Lying, in a manner of speaking

We investigated the production and perception of paralinguistic cues to deception in a two-person, interactive game. Speakers tried to mislead their partner by lying some of the time, while listeners tried to catch speakers out by guessing when they were lying. Our results show that listeners were more likely to associate disfluencies with deception, despite the fact that speakers were in fact more disfluent when telling the truth. We interpret this pattern of behavior within the attempted control approach to deception, whereby liars manipulate their language to conceal the fact that they are lying.