The Effect And Mechanism Of The Target’s Socioeconomic Status On The Observers’ Response Bias In Deception Detection

Lie detection is an important but highly challenging task.From social interaction to professional negotiation to judicial adjudication,successfully identifying lies facilitates healthy relationships,satisfying economic exchanges,and meaningful security.A large number of research shows that: human beings have a low ability to lie detection,just only slightly better than chance accuracy;people have response bias.People differ in their tendency to judge statements as truthful or deceptive,which is referred to as response bias,Whereas some observers exhibit a so-called truth bias,which means that they judge statements to be truthful disproportionately more often than to be deceptive,other observers possess a lie bias,reflecting a tendency to deliver lie judgments.The category of response bias or the degree to truth bias changes with the occupation of the observers and targets’ group memberships.For example,previous studies have examined the effects of targets’ natural cues on the response bias,such as race and gender.However,few studies have studied the effect of targets’ social cues(such as occupation,socioeconomic status,etc.)on observers’ response bias.Socioeconomic Status(SES)is an important social clue and to a large extent determines people’s behavior model and decision preference in interpersonal interaction.So,the research on this issue has an important theoretical and practical implications for judicial justicean inter-group integration.In this study,we explored whether the perception of targets’ SES influenced observers’ threshold(response bias)to label speakers as liars and the mechanism under the condition of Non-verbal,by recruiting higher SES and lower SES targets,appling mock-crime paradigms to record the experimental materials,employing lie detection test paradigms based on observation method,and using criterion(c)from signal detection theory as the indicator of response bias.Study1(70 subjects)which was a two levels for the sigle factor within-subjects design and this factor was targets’ SES(higher vs lower),examined the effect of targets’ SES on the observers’ response bias by the statistical method of paired-samples t test.Study 2 repeatedly validated the results of study 1 and used multiple mediation model to investigate the mechanism of targets’ attractiveness,trustworthiness and anxiety between the targets’ SES and the observers’ response bias.In summary,this study draws the following conclusions:(1)Undergraduate subjects have a significant truth bias,both for lower SES targets and higher SES targets(2)The targets’ SES would affect the response bias of observers.Compared with the lower SES targets,Undergraduate subjects have a greater truth bias to the higher SES targets.That is,participants judged that higher SES targets were telling the truth more often than they judged that lower SES targets were telling the truth.(3)The effect of targets’ SES on response bias is indirectly through the following two serial mediation paths which were parallell: targets’ SES→ attractiveness→ trustworthiness→ response bias;targets’ SES→ anxiety→ trustworthiness→ response bias,mainly through the first path.The effect of targets’ SES on response bias was totally mediated by targets’ trustworthiness.