...observers virtue of their level of interactivity. This experiment compared the judgments of participant-receivers and observers to test this principle. Results supported all hypotheses. Participant-receivers gave more favorable or lenient evaluations of participant-sender performance than did observers and were less accurate in detecting deception. This finding offers strong support for Interpersonal Deception Theory's contention that interactive deception differs from noninteractive deception and advantages participant-senders over participant-receivers.

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* The degree to which actors are active participants in the communication process is a defining property of interpersonal interactivity (Bengtsson, Burgoon, Cederberg, Bonito, & Lundberg, 1999; Burgoon, Bengtsson, Bonito, Ramirez, Dunbar, & Miczo, 1999). Participation refers to the extent to which actors are "ratified" interlocutors who are entitled to turns at talk, share the conversational floor, and exhibit a high rate of reciprocal turn-taking during the conversation. Senders who engage in extended, uninterrupted monologues qualify as less participative, as do passive message recipients or third-party observers who witness the ongoing interaction. Thus, participation should not be viewed narrowly as an either/or phenomenon but rather as the relative amount of involvement in the interaction in question. The level of participation afforded to, or availed by actors, may be a function of the communication context as well as societal norms and role relationships.

Recent studies have demonstrated that the memories and experiences of participants in an interaction differ somewhat from those who are merely observing the event (e.g., Benoit, Benoit, & Wilke, 1995; Burgoon & Dunbar, 2000; Stafford, Waldron, & Infield, 1989). In the current investigation, the focus was on receiver participation (i.e., an active participant versus watching a videotape). The objective was to replicate and extend prior experiments testing this purportedly fundamental property of interactivity in a context in which it is expected to have particular relevance--deception.

THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES AND HYPOTHESES

Interpersonal deception theory (IDT: Buller & Burgoon, 1996) contends that interactive deceit differs in fundamental ways from noninteractive deceit. When deceit occurs interactively--i.e., when creators of deceptive messages produce them "online" during interaction with the targeted message recipient--the resultant communication and judgment processes differ from instances of noninteractive deception--i.e., when senders produce messages for later viewing, hearing, or reading by an observer who was not present during initial message production. According to IDT, senders may draw upon the benefits of interpersonal interaction to craft more believable messages. Not only may they draw upon the truth or positivity biases that attend interpersonal interaction (e.g., Buller & Hunsaker, 1995; Burgoon & Newton, 1991) and the sense of commonality that reciprocal interaction patterns often foster but they may also draw upon receiver feedback to repair any deceptive messages that elicit negative feedback and even enlist the receiver in the process of constructing plausible messages (Burgoon & Buller, 1994; Burgoon, Buller, Floyd, & Grandpre, 1996). Thus, participation between sender and receiver should confer a net advantage on senders, making it more difficult for receivers to detect deception. Burgoon, Buller, and Floyd (2001) supported this prediction. Senders with higher participation (in dialogue rather than monologue) better adapted to receivers' suspicions and created a more involving, dominant, and pleasant demeanor, making them more successful at evading detection.

There are several explanations for differences between participants and observers (e.g., Benoit et al., 1995; Buller & Hunsaker, 1995; Buller, Strzyzewski, & Hunsaker, 1991; Burgoon & Dunbar, 2000; Burgoon, & Newton, 1991). First, when participants are engaged in interactions with others, they have multiple goals to accomplish. They are busier cognitively and behaviorally than are observers in that they must interpret cues from multiple channels while planning and managing their own verbal and nonverbal messages. Second, according to attribution theory, the actor-observer effect assumes that participants are unable to see their own behavior and so situational variables achieve more salience than do dispositional variables. Third, actors know their own feelings about and reasons for their behavior. They understand the history behind their actions and what their behavior has been in other, similar, situations. Observers lack such contextualizing information. Fourth, interacting with another is thought to create a sense of relationship and connection with...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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