Motivational cues: the role of perceived senders' self-control ability in raters' deception judgements

Previous studies have found that senders' personal traits may be used by others to make judgements about the senders' truthfulness. Two studies were conducted to examine whether perceived self-control ability has an effect on deception judgement. Perceived self-control was hypothesized to act as a motivational cue that participants would use to assess the sender's motivation to lie, which in turn would influence their deception judgement. Results revealed that when participants assessed the sender as having higher self-control ability, they would consider the sender to be less motivated to lie in daily life (Study 1), and judge the sender more truthful in a text-based deception judgement task (Study 2). However, the effect of perceived self-control ability disappeared in a video-based task (Study 2), likely due to the multitude of various cues available in audio-visual stimuli. The theoretical and applied implications of the results are discussed.