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The Truth-Default, Diagnostic Utility, And The Value Of Contextual Knowledge In Deceptive Interactions, Heath A. Howard

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

This dissertation describes and reports an experimental study examining the predictions of truth-default theory (TDT). TDT is an expansive, modular theory of deception detection which explains the processes by which people abandon the truth-default state and navigate judgments of message veracity in conversations. The first goal of this study was to test TDT’s seventh proposition, which explains how communicators abandon the truth-default state through trigger events (i.e., actions which prompt communicators to be uncertain about the accuracy of the message) such as decreased sender believability and message coherence. The second goal of this study was to test the predictions of …