Detecting true lies: police officers' ability to detect suspects' lies

Ninety-nine police officers, not identified in previous research as belonging to groups that are superior in lie detection, attempted to detect truths and lies told by suspects during their videotaped police interviews. Accuracy rates were higher than those typically found in deception research and reached levels similar to those obtained by specialized lie detectors in previous research. Accuracy was positively correlated with perceived experience in interviewing suspects and with mentioning cues to detecting deceit that relate to a suspect's story. Accuracy was negatively correlated with popular stereotypical cues such as gaze aversion and fidgeting. As in previous research, accuracy and confidence were not significantly correlated, but the level of confidence was dependent on whether officers judged actual truths or actual lies and on the method by which confidence was measured.     

Follow the liar: the effects of adult lies on children's honesty

Recent research shows that most adults admit they lie to children. We also know that children learn through modeling and imitation. To date there are no published studies that examine whether lying to children has an effect on children's honesty. We aimed to bridge the gap in this literature by examining the effects of adults' lies on elementary and preschool‐aged children's behavior using a modified temptation resistance paradigm, in which children are tempted to peek at a toy they have been told not to look at, and later given a chance to either admit peeking, or try to conceal their transgression by lying. Prior to being tested, half of the children were told a lie and half were not. We then measured both cheating (peeking) and lie‐telling behaviors. We hypothesized that lying to a child would increase the likelihood that they would both peek at the toy and lie about having done so. Results showed that school‐age children were more likely to peek if they had been lied to, and were also more likely to lie about peeking. In contrast with the school‐age children, there was no difference in peeking or lying for preschoolers who were and were not lied to. These results have important implications for parenting and educational settings.     

Teenage Offenders' Ability to Detect Deception in Their Peers

This study investigated the deception detection abilities of teenage offenders and teenage non‐offenders who made veracity judgments about 12 videotaped interviewees and also explored the behavioural characteristics of teenage liars and truth tellers. The findings revealed that teenage offenders were significantly more accurate in their credibility judgments than teenage non‐offenders. However, the offenders' impressive accuracy rates were not as a consequence of using valid cues to deceit. The feedback hypothesis helps to explain why the offenders were more accurate in their decisions: Operating within a criminal environment may mean that teenage offenders frequently lie and are lied to. Consequently, they receive more feedback than non‐offenders regarding the effectiveness of their lies as well as how successful they are at detecting lies. As a result, their lie detection ability improves. The current study suggests moving away from individual deceptive cues as predictors of deceit towards a more intuitive and holistic approach to lie detection, such as the Brunswikian Lens Model.Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Effect of lie labelling on children's evaluation of selfish,polite, and altruistic lies

This study investigates how 5‐ and 6‐year‐olds' evaluations of selfish, polite, and altruistic lies change as a result of whether these false statements are explicitly labelled as lies. We are also interested in how interpretive theory of mind may correlate with such evaluations with and without a lie label. Our results showed that labelling lowered children's evaluations for the polite and altruistic lies, but not for the selfish lies. Interpretive theory of mind correlated positively with the evaluation difference between the polite and altruistic lies and that between the selfish and altruistic lies in the label, but not in the non‐label condition. Correlation between the selfish and altruistic lies and that between the polite and altruistic lies were stronger with than without labelling, after controlling for age, and verbal and non‐verbal intelligence. We conclude that lie labelling biases children towards more negative evaluations for non‐selfish lies and makes them see lies of different motives as more similar. If a lie label is applied, whether lies of different motives are still evaluated differently depends on interpretive theory of mind, which reflects the child's ability to represent and allow different interpretations of an ambiguous reality.     

