Chapter

14

Voice and Vocabulary

In This Chapter

Does this little exchange sound familiar? You’ve probably had that exact conversation with someone, which is why you will understand intuitively how much meaning can be conveyed in tone of voice.

We know that the voice can convey emotion, and in this chapter we talk about things experts listen for to determine whether someone is lying. Similarly, a false story, in writing, may look different than the truth. You’ve no doubt heard the expression: “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.” Also in this chapter, you learn that both are important—although maybe not in the ways you might think.

I’m Counting on You

Forget Freud and Rorschach. The hottest thing these days in psychological profiling is Luke—well, LIWC. That’s short for Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, a word-counting and psychological profiling software created by Dr. James W. Pennebaker at the University of Texas, in Austin. Word analysis is like going through an airport checkpoint, where security screeners x-ray you and rummage through the contents of your suitcase. The words you choose, particularly pronouns, and how often you use them offer insight into your personality, social connections, and psychological and physical well-being. Your vocabulary, both written and spoken, offers insight into how you think, how you feel, and who you are.

Pennebaker’s exhaustive study of more than half a million letters, poems, books, blogs, conversations, and texts, published in the 1990s, found that people leave word signatures as distinctive as fingerprints. This groundbreaking work has been used recently to study everything from deception to the political temperature of the Arab spring.

	WORKIN’ IT

If you’d like to give LIWC a try, Dr. Pennebaker offers some interesting exercises on the website for his book The Secret Life of Pronouns (secretlifeofpronouns.com). For now, we will share some of Dr. Pennebaker’s findings.

In the next few paragraphs, we offer a cross-section of what Pennebaker calls “function” words—the heart of LIWC analysis—and then we’ll test your new knowledge with a real-life example.

The “I” Word

It’s the most common word in the English language. (Let’s face it, we’re all full of ourselves.) And so it follows that I-words track where people pay attention. Dr. Pennebaker says people who are self-focused, insecure, or self-effacing, tend to use first-person singular pronouns (I, me, my) at high rates.

Confident, task-focused folks let the I-words drop—of course, so do liars, which is where things get interesting:

• Women tend to use I-words more than men.

• Poor people tend to use more I-words than the rich.

• Depressed people use more I-words than happy people.

• The young use more I-words than the elderly.

All of that tends to have a fairly negative connotation, but research has also shown that people who use more personal pronouns also tend to be telling the truth. Context, of course, is key.

Other Revealing Words

I-words are also known as “self-referential” words. Here are other function words and what they reveal about someone:

Social words: They, she, us, we, talk, and friends; these words tend to be used more often by people who are more social and enjoy close relationships.

Positive emotion words: Love, happy, great, or good; these are the words of people who see the world in a positive light.

Negative emotion words: Hate, disgust, kill, afraid, and sad; these words are the vocabulary of the neurotic and people who tend to see life through tainted lenses.

Big words: People who use lots of words longer than six letters tend to be more educated but also may be more detached and emotionally distant.

	YA DON’T SAY

LIWC and Lying

Any fiction writer will tell you that making things up isn’t as easy as you might think. Making up a story about something you haven’t actually experienced and passing it off as true, or at least believable, is a skill few possess. Most liars give themselves away—either through words that don’t match their expressions or through the words themselves.

Dr. Pennebaker turned his linguistic inquiry and word-counting skills on himself, analyzing recommendation letters he’d written for students. An interesting pattern developed. Letters for the students he held in highest regard tended to have fewer positive emotion words and more concrete facts. Conversely, letters for weaker students tended to focus more on the reader, “I’m sure you will find …” and less on the student.

He also tended to write more about the better students, because he had more to work with. Similarly, Pennebaker writes that liars will generally write and say less, because they have fewer “real” details to reveal. He notes that real stories used more personal pronouns and fewer emotion words. Also, real stories have more words that describe time, space, and movement, and use fewer verbs and cognitive (thinking) words.

When it comes to deception, beware of people who use “would, should, could, and ought”; these discrepancy verbs imply imagined rather than actual experience. Interestingly, these are the very words fiction writers are taught to eliminate from their vocabulary, to give their work a more realistic tone.

	YA DON’T SAY

The following graph demonstrates words associated with honesty and deception.

Note that words with bars on the left side of the table are reliably associated with deception. The further to the left, the less trustworthy. Those on the right side are markers of honesty. Those words with bars close to the center line are not reliably associated with either truth or deception.

Words associated with honesty and deception.

