People systematically judged slower responses as less sincere for a range of scenarios; response delays are perceived to be the result of the responder suppressing automatic, truthful thoughts

Ziano, Ignazio, and Deming Wang. 2019. “Slow Lies: Response Delays Promote Perceptions of Insincerity.” PsyArXiv. May 22. doi:10.31234/osf.io/t56av

Abstract: Evaluating other people’s sincerity is a ubiquitous and important part of social interactions. Ten experiments (total N = 6381) show that response speed is an important cue on which people base their sincerity inferences. Specifically, people systematically judged slower (vs. faster) responses as less sincere for a range of scenarios from trivial daily conversations to high stakes situations such as police interrogation. Our findings suggest that this is because response delays are perceived to be the result of the responder suppressing automatic, truthful thoughts. People seem to have a rich lay theory of response speed, which takes into account a variety of situational factors. For instance, the effect of response speed on perceived sincerity is smaller if the response is socially undesirable, or if it can be attributed to memory effort. Finally, we showed that people are only partially able to disregard response speed in making sincerity inferences.