See no lies,hear no lies: differences in discrimination accuracy and response bias when watching or listening to police suspect interviews

In the present experiment, police officers attempted to detect truths and lies told by suspects in their police interviews in three different ways: They either saw the suspects (visual condition), only heard the suspects (audio condition) or both saw and heard the suspects (control condition). Research has demonstrated that vocal and speech‐related cues are better diagnostic cues to deceit than visual cues. Therefore, we predicted that participants in the visual condition would perform worst in the lie detection task. Having access only to visual cues may encourage observers to be more reliant on stereotypical beliefs when attempting to detect truths and lies. Since these stereotypes are related to the behaviour of liars, rather than to the behaviour of truth tellers, we further predicted that being exposed only to visual cues may result in a lie bias. The findings supported these hypotheses, and the implications are discussed. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The effect of lying on intentional versus unintentional facial expressions

Given the absence of a consensus within the literature regarding nonverbal cues that make lie detection possible, the present research aims to test whether the facial expressions of women involved in deceitful interactions differ from those involved in truthful interactions. This comparison is made both on the factor lie versus truth and on the characteristics of the situation: prepared versus spontaneous lie. The interactional situation is inspired by the “$ 20 for a lie” experiment [J Abnorm Soc Psychol 58 (1959) 203–210]. The nonverbal behaviour-coding scheme used was based on the cues identified by Ekman et al. In line with our hypotheses, the number of behaviours observed (all categories combined) was significantly higher in the deceitful interaction and even more so in the spontaneous lie condition. Moreover, there was a noticeably higher proportion of intentional behaviours in liars than in truth-tellers. Finally, the proportion of fake smiles and smiles of embarrassment was also markedly higher in liars. The correspondence between these results and those already reported in the literature is discussed, as well as the possibility of using some of the cues studied as indicators in applied settings.     

LYING PERSON-TO-PERSON ABOUT LIFE EVENTS: A COGNITIVE FRAMEWORK FOR LIE DETECTION

Undetected lies of prospective or current employees cost business billions of dollars annually. The ability to detect these lies would be of immense benefit. Several recent reports have called for research on new, theoretically based methods of lie detection. In response, we tested the Activation-Decision-Construction Model of lying ( Walczyk, Roper, Seeman, & Humphreys, 2003 ) according to which response time is a cue to deception. Participants were tested person-to-person. In Experiment 1, half lied to questions probing recent episodic memories. The other half answered honestly. Liar-truth teller response time differences were observed between subjects. Discriminant analyses demonstrated the value of response time for uncovering deceit. Those highest in social skills were the quickest liars. In Experiment 2, lying was shown to take longer than truth telling within subjects, and within-subject response time standard deviations were shown to be converging cues to deception. Based on these data and the ADCM, a Time-Restricted Integrity Confirmation (Tri-Con) framework for lie detection is proposed that might one day provide cost effective lie detection for business.     

Young Deceivers: Executive Functioning and Antisocial Lie‐telling in Preschool Aged Children

The present study examined the emergence of antisocial lie‐telling in very young children. Lie‐telling was studied in relation to executive functioning skills and children's abilities to identify both truths and lies. A total of 65 children (M_{age in months} = 31.75, SD = 1.87) participated in a modified temptation resistance paradigm (TRP; designed to elicit spontaneous lies). Executive functioning was measured through an inhibitory control task and a forward search planning task. The Truth/Lie Identification task was administered (Lyon, Carrick, & Quas, 2010 ) to measure children's abilities to accurately distinguish truths and lies. During the TRP, a total of 89.23% children peeked at the toy when a research assistant left the room, and of those children, 29.31% lied to the research assistant. Significant differences on executive functioning measures were found between lie‐tellers and confessors, as well as for the Truth/Lie Identification task. Lie‐tellers had higher scores on measures of inhibitory control and forward search planning. Lie‐tellers also had higher accuracy on the Truth/Lie Identification task than confessors. This study provides a unique contribution to the literature by examining 2.5‐year‐old children's emerging lie‐telling abilities, a relatively understudied age during which fledgling lie‐telling emerges. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Overlooking the Obvious: Incentives to Lie

Over the years, people have searched for deception cues in the liar's behavior. However, the sender's incentives to lie might be more revealing than behavior. In Experiment 1, an incentive was developed that was predictive of lying. Judges with access to incentive information in addition to behavior achieved almost perfect lie/truth detection. This was not a result of the speakers' behavior being transparent (Experiment 2) but because incentive information was useful to separate lies from truths (Experiments 2 and 3). Experiment 3 revealed that people may forego perfectly diagnostic contextual cues to base their judgments on illusory behavioral cues.     

