An Introduction to Advances in Deception Theory

We warmly welcome you, the readers, to this special issue on Advances in Deception Theory in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology. We are honored and excited to co-participate in the development of this collection. In this introduction, we briefly describe the story behind how this issue came into being and preview for you its contents.

This issue focuses on two new theories of deception: Information Manipulation Theory 2 (IMT2; McCornack, Morrison, Paik, Wisner, & Zhu, 2014) and Truth-Default Theory (TDT; Levine, 2014). These focal works are followed by peer-reviewed, expert commentaries by Cole (2014), Greene (2014), Harwood (2014), Walczyk (2014), Van Swol (2014), and Verschuere and Shalvi (2014). Finally, we (Levine & McCornack, 2014) offer a concluding essay, providing our integrated vision for the future of deception theory.

IMT2 (McCornack et al., 2014) is a propositional theory of deceptive discourse production that conceptually frames deception as involving the covert manipulation of information along multiple dimensions and as a contextual problem-solving activity driven by the desire for quick, efficient, and viable communicative solutions. IMT2 is rooted in linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, speech production, and artificial intelligence. Synthesizing these literatures, IMT2 posits a central premise with regard to deceptive discourse production, and 11 propositions deriving from this premise.

The focus of TDT is more on the message receiver side. TDT seeks to provide a coherent account of meta-analytic findings such as the robust existence of truth-bias and the stubborn persistence of slightly-better-than-chance accuracy, while also providing a path to improved accuracy.

As many of you may know, we (the authors) have collaborated on numerous joint works over the years, and consequently we were aware of each other’s theoretical progress as IMT2 and TDT evolved in parallel. Levine initially suggested the idea for this special issue, and McCornack endorsed it. A proposal was drafted and offered to Howie Giles, who provided invaluable support and insight in bringing the proposed project to fruition. For this, we owe him an enormous debt of gratitude.

Critical to the development of this special issue was a scientific value that we both share, namely, that new theories should be subjected to scientific scrutiny in an unfettered fashion by scholars other than the authors. Too often within our discipline, theory testing is left to the very people who are the most ego-invested in having the theory validated. As a consequence, subsequent published commentaries on theory validity end up being little more than congratulatory self-back-patting. We wanted to avoid this at all costs; hence, the idea (and execution) of this special issue was for us to have no editorial oversight whatsoever on the content of the accompanying commentaries. In simple and casual terms, we wanted to throw our works out there, and let luminaries in the scholarly community “have at them.”

Diversity of expertise in commentators was critical. We sought out respected and accomplished scientists from both within and outside the area of deception. Commentaries were solicited from Communication, Psychology, and Cognitive Science. The commentaries were peer reviewed by fellow commentators. Howie Giles then graciously provided his “eagle-eye” editorial services for all of the resulting article. The end result is what you see before you: two essays, six commentaries, and our conclusion.

The commentaries represent a clear and striking illustration of the breadth and depth of our scholarly community. Specifically, Cole (2014) provides a communication and relational deception perspective—focusing on issues of intentionality and the relational consequences of discovered deception. Greene’s (2014) excellent essay also provides a perspective from within the field of communication—but from a vantage point outside the topic of deception. He critically assesses IMT2 as a theory of message production—pointing out areas in need of explication and contrasting IMT2 with Second Generation Action Assembly Theory. Like Greene (2014), Harwood (2014) provides a general communication perspective. Harwood’s essay contrasts big and small, hard and easy lies. Harwood also assesses IMT2 and TDT2 in relational to several criteria for evaluating theory. Van Swol (2014) evaluates IMT2 and TDT from a social psychological perspective, tying in the work of Dan Ariely, among others. Her essay focuses on questioning the assumptions that underlie deception theory. Verschuere and Shalvi (2014) provide a fascinating contrast between perspectives from social psychology and applied cognitive psychology, with regard to deception motivation and the automaticity of truth. They see TDT and IMT2 diverging with respect to truth automaticity. And finally, Walczyk (2014) evaluates IMT2 from the perspective of a cognitive scientist who has also proposed a theory of deception message production. Walczyk points out key insights offered by IMT2 but also offers insightful suggestions for refinement.

Together, these divergent scholars form a coherent community of commentary—providing a refreshing and multifaceted examination of not just the focal papers, but of the science of deception, and the state of social scientific theory in general. We hope that you, the readers, will share our enthusiasm about this robust and provocative discussion and will find the works herein useful in helping plot a future course for work in deception.