures in the darkroom was always feasible, but with the advent of digital technology and resources afforded in an online setting, manipulation has become even easier. Not to mention, the extent of alteration has reached heights that were never thought possible. With the click of a mouse, something or someone can be cropped out of a picture, leaving the viewer to interpret whatever is left at face value. Deception can be established in photographs in several ways; a photograph can be manipulated either before, during, or after it is taken. For example, a photograph can be staged before it is taken, the camera angle can be altered while it is being taken, or Adobe Photoshop can be used to alter the picture after it’s been taken. It is also important to note that it is not only the photographer who can alter a photo, but the subject can be altered as well. That is, the photographer can change the camera settings or modify the physical picture or the person or object being photographed can be transformed. This ease of editability should, in theory, undermine the credibility of photographs; however, it is important to understand that a photograph’s meaning may vary with context. “A picture on a newspaper front page has more assertional force than it will hanging in an art gallery” (Martin, 1987).

The techniques used for photo-manipulation are infinite and photos can be staged or altered after a picture is taken. With digital photography, a photographer takes a picture, and the images are transferred to a computer. At this point, the picture can be edited using a manipulation software package, such as Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop allows for pictures to be cropped, blurred, lightened, darkened, stitched to another photo, and with some training it even allows for adding or erasing something or someone from a picture. Staging a picture may involve camera angle, zoom, or simply setting up the scene (not candid). Photographs were once considered incontestable proof, but maybe, “the camera has always been a liar, especially in the hands of a capable photographer” (Henshall, 1998). Why is it then that we still believe what we see in photographs?

posted by Nicole @ 4:29 PM 0 comments