This discussion has been very helpful and I appreciate the nuanced points people are making. Best wishes, -- Bonnie On Apr 13, 2006, at 1:20 PM, Nancy Baym wrote:
People hesitate for many reasons -- they are lying, they are unsure of what they are saying, they are not sure whether they should reveal something, they are searching for the words that say what they mean, they have never articulated the answer to a question someone (such as an interviewer) asks. The problem is is figuring out which reason applies in a given situation.
Again, that's a claim requiring empirical justification. As the deception literature shows, there are lots of things we think we know about the signs of deception that turn out to be myths, and I think that verbal hesitation is one of those mythical symptoms.
There is empirical research showing that response latency and longer pauses are associated with deception (unlike making eye contact). However, as this thread has pointed out, there are many other things with which pauses are associated and I would caution a researcher against assuming any particular one to be the case without additional sources of evidence for the claim.
Nancy _______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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Bonnie A. Nardi School of Information and Computer Sciences University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA 92697-3425 (949) 824-6534 www.artifex.org/~bonnie/