The effect of planned and spontaneous delivery on familiar and unfamiliar speech acts: When does it pay to plan

The manner in which a course of action is stored cognitively should effect the ease with which the action can be deployed. White lies, as routines, should be deployed mindlessly and should not benefit from planning. Unfamiliar lies, those that breach another's trust, may require syntactical construction that benefits from planning. Planning theory's Hierarchy Principle argues that persons modify plan components by considering the effort that modifications entail. Deception theorists have argued that the face is more controllable than voice or body. If controllability can be construed as effort, thwarts identifying the deceiver's facial expressiveness as the source of suspicion should be responded to more quickly and fluently than thwarts identifying verbal content as the source of suspicion. This experiment involved a subject's encounter with a confederate who ostensibly was their partner in a game or debate. Subjects were told that partners could compete against each other, but that their partner had not been told this. Confederates wore a headset with an attached microphone or wore a lab coat. Confederates asked the subject if they had been told anything special about the game, giving subjects the opportunity to tell a lie that breached trust. Confederates asked if they looked alright, giving subjects the opportunity to tell a white lie. Some subjects were forewarned their partner might ask (1) for reassurance concerning their appearance or (2) if the subject had been told anything special. After subjects lied, confederates stated disbelief, citing subjects' facial expressiveness, vocal expressiveness or body language, thus giving subjects the opportunity to modify lies. These exchanges were videotaped. In all, one hundred twenty judges viewed subjects' behavior, scoring it for perceived veracity. Results showed that persons telling unfamiliar lies spontaneously displayed unfilled pauses of greater durations and more filled pauses than persons planning to tell such lies. The thwarts persons received did not differentiate groups in terms of onset latencies and filled and unfilled pauses that accompanied their responses.