How an interviewee knows what information is key to disclose or withhold

Dear Zoltan,

Many thanks for inviting us to consider the suggestion to expand on the discussion of the captioned Stage 2 registered report. We do appreciate the reviewer’s comment to discuss practical implications. While acknowledging the focus on methodology and future research, we believe the entire discussion circles practical implications. For example, we discuss the practical issue that disposition had a stronger influence on interviewees’ disclosure than when reasoning about what the interviewer wants to know. But contrary to our expectations, mental designation preferences indicated that interviewees generally assume interviewers want to know complete details, irrespective of question specificity. We also talk about how questions with greater specificity (i.e., high- versus low-worthwhileness questions) may increase the confidence in what the interviewer wants to know. And we speculate that the confidence high-worthwhileness questions bring might serve two ends. They might facilitate disclosure when interviewees elect to be cooperative. But high-worthwhileness questions might impede disclosure or even assist in deception, given that such questions make interviewees confident in their perception of what the interviewer wants to know. And resistant interviewees are inclined to refrain from assisting their interviewer. Overall, our aim was to tell practitioners what to expect not what to do (the latter is not our expertise), which is not typically how researchers frame practical implications. We believe the manuscript is already lengthy and additions will be antithetical to simplifying the prose.

One minor edit to note: we edited the Abstract to reduce the word length in preparation for publication.

Finally, we would like to make the report public. It is set to private on PCI.

Sincerely,

Authors.