[return to overview page]

If our goal is to compare human, computer, and hybrid lie detection, we must have a corpus of statements on which human, computer, and hybrid lie detection performance can be assessed. To this end, I generated (through “crowd-sourcing”) such a corpus of statements. Further, this corpus is designed to overcome certain weaknesses in the corpuses used in some of the previous text-based lie-detection analyses. In this section, I describe in detail how I generated this corpus of statements.

General Approach

There are two major ways of collecting text-based statements for lie detection:

While some studies have used the former method (e.g. Pérez-Rosas & Mihalcea, 2015), these often result in low quality statements and introduce extraneous sources of variability between truths and lies. For example, here are some examples of open-ended lie statements from the Pérez-Rosas & Mihalcea, 2015 dataset (which the authors make publicly available to their credit):

And here are some examples of true statements from that same dataset:

These statements are of low quality. And they may differ from each other in systematic ways that we do not intend (e.g. more of the lies may be about one’s personal experiences). I sought to generate a dataset in which statements were of higher quality and left less room for unintended variability. Thus, I opted to collect statements which were either true or untrue responses to specific prompts.

An example of a study that generated true and false statements by asking people to respond either honestly or dishonestly to fixed questions comes from Klein & Epley (2015). Here are the prompts used in that study:

Another study that uses this method comes from Newman, Pennebaker, Berry, & Richards (2003), who asked people to lie in several confined ways. Specifically, participants were asked to either lie or tell the truth about their opinion about a political issue (abortion), their opinion about about a friend (e.g. pretend they like someone they don’t), or respond to an accusation (e.g. that they stole money).

I sought to emulate the best features of these previous studies, which were able to more successfuly generate higher quality statements with less unintended variability.

One might note that the statements in these prompt-based studies tend to have some similar characteristics. First, the prompts ask the participants to communicate information about themselves (e.g. their favorite class), rather than de-personalized or general facts about the world (e.g. the height of the Eiffel tower). Psychologically, this might be thought of asking participants to recall information stored in episodic (auto-biographic) memory rather than declarative memory. Further, these personally relevant statements can be intuitively grouped into some overarching categories:

I tried to collect an equal number of these three types of statements (opinion-based, self-representation-based, and event-based). These, in my mind, might roughly correspond to some of the major categories of lying that people might engage in in the “real world”: misrepresenting their opinions (e.g. their opinions and attitudes towards other), misrepresenting themselves (e.g. their skills during a job interview), or misrepresenting events (e.g. lying to a jury about where one was on the night of a suspected crime).

Participants

Participants were recruited on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. They were paid $2.50 for their time.

The goal was to generate at least 5,000 total statements. Participants answered 6 total questions. Once, they answered all six questions by lying. And once they answered those same six questions by telling the truth. (The order in which participants did this was randomized and recorded.) Thus, because each participant generates 12 statements total, at least 417 participants were needed (417 * 12 = 5004).

Only those participants who generated both a true and false statement for each of the 6 prompts was included in the final dataset (to ensure no imbalanced participants were included who contributed more than one type of statement than another, or who only responded to certain questions.) Thus, recruiting continued until 417 participants were recruited who generated 12 full statements. This necessitated recruited 437 participants (i.e. 20 did not generate full responses and were dropped from the final dataset).

Procedures and Materials

I will now walk through the exact procedure by which participants were led to generate statements. I will go through the stimuli, in the order that participants went through them. Further, to clearly demonstrate how participants actually responded to the questions and stimuli, I picked one actual participant and show her actual responses at each stage of the experiment (who I will refer to as Jane, for the sake of exposition).

Prelimary Questions

Before responding to the prompts, participants were asked to list the names or initials of someone they liked, someone they disliked, and someone they knew well. These specific people were then used in the prompts, explained below. Below, we can see the prompt and Jane’s responses.

Prelimary Questions (Actual Responses)

Explanation of Task

Next, the general experiment was explained to participants. Note that participants were asked to generate lies that seem convincing and realistic. This was meant to avoid obviously untrue lies, as we saw in other datasets. The actual prompt is shown below.

Explanation of Task (Actual Prompt)

(The first bolded section includes a typo. It should of course say “six questions”.)

Statements

All participants were presented with the same set of six questions. Once, they were asked to go through all six questions and answer honestly. And once, they were asked to go through each statement and answer dishonestly. As mentioned earlier, the order in which they did this (truths then lies, or lies then truths) was randomized between participants. The order in which participants answered the six questions was kept constant in both conditions, and between participants. These questions, with Jane’s actual response’s, are shown below. (Note that participants also had to give responses that were at least 200 characters long, which they were told corresponded to about 3-5 sentences.)

First, I will show her six truthful responses. (Note that for the first question, the name of the person she said she knows well, JaQuan, is piped in. And for the fourth question, the name of the person she said she liked, Isaiah, is piped in.) This will be followed by her six untruthful responses.

Statements (Actual Responses: Truthful Answers)

Statements (Actual Responses: Untruthful Answers)

Verbal Explanations of Lying Method

After completing both the truths and lie generation task, participants were then asked to provide some additional information about how they generated the lies. Specifically, participants were asked to do two things. They were shown the actual text of lies they had written (and the prompt to which they were responding in each case), and they were asked to describe (in an open-ended text response) how they had generated each lie. After they had described their method in their own words for each of the 6 statements, they were shown their 6 statements again and asked to dichotomously categorize their lie into one that was either: mostly based on reality (e.g. some slight modification of a true fact or opinion) or mostly based on something that the participant fabricated (e.g. came up with themselves, perhaps in a the way one might make up a story.)

Below are Jane’s actual descriptions of how she came up with each lie, in her own words.

Verbal Explanations of Lying Method (Actual Responses)

Forced Choice Categorizations

After writing out in words how she came up with the each of her six lies, Jane made a binary decision about the basis of her lying method. The prompt for that binary decision and then each of here binary choices is shown below.

Forced Choice Categorizations (Actual Prompt)

Forced Choice Categorizations (Actual Responses)

Demographics

Finally, participants were asked to provide some basic demographic information (gender, age, ethnicity/race, their country of origin). With this participants were thanked for their participation and the study finished.

Citations