Convention speeches help professor detect deception
Updated Sun. Sep. 7 2008 11:58 AM ET
CTV.ca News Staff
A Queen's University computer science professor claims he has studied the Democratic and GOP convention speeches, crunched the numbers, run them through his computer and found that Republican John McCain really may be a straight talker.
David Skillicorn analyzed the speeches of major speakers at the Republican and Democratic conventions, counted some key words that indicate if someone is trying to be deceptive, put them through a software program, and came up with results that may surprise some people.
McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, appears to have delivered a speech with the least amount of deception or "spin" of all the major politicians to speak over the past two weeks, according to Skillicorn's analysis.
His Democratic rival, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, didn't fare much better than U.S. President George Bush in the study. Obama placed in the middle when it came to the amount of spin in his speech. The candidate with the most deceptive speech was former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, according to Skillicorn.
How did Skillicorn determine which candidate used more or less spin? He based his study on research conducted by prominent University of Texas psychologist James Pennebaker. The former FBI polygraph unit instructor and a colleague discovered that a person's choice of words could indicate when he or she was lying.
Pennebaker claimed that liars generally used fewer first person pronouns (like "I" or "my") than more honest people.
"When someone is being deceptive the rate of those words goes down. So, people disassociate themselves from what they are saying. They step back from it," Skillicorn told CTV News from Kingston, Ont.
Conversely, Skillicorn says the use of negative association words (for example, words such as hate, anger, boring, dumb, disappointing, and weak) increases when someone is being deceptive.
Once the major speeches were run through a text analysis program, he says McCain clearly came out as the "low spin" winner.
Here is Skillicorn's list of candidates in order of least to most deceptive.
* John McCain
* Mike Huckabee
* Joe Biden
* Joe Lieberman
* Sarah Palin
* Michelle Obama
* Barack Obama
* George W. Bush
* Bill Clinton
* Hillary Clinton
* Fred Thompson
* Rudolph Giuliani
* Mitt Romney
"(McCain) tells his own story. So, necessarily he is using lots of "I's"," Skillicorn said.
"But if you look at the way he speaks of policy, it's the same way, which is not the way Obama phrases his policy discussion. The reason may be because (Obama) hasn't done as much. So, he doesn't have the same choices."
Critics may question Skillicorn's methodology. The key words and phrases he uses to determine the veracity of a speech were based on Pennebaker's studies where participants actually wrote out their own answers to questions they were asked.
Few, if any, political candidates for major office in the U.S. write their own speeches. Instead, all of the candidates Skillicorn reviewed likely had their speeches written by teams of writers. So, his analysis may not determine whether or not a candidate is trying to manipulate the truth. Instead, it may say more about the speechwriters than the candidate.
Skillicorn says that doesn't matter because speechwriters try to match their words with their subject's speech pattern. Also, he says, the speakers usually finesse the final draft of the speech.
Using text analysis is "a really good window into the soul because (speech is) being driven by the subconscious," he said.