Police officers ability to detect deception in high stakes situations and in repeated lie detection tests

Thirty‐seven police officers, not identified in previous research as belonging to groups that are superior in lie detection, attempted to detect truths and lies told by suspects during their videotaped police interviews. In order to measure consistency in their ability, the officers each participated in four different tests, each of which was on a different day. They were asked to indicate their confidence in being able to distinguish between truths and lies prior to the first test and after completing all four tests. We predicted that accuracy rates would be higher than those typically found in research with police officers; that good or poor performances on an individual test would be partly caused by luck, and, consequently, participants' accuracy scores were likely to progress towards the mean if their performance on all four tests was to be combined; and that officers would underestimate their own performance. These hypotheses were supported. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Contribution of color to face recognition

One of the key challenges in face perception lies in determining how different facial attributes contribute to judgments of identity. In this study, we focus on the role of color cues. Although color appears to be a salient attribute of faces, past research has suggested that it confers little recognition advantage for identifying people. Here we report experimental results suggesting that color cues do play a role in face recognition and their contribution becomes evident when shape cues are degraded. Under such conditions, recognition performance with color images is significantly better than that with gray-scale images. Our experimental results also indicate that the contribution of color may lie not so much in providing diagnostic cues to identity as in aiding low-level image-analysis processes such as segmentation.     

Detecting lies in young children,adolescents and adults

The ability of teachers, social workers, police officers and laypersons (undergraduate and postgraduate students) to detect truths and lies told by 5–6 year‐olds, adolescents and adults was tested in the present experiment. Lie detectors judged the veracity of statements from 18 liars and 18 truth tellers belonging to these three age groups. Accuracy scores were around 60% for each of these three age groups, both for detecting truths and for detecting lies. No occupational differences emerged. Moreover, judgements made by teachers, social workers and police officers showed an overlap, suggesting that an erroneous decision made by a member of one group may not easily be detected by a member of the other groups. The lie detectors were inclined to judge cues of nervousness, cognitive demand and attempted behavioural control as cues to deceit, even when truth tellers were displaying these cues. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Police officers' beliefs about,and use of,cues to deception

Meta‐analytic findings indicate that people, including police officers, are generally poor at detecting low‐stakes deception. Related to this, investigations of behaviours that people reportedly use to make truth or lie judgements tend to conclude that people rely on incorrect stereotypes. However, consistent findings suggest that police officers are able to detect high‐stakes deception; this implies that, at least in some contexts, police officers utilise reliable cues to deception. The research presented here was an investigation of cues to deception used by police officers (N  = 69), when making veracity decisions about real world, high‐stakes communications. Data were collected on both free report cues, and also prescribed cues that were known (from previous research), to discriminate between liars and truth‐tellers in the communications that the police officers observed. Officers free reported using cues related to verbal content, emotion, body language, eyes, vocal cues, and external cues. Most prescribed cues were self‐reportedly used correctly by large majorities of the officers, suggesting that they may not rely on inaccurate stereotypes. Self‐report use of categories of free report cues, and prescribed cues, was not related to accuracy in detecting deception. As people may not always be aware of the behaviours on which their judgements are based, the relationships between some of the behaviours actually displayed in the communications, and group accuracy in detecting deception in those communications, were also investigated. Group accuracy was related to the presence of subjective, emotion‐related cues in the communications.     

Assessing cognitive load using oculometrics to identify deceit during interviews

Lying requires a long‐term memory search and is a cognitive load task. Telling a spontaneous lie is associated with a higher cognitive load compared with the truth, although when memories are planned before telling a lie, the cognitive load can be less compared with the truth; therefore, telling a spontaneous lie could be associated with a higher cognitive load compared with a planned lie. In this study, we examined cognitive load, as measured through oculometrics, to identify deceit in interviews. Twenty‐four subjects were questioned, and their answers classified as spontaneous lies, planned lies, and truths. Results show that saccades and fixations were associated with a higher cognitive load when telling spontaneous lies compared with telling truths. Blinks and pupillometry show that subjects require greater cognitive load when telling truths compared with planned lies. Finally, telling spontaneous lies required higher cognitive load compared with planned lies, as assessed by blinks.     

