Mircea Zloteanu

• 

  Sharing Economy: How Trust and Reputation Shape Behaviour

  I am the primary behavioural researcher investigating how trust and reputation influence user interaction and decision-making in the Sharing Economy.

  In a series of online experiments, we investigate the effect of community-generated trust and reputation information (TRI) on user decision-making and choice preference on Sharing Economy platforms. The results over several studies strongly support our claim that TRI produces a positivity bias in users' perception of other users (here, Hosts). This work illustrates the strength of TRI on user judgement, its limitation as a metric for quality, and the cognitive bias people experience in this novel online peer-to-peer environment.

• 

  Looking ready for Jail - The Influence of Handcuffs on Deception Detection and Suspiciousness

  Research investigating the effects of context on how interrogators and perceivers detect veracity and how their biases are influenced by the suspects ability to gesticulate freely.

  This experiment looked at how the context in which individuals are interrogated affects how believable they appear. Participants were videotaped while providing truthful or fabricated responses in an interrogation setting while their ability to gesticulate freely was manipulated. The manipulation was achieved by handcuffing half of the participants. Deception detection accuracy, confidence and bias for the two conditions was obtained from both layperson and police officers. The study looks at how the physical constraints imposed on the “suspects” affects their ability to appear honest and on how these constraints affect the decoder’s accuracy and suspiciousness.

• 

  Surprise! I’m not actually surprised – the ability to fake an emotion

  Investigating the factors that allow indviduals to successfully fake emotional expressions.

  How do people fake emotions, and how convincing are they? Participants were recorded reacting to a surprising stimulus, a vampire jack-in-the-box, and faking surprise to a neutral stimulus, a countdown timer. Half the participants faked surprise before experiencing genuine surprise (improvise condition), and the other half afterwards (rehearse condition). These recordings were shown to other participants who tried to identify which were genuine. The improvised surprise was easier to classify as fake, compared to rehearsed surprise, which was indistinguishable from genuine surprise. The improvised and rehearsed expressions were rated as equally intense, and both less so than the genuine surprise. These results show that the experience of surprise helps participants convincingly portray that emotion later. Further experiments will reveal what aspects of rehearsal aid performance, whether participants are drawing on their recent internal experience of genuine surprise, or a motor memory of their recent behaviour when genuinely surprised.

• 

  Emotion recognition ability and Deception Detection in Low-stakes lying

  Investigating the differences in deception detectiong in everyday lying scenarios.

  Emotion theories of deception state that information relating to one’s true emotions is useful in determining if they are lying or telling the truth. The current study investigated accuracy of deception detection based on differences in one’s ability to accurately recognise emotional cues in low-stake lies, where the consequences or rewards to the deceiver are low. The study compared participants on subtle cue recognition, microexpression detection, empathy, and alexithymia. The results reveal that one’s ability to detect facial cues was not related to accuracy. Empathy and deception detection showed a negative correlation, suggesting higher trait empathy is detrimental to accuracy, while alexithymia did not relate to either emotion recognition or deception detection. The findings illustrates that the relationship between emotion recognition in low-stakes lies differs from that observed in other types of lies, and that different component of emotion recognition have different relationships with the deception detection process.

• 

  Emotion Recognition Training and Deception Detection: Importance of the Type of Lie Told

  Research looking at the benefits/detriments of facial expression training in low and high stakes lies.

  Emotion theories of deception state that cues relating to the true emotions of a deceiver leak out during deception (Ekman & Friesen, 1969). Although such cues are said to be ubiquitous, research investigating their usefulness in deception detection shows inconsistent results. A potential issue is the role of moderating factors that determine cue production, such as the stakes to the liar for deceiving. The current study investigated the effect of emotion recognition training and bogus training on accuracy in detecting lie where the stakes to the deceiver were low or high. The results showed that in both deception conditions neither emotion recognition training nor bogus training was useful in improving accuracy, but that low-stakes lies and emotional lies were easier to detect. The potentially paradoxical results are discussed in terms of a dual system model of emotion recognition in deception detection.

• 

  Difference in Single vs. Pair judgements on Deception Detection, Confidence and Bias based on the Level of Communication

  Why are people working together to detect lies not better than a single observer? And what effects does collaborating have on judgements?

  When people judge whether others are lying or telling the truth, they act differently if they are working alone or in a group. The current experiment explored this finding by varying the amount of information that participants (working alone or in a pair) could communicate while making veracity decisions. The information that participants provided varied on three levels: a binary truth/lie decision, a binary decision and a set of reasons chosen from a list, or an open ended discussion/explanation. Being alone or in a pair had no significant effect on accuracy, but confidence was higher in the pair condition. A truth bias was found in the single condition but was mostly eliminated for pairs. As was predicted, the amount of information provided after each decision had an effect on accuracy, bias, and confidence. Lie detection accuracy was highest when stating a reason chosen from a list, while confidence increased with the amount of information provided. In pairs, specifying a reason or conversing while making the veracity decision eliminated the truth bias. The current findings improve our understanding of the effect of pair decision making, illustrating how varying levels of information can have different effect on decision making and deception detection.

• 

  The effect of Body Posture and Empathy on the Recognition of Facial Expressions of Emotions and Deception Detection

  Looking at the embodied effect of body postures on perception of emotional information, veracity judgements and social acuity.

  Previous research has indicated that body postures have significant effects on the way individuals process social information, but little is known of the effect postures may have on social acuity and the recognition of behavioural cues. The current study investigated the effect of open and closed body postures on the recognition of facial expressions of emotion and deception detection. It was hypothesised that adopting an Open posture would result in improved recognition of all seven universal expressions, compared to a Closed posture. Secondly, the Open posture would improve accuracy of deception detection, due to the improvement in recognition of cues of deception. Differences in empathy were also considered, as empathy is an important individual difference relating to the accurate recognition of emotional states in other, predicting that individuals with higher self-reported empathy would outperform individuals with lower empathy scores on both facial expression recognition and deception detection. The results showed partial support for the experimental hypotheses, finding that Open postures improved accuracy of truth detection, but not of lie detection. No effect of posture was found for the recognition of facial expression of emotion. The predicted advantage of higher trait empathy was found for truth detection, but no effect for either the lie detection or for facial expression recognition. The results are discussed in terms of theories of social acuity and information processing, as well as their implications in the field of deception detection. Potential limitations and future research directions are also discussed.

• 

  The face of QI: Novel Facial expression recognition study

  Investigating a new conversational expression.

  This experiment will focus on the ability of individuals to match facial expressions with congruent or incongruent descriptions of emotional states. It will focus both on established facial expressions of emotions and potentially novel conversational expression. The experiment will involve online data collection from a diverse sample of participants, in the hopes of providing a highly ecologically valid understanding of how well people can classify the emotional expressions of others. The study aims to find initial data on this new conversational expression that relates to genuine interest and acceptance of novel information.

Gallery

A few photographs illustarting various aspects of research life