Can We Be Honest? Cognition, Intention, Speech Production, and the Future of Deception Research

The last many years have given us clear and startling insights into human cognition and the process of human speech production. Yet much of current deception research eschews such revelations. Specifically, many deception scholars continue to presume a top-down, sequential-stepwise, selection-based speech production model that begins with a singular intent-to-deceive and ends with selection between binary discourse options—truth versus lie—that then are instantiated as communicative behavior. Unfortunately, such a model lacks goodness-of-fit with theory and research in speech production, cognitive psychology, and neurolinguistics. What's more, the presumptive truth/lie binary that dominates both experimental designs and research rationales bears little resemblance to the actual discourse patterns observed when people are allowed to freely generate responses to truth-problematic contexts. In this essay, we do three things. First, we review classic and current work in speech production. Second, we revisit the intentional states propositions of a recent theory of deceptive message production—Information Manipulation Theory 2—along with illustrative discourse examples from our own data. Finally, we entreat deception scholars to move our field forward in the future to a more fruitful place.