The ability to discriminate between true and false statements of intent is of utmost importance from a societal point of view. For example, in a police investigation, a correct veracity judgment of a statement of intention can prevent a planned future crime from happening. The field is new, and therefore lacks theoretical stringency. This is problematic since an understanding of the cognitive nature of intentions is key to developing methods for discriminating between truthful and deceptive statements. We tested if there are systematic ways in how true and false intentions are mentally represented. Informed by construal level theory (CLT) we reasoned that a true intention, which refers to a likely future action (since the person genuinely intends to perform the claimed action), should be relatively concretely represented. A false intention, on the other hand, which refers to an unlikely future action (since the person does not intend to carry out the claimed action), should be relatively abstractly represented. We expected a larger difference in mental abstraction when the intention referred to a schema-inconsistent task, than when the intention referred to a schema-consistent task. We found no support for our predictions. The aggregated findings from this and closely related studies suggest that true and false intentions instead may be represented at similar construal levels. If so, this calls for other innovative theoretical approaches to the important problem of how to unveil differences between true and false intentions.
It is of vast societal interest to distinguish between people’s true and false intentions -truths and lies about one’s future actions. Such knowledge can increase legal practitioners’ chances of preventing future crimes, for example by being able to spot markers of deception in a suspected terrorist’s statement (Granhag & Mac Giolla, 2014). Some thirty studies have to date been published on the topic of true and false intentions, and despite some promising findings (e.g., verbal markers of false intent; Mac Giolla, Granhag, & Liu-Jönsson, 2013), the field still lacks a stringent underlying theory. A recent attempt to rectify this was made by examining the underlying cognitive representations of true and false statements of intentions by applying predictions from CLT (Trope & Liberman, 2010) to the study of intentions (Calderon, Mac Giolla, Granhag, & Ask, 2017). This theoretical approach has the goal of improving verbal deception detection by revealing new cues to deceit. The current study builds on this novel work.
Calderon et al. (2017) proposed and tested the idea that that there may be systematic differences in the level of abstraction at which true and false intentions are mentally represented. They derived their prediction from the CLT framework (Trope & Liberman, 2010). With its roots in earlier theories on categorization (Rosch, Mervis, Gray, Johnson, & Boyes-Braem, 1976) and level of action identification (Vallacher & Wegner, 1987), CLT defines higher, abstract mental construals in terms of simpler scenes, and more inclusive categorization of objects and actions (i.e., fewer and broader categories). Lower, more concrete mental construals, on the other hand, involve more complex scenes, and less inclusive categorization of objects and actions (i.e., more and narrower categories; Trope & Liberman, 2010).
The specific contribution of CLT is that it explains under what circumstances people may adopt a more or less abstract mental representation of things. Specifically, it proposes that the further away a situation is from direct experience (i.e., the more psychologically distant), the more abstractly it will be mentally represented. For example, events happening further away in time (e.g., Liberman, Sagristano, & Trope, 2002) and space (e.g., Fujita, Henderson, Eng, Trope, & Liberman, 2006), and events happening to people that are percieved to be socially distant (e.g., Liviatan, Trope, & Liberman, 2008), have been shown to be represented more abstractly than events closer to here, now, and the self. In addition to the dimensions of temporal, spatial, and social distance, research has demonstrated how variations in subjective likelihood of events influence abstraction in a similar vein. Specifically, future events that are perceived as unlikely to occur have been found to be represented more abstractly than events perceived as likely to occur (Wakslak, Trope, Liberman, & Alony, 2006). There is an extensive number of empirical studies supporting the CLT assumptions. A meta-analysis including 310 effects of psychological distance on construal level from 125 experimental studies (Soderberg, Callahan, Kochersberger, Amit, & Ledgerwood, 2014) found a medium-sized effect (by the classic standards of Cohen, 1992) of psychological distance on how concretely or abstractly one represents an object or event. The effect was stable over cultures, settings, and types of distance (temporal, spatial, social, and likelihood distance).
Since a true intention typically is defined as a stated task that a person is committed to perform (Granhag, 2010), Calderon et al. (2017) argued that it naturally comes with a high perceived likelihood of occurring. Based on CLT, this means that a true intention should be represented relatively concretely. In contrast, since a false intention does not come with a commitment to perform the stated task, it comes with a low perceived likelihood of occurring. Therefore, relative to true intentions, false intentions should be represented more abstractly.
In two experiments, Calderon et al. (2017) introduced participants to simple tasks which they were told to either perform later (i.e., true intentions) or not to perform (i.e., false intentions). The participants were asked to provide statements saying that they were going to perform the tasks, thereby eliciting true and false statements. For example, tasks involved playing notes on a keyboard and attaching a poster to a wall. Established measures of construal level were used to assess the level at which true and false intentions were represented (e.g., participants’ preference for concrete or abstract alternative descriptions of the tasks). No differences in level of construal were found between true and false intentions. It was suggested that the null results were the effect of the tasks being too easy and schema-consistent for any differences to emerge in construal level. This explanation was derived from action identification theoryFootnote 1 (Vallacher & Wegner, 1987), which suggests that people tend to identify actions at a higher, more abstract, construal level in situations where actions are “non-disruptive” (e.g., easy, familiar, or schema-consistent). However, when an action is “disruptive” (e.g., a task which does not fit any existing mental script), people tend to turn to lower, more concrete, representations of the action. This is because concrete representations are more beneficial for action implementation in the latter case. In a study supporting this assumption, participants were asked to drink coffee from either normal-sized coffee cups or from unusually large and heavy cups (specifically designed to be disruptive of the action; Wegner, Vallacher, Macomber, Wood, & Arps, 1984). Wegner and colleagues found that participants drinking coffee from normal cups chose higher level, abstract, phrases to describe what they were doing (e.g., “becoming alert”, “satisfying my need”), whereas participants drinking coffee from the unusual cups favored lower-level, concrete descriptions (e.g., “putting a cup to my mouth”, “swallowing”).
Drawing on the findings of Wegner et al. (1984), Calderon et al. (2017) argued that both those stating true, and those stating false intentions, may hold relatively abstract mental representations when the tasks are non-disruptive. However, if a task is disruptive, truth tellers may adopt a more concrete construal level as it will be more functional for future action implementation. Those stating a false intention, on the other hand, who do not plan to perform their claimed intention, have little to gain by adopting a more concrete construal, even for schema-inconsistent tasks. To test this assumption, we asked the participants in the current study to prepare for a future task (i.e., true intention) or to plan a cover story to mask a secret mission (i.e., false intention). In order to examine the influence of the more theoretical concept of task disruptiveness, which comes in many guises (Vallacher & Wegner, 1987), we manipulated the specific case of schema consistency: The future task was either schema-consistent (i.e., collect office supplies from an office) or schema-inconsistent (i.e., collect random objects from an office). Construal level was measured as the number of thematic categories participants grouped the objects into, where a higher number of categories represents a more concrete construal (see, for example, Wakslak et al., 2006, “Exp. 1”, who used this dependent measure). We predicted that participants with a true intention would categorize these objects into more groups (indicative of a lower, more concrete level of construal) than those with a false intention, particularly for the schema-inconsistent task. Specifically, we predicted an interaction effect, such that the difference in construal level between true-intention and false-intention participants would be larger in the schema-inconsistent conditions than in the schema-consistent conditions.