The enigma of altruistic lying: Perspective differences in what motivates and justifies lie telling within romantic relationships

Lie tellers in intimate relationships often claim their lies were told to protect their partner. However, based on several converging theories (e.g., motivated reasoning, cognitive dissonance), we expected lie receivers to interpret lie tellers' motives less altruistically. We also made predictions regarding other variables on which we expected lie tellers' and lie receivers' perceptions to differ (e.g., justifications for the lie and responses to the lie, lie tellers' guilt, the temporal and situational context of the lies, perceptions of causality and blame). Participants wrote 2 autobiographical narratives, one from the perspective of lie teller and the other from the perspective of lie receiver. Participants also completed questionnaire items that mirrored the coding dimensions used in our content analyses of the narratives. As predicted, results indicated that the same participants, when occupying the role of lie teller as opposed to lie receiver, viewed their lies as more altruistically motivated, guilt inducing, spontaneous, justified by features of the situation, and provoked by the lie receiver. We discuss potential explanations for perspective differences in lying, the value of multiple perspectives when studying and evaluating lies, and the potential for an understanding of perspective differences to aid in conflict resolution.     

Children tell white lies to make others feel better

We investigated whether children tell white lies simply out of politeness or as a means to improve another person's mood. A first experimental phase probed children's individual insight to use white lies when prosocial behaviour was called for. We compared a situation in which a person had expressed sadness about her artwork and the goal was to make her feel better (Sad condition) with a situation in which a person was indifferent about her work (Neutral condition). Children at 7 years and older were more likely to tell a white lie than the blunt truth in the Sad over the Neutral condition. Five‐year‐olds showed only a trend. A second phase tested whether children selectively use white lie telling after it was modelled by an adult. Results showed that after modelling, children from all age groups were significantly more likely to use white lies in the Sad condition than in the Neutral condition. Taken together, these results show that children are attentive to another person's affective states when choosing whether to tell a white lie or tell the truth. We discuss the emergence of this behaviour in relation to children's developing social cognition and the increasing sophistication of children's prosocial behaviour.     

We Believe in Being Honest: Examining Subcultural Differences in the Acceptability of Deception1

Perceptions of lie acceptability vary as a function of the motivation for the lie, the relationship between deceiver and deceived, and the perceiver's cultural background. The current study examines the relation between one cultural background—that is, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‐Day Saints (LDS)—and perceptions of lie acceptability, and whether this varies as a function of lie and rater characteristics. Participants rated lie acceptability in 12 scenarios varying lie motivation and lie recipient. Overall, the LDS group rated lies as less acceptable than did the non‐LDS group, and lie acceptability varied according to lie motivation and lie recipient. Participant age was negatively correlated with lie acceptability. Implications of the findings and directions for future research are discussed.     

How to Detect Deception in Everyday Life and the Reasons Underlying It

The autobiographical Implicit Association Test (aIAT) evaluates which of two contrasting autobiographical events is true for an individual on the basis of implicit associations and corresponding reaction times in classifying sentences. In this research, white lies and corresponding reasons to lie were investigated. White lies are social lies. They are widespread in our in our daily lives, in the business world and in the forensic contexts. The ability to deceive is essential for polite interactions and, at times, self‐preservation, but little research was conducted so far on this type of deception. The authors tested the efficiency of the aIAT in identifying a white lie and the real reason for producing a white lie, contrasting each participant's real motivation for lying and a false (faked) one. In both cases, aIAT differentiated truth from white lies and also identified the real reason from the faked one for all 20 participants. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Children's Antisocial and Prosocial Lies to Familiar and Unfamiliar Adults

Although parents frequently instruct children not to lie, children often observe lie‐telling within the family environment. To date, no empirical research has examined children's spontaneous lie‐telling to different lie‐recipients. The current study examined children's spontaneous deceptive behaviour to parents and unfamiliar adults. In Experiment 1 (N = 98), children's (ages 6–9) antisocial lies to a parent or an unfamiliar adult were examined using a modified Temptation Resistance Paradigm. In Experiment 2, (N = 99) children's (ages 6–9) prosocial lies to a parent versus an unfamiliar adult were examined using the Disappointing Gift Paradigm. Results indicate that, across different types of lies, children are more likely to lie to an unfamiliar adult than to a parent. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.