TARGET ARTICLE: Singles in Society and in Science

We suggest that single adults in contemporary American society are targets of stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination, a phenomenon we will call singlism. Singlism is an outgrowth of a largely uncontested set of beliefs, the Ideology of Marriage and Family. Its premises include the assumptions that the sexual partnership is the one truly important peer relationship and that people who have such partnerships are happier and more fulfilled than those who do not. We use published claims about the greater happiness of married people to illustrate how the scientific enterprise seems to be influenced by the ideology. We propose that people who are single-particularly women who have always been single-fare better than the ideology would predict because they do have positive, enduring, and important interpersonal relationships. The persistence of singlism is especially puzzling considering that actual differences based on civil (marital) status seem to be qualified and small, the number of singles is growing, and sensitivity to other varieties of prejudice is acute. By way of explanation, we consider arguments from evolutionary psychology, attachment theory, a social problems perspective, the growth of the cult of the couple, and the appeal of an ideology that offers a simple and compelling worldview.     

Individual differences in judging deception: accuracy and bias

The authors report a meta-analysis of individual differences in detecting deception, confining attention to occasions when people judge strangers' veracity in real-time with no special aids. The authors have developed a statistical technique to correct nominal individual differences for differences introduced by random measurement error. Although researchers have suggested that people differ in the ability to detect lies, psychometric analyses of 247 samples reveal that these ability differences are minute. In terms of the percentage of lies detected, measurement-corrected standard deviations in judge ability are less than 1%. In accuracy, judges range no more widely than would be expected by chance, and the best judges are no more accurate than a stochastic mechanism would produce. When judging deception, people differ less in ability than in the inclination to regard others' statements as truthful. People also differ from one another as lie- and truth-tellers. They vary in the detectability of their lies. Moreover, some people are more credible than others whether lying or truth-telling. Results reveal that the outcome of a deception judgment depends more on the liar's credibility than any other individual difference.     

Cues to deception

Do people behave differently when they are lying compared with when they are telling the truth? The combined results of 1,338 estimates of 158 cues to deception are reported. Results show that in some ways, liars are less forthcoming than truth tellers, and they tell less compelling tales. They also make a more negative impression and are more tense. Their stories include fewer ordinary imperfections and unusual contents. However, many behaviors showed no discernible links, or only weak links, to deceit. Cues to deception were more pronounced when people were motivated to succeed, especially when the motivations were identity relevant rather than monetary or material. Cues to deception were also stronger when lies were about transgressions.     

Time course of melody recognition: a gating paradigm study

Recognizing a well-known melody (e.g., one's national anthem) is not an all-or-none process. Instead, recognition develops progressively while the melody unfolds over time. To examine which factors govern the time course of this recognition process, the gating paradigm, initially designed to study auditory word recognition, was adapted to music. Musicians and nonmusicians were presented with segments of increasing duration of familiar and unfamiliar melodies (i.e., the first note, then the first two notes, then the first three notes, and so forth). Recognition was assessed after each segment either by requiring participants to provide a familiarity judgment (Experiment 1) or by asking them to sing the melody that they thought had been presented (Experiment 2). In general, the more familiar the melody, the fewer the notes required for recognition. Musicians judged music's familiarity within fewer notes than did nonmusicians, whereas the reverse situation (i.e., musicians were slower than nonmusicians) occurred when a sung response was requested. However, both musicians and nonmusicians appeared to segment melodies into the same perceptual units (i.e., motives) in order to access the correct representation in memory. These results are interpreted in light of the cohort model (Marslen-Wilson, 1987), as applied to the music domain.