When a journalist and politician engage in deception detection: Effects of demeanor, refutation, and partisanship in combative media interviews

ABSTRACT

When journalists accuse politicians of deception and politicians return fire, how do voters decide what to believe? Grounded on truth-default theory and visual primacy theory, this paper reports experiments with stimuli of interviews in which a journalist accuses a politician of deceptive evasion. In Study 1, we manipulate whether the journalist’s allegation is accurate. Voters seem unable to tell, basing their perceptions on the politician’s demeanor. In Study 2 we test the effect of a politician honestly refuting a dishonest journalist. Voters still attend to demeanor, not verbal message content. In Study 3 partisanship, verbal refutation, and nonverbal demeanor interact. Democratic voters respond more favorably to their politician refuting a journalist and are not misled by demeanor like Republicans.

KEYWORDS:

• Truth-default theory
• Deception detection
• Demeanor
• Political interview
• Partisan bias
• Visual primacy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A “speeder check” implemented by the Qualtrics Panel administrator filtered out those who were advancing through the study one standard deviation (or faster) below the mean of the “soft launch.” Quality assurance checks resulted in our final sample size of 209 in the dataset for this study.