(Courtesy of Dr. James W. Pennebaker, author, The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us and founder of LIWC)

How You Say It

Because liars spend time and energy making up a story, they will often lose track of what their voice is giving away. It is almost impossible to control voice, words, body language, and facial expressions all at once, so clues will leak out in the places they’re unable to control. It’s like patting your head while rubbing your belly and hopping on one foot, all at the same time.

Here are some “leaks” to look for, and what they reveal:

• Rapid speech: verbal adrenaline response, anxiety, fight or flight

• Increased voice volume: stress

• Higher pitch: fear, anxiety

• Pauses between the words: distraction, preoccupation, concentration

• Hesitation at the beginning of the speaker’s turn: calculation, reflection, weighing options

• Uh, um, ah: stalling for time

• Repeating words: another stalling tactic

• Unfinished words: preoccupation, uncertainty

• Broken speech: scrambling for words

Vocal errors occur when the deceiver isn’t prepared to answer questions. They stammer around until their brain kicks in to conjure up a response.

Speech errors can also occur when someone is well-rehearsed. They may practice their lines ahead of time, but when it comes to crunch-time, they freeze up, which causes speech errors and hesitations in the flow of the conversation.

You may be thinking, “That has happened to me before, and I wasn’t lying; I was just nervous speaking in front of others.” That’s correct; someone can be truthful and have the same symptoms as lying. You have to rely on context clues to rule out normal nervousness versus getting your story straight. That’s why establishing a baseline is so important.

	SAY WHAT?

Inflection

Speech inflection is the pitch plus loudness of voice. When someone’s voice becomes louder and the pitch goes up, it suggests the presence of underlying fear or anger. The question you, as a deception detective, have to ask yourself is: why?

For example, if your spouse returns home late without prior warning, you might ask, “Honey, where have you been?” If his voice becomes louder than normal and the pitch goes up, there is an underlying cause. First, rule out problems at work or other issues, before jumping to conclusions. If he says everything’s okay at work, then it’s reasonable to suspect there’s something going on that he doesn’t want you to know about.

Pace

Pace is the speed with which thoughts are communicated through speech. A liar, put on the spot, will experience an adrenaline rush—the old “fight or flight” instinct. This often manifests as accelerated speech. The old saying, “Beware of fast-talkers,” isn’t far from the truth.

Lowered Voice

A liar’s voice may also become softer when disguising a lie, as if they’re telling a secret. Have you ever found yourself suddenly lowering your voice when talking with a friend, even though there’s no one around to hear? Subconsciously, you hit the mute button because you knew that the information you were about to share was either partially untrue or something you shouldn’t be sharing.

Mumbling

Some liars may intentionally mumble specific facts, or cover their mouths when talking, to keep you from hearing specific details. It’s the verbal equivalent of the small print in contracts.

Buying Time

A classic stalling tactic is that of buying time to conjure up a response to cover a lie. A savvy liar will be able to come up with a quicker answer than an unskilled liar. Nevertheless, there will always be a delay in the response, some longer than others, based on the liar’s intellectual capacity. If someone can’t seem to pull off a big fat lie, they’ll pair a little truth with a lie.

Monotone

The flat-line, monotone voice may indicate a skillful liar concealing emotions. A skillful liar thinks that if they appear to be in control and avoids showing any emotion, their lies will appear more believable. Clearly, if someone always speaks in a monotone, then that would be considered their norm and should not be counted as deception. If monotone is not their normal mode of communication, something is probably up.

Laughing

Deception is no laughing matter, but laughter can be a sign of deception. Unlike spontaneous laughter, which is a natural body response, fake laughter is manipulative. Spontaneous laughter is accompanied by a heartfelt smile, as discussed in Chapter 4, where the corners of the mouth turn up and the cheeks rise, causing crow’s feet to appear around the eyes. A fake laugh may be accompanied by a forced smile, where the mouth turns up and stretches horizontally, avoiding crow’s feet. It’s almost as if smiling is painful.

Just because a laugh is spontaneous doesn’t always mean it’s a good thing. Laughter before or after a statement can be an indicator of deception or nervousness.

When you hear giggles during a conversation, but there’s nothing to laugh about, you have to question what they are saying that would make them feel uncomfortable enough to cover it with a laugh.

	WORKIN’ IT

The Least You Need to Know

• The pronouns someone uses and the frequency they use them can reveal the truth.

• Thare are voice changes in tone and tempo when someone is lying.

• Liars work hard to lie and pay less attention to their speech patterns and voice, which actually can reveal they are lying.

• Awkward smiling and laughing can be signs of deception.