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How might they be combined to improve their
predictive efficiency? Can they be refined? Can you think of better measures (for example, asking
each suspect to make up a story using the critical words)?
DISCUSSION, EXTENSIONS, AND EXPERIMENTAL VARIATIONS
1. If your section runs for one and one-half hours or so, you might add one or both of the following
aspects: (a) a passive accomplice who accompanies the killer but does not talk to him, watches the
questionable deed, has access to the relevant information but is neither a blackmailer, a killer, nor a
destroyer of evidence; (b) a coincidental, innocent suspect who, by happenstance, does some weird
things that involve the same critical words but is not guilty of any crime. For example, your letter to
this person might say he is looking for the sign of a skull and cross-bones on a letter which, when
he find it in Room____, he is to crush and destroy because he thinks it contains a curse, etc. These
additions make lie detection less easy and open discussion about false-positives, personal
responsibility, and reliability.
2. Why would it be important for the experimenter and the timekeeper not to know which suspect was
guilty?
3. Could you train the guilty person not to betray himself through his emotional arousal? Are there
people who have learned to suppress or not experience guilt? How could their guilt be assessed?
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4. What role does self-monitoring play in being able to infer internal states from external behavior?
5. What does it mean to be “poker faced” or to have a face “like an open book”?
6. What kinds of external behavior are the best indicators of internal states? How can we train
ourselves to monitor and control such sources of channel leakage?
7. What circumstances and variables lead to errors and misinterpretations of the “inner person” from
outer appearances? Also consider the conditions under which we judge a nonparticipant as “shy”
or “bored,” “unmotivated,” or “aloof, “not prepared” or “reserved.”
8. How can we distinguish between generalized arousal (anxiety from being put into a novel situation
or from being tested) and the specific motivation stemming from guilt?
9. Sigmund Freud used word association as a clue to detect secrets the person concealed even from
him- or herself. The idea that repressed thoughts will be revealed in overt behavior (slips of the
tongue, strange associations, etc.) is basic to Freudian psychodynamic notions of the functioning of
personality.
10. Contrast the methodologies of using qualitative content analysis of word associations to that of
quantitative reaction time measures to get at the “deeper” structure of functioning. Personality
psychologists and lay people more often use the former, while cognitive psychologists tend to use
the latter. Beyond the methods of obtaining data, are there differences in how one goes about
making inferences from these two sources of data?
11. Jury Decisions. If there is time, an interesting variation is to divide the class into juries with the
mandate of coming to a unanimous decision in x-minutes’ time. Ask a spokesperson for each jury to
call out its verdict. Be sure to have jury members indicate the confidence level of their personal
verdict and the jury’s final decision. Analyze any changes in confidence or personal decisions due
to the social influence of other jurors. How are explanations for erroneous inferences handled after
the class learns the “truth”?