ABSTRACT
One of the earliest phenomena addressed by a self-consciously cognitive social psychology—and one that continues to be an important research focus for contemporary cognitive social psychologists—is the process by which we form impressions of others. This chapter discusses a series of studies of interactions in which one party attempted to deceive the other. The dependent variable measure is what we call the Detection Index. It consists of the sum of the truthfulness ratings for those questions on which the interviewee was answering truthfully minus the sum of the ratings for those answers on which the interviewee was lying. Attractiveness is typically considered a biasing factor and was included because we expected it to be related to our judges’ ratings—predicting that attractive interviewees would be judged more truthful. It should go without saying that our attribution explanation of the effects of pitch variation on perceived internal state is at this point little more than a plausible speculation.
