The miscommunication of deception: An adaptive perspective

Undergraduates were videotaped as they told lies and truths about their last job. Later, these undergraduates viewed the videotape and tried to guess which of their fellow subject were lying. Monetary incentives had been offered for successful lying and lie detection. Our subjects showed a “demeanor bias”—some looked honest even when they were lying; others looked dishonest even when they were telling the truth. These differences in apparent honesty were the primary determinant of deception judgments; perceivers' detection skills played a lesser role. Honest-looking subjects were predisposed to perceive others as dishonest. In general, our liars used hand gestures, maintained eye contact, and refrained from smiling. Perceivers misconstrued these behaviors as signs of honesty and could not often detect deceit—unless the lie was being told by a subject who had earlier told the truth. We draw on sociobiological concepts and offer an adaptive perspective on human deceit.     

Using the Reverse Order Technique with Non‐Native Speakers or Through an Interpreter

We examined whether the reverse order technique can be implemented when people speak through an interpreter. A total of 40 Chinese, 40 Korean and 30 Hispanic participants were interviewed in English or in their own native language through an interpreter. Interviewees were asked to tell the truth or lie about a secret meeting they viewed. They were asked to recall what they saw in chronological order and then in reverse order. The reverse order technique revealed two cues to deceit (detail and commissions) when an interpreter was present, whereas no cues to deceit emerged when interviewees spoke in English. This suggests that the reverse order technique can be used with an interpreter but possibly not with non‐native speakers. Perhaps the combined task of speaking in a non‐native language and reporting in reverse order is mentally taxing for liars and truth tellers, thus making differences between them unlikely to emerge. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Training Lie Detectors to Use Nonverbal Cues Instead of Global Heuristics

Everyday lie detectors lack the necessary knowledge to use nonverbal cues that discriminate lies from truthful communications. Instead, they rely on general heuristics like infreqtuency of reported events or falsifiability. Lie detectors judged the veracity of 40 reports on minor delinquency that were either truthful or not and referred either to falsifiable manifest actions or to nonfalsifiable subjective feelings. In the uninformed condition, detectors were free to use their intuitive strategies. In the informed condition, they were given detailed instructions about valid nonverbal cues. In the informed feedback condition, they received additional outcome feedback. Performance was generally above chance but further improved through cue information and feedback. Falsifiability caused a bias toward reduced veracity judgments. A lens model analysis supports the interpretation that naive lie detectors follow content-related heuristics but can flexibly change their strategy as they learn about authentic nonverbal cues.     

Effects of feedback on the overestimated capacity to detect lies and the underestimated ability to tell lies

People tend to overestimate their capacity to detect lying in others and to underestimate their own ability to tell lies. These biases were demonstrated in a sample of 60 police officers. In a lie‐detection task, the officers evaluated their accuracy as high and were overconfident in their judgements. In fact, their performance was below chance level. Participants also received false feedback about their performance. When the feedback suggested that they had performed better than they thought, this further enhanced their perceived lie‐detection capacity and also increased their belief in their ability to conceal their own lies. When the feedback suggested they had performed worse than they thought, their ratings of both lie detection and their lie‐telling abilities were lowered. Results are discussed in terms of anchoring, availability, and the self‐assessment bias. On a practical level, the tendency of police interrogators to overestimate their ability to detect deception could change suspicion into certainty and increase the risk of a false confession. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Detecting Deceit Via Analyses of Verbal and Nonverbal Behavior in Children and Adults

This experiment examined children's and undergraduates' verbal and nonverbal deceptive behavior, and the extent to which their truths and lies could be correctly classified by paying attention to these responses. Participants (N= 196) aged 5–6, 10–11, and 14–15, as well as university undergraduates, participated in an erasing the blackboard event, and told the truth or lied about the event afterwards. Nonverbal and verbal responses were coded, the latter with Criteria‐Based Content Analysis and Reality Monitoring. Although children and undergraduates demonstrated different behaviors (for example, the children obtained lower CBCA scores and made more movements), actual cues to deceit were remarkably similar across different age groups (for example, both 5–6‐year‐olds and undergraduates obtained lower CBCA scores and made fewer movements while lying). A combination of verbal and nonverbal lie detection methods resulted in more correct classifications of liars and truth tellers than the verbal and nonverbal lie detection methods individually, with the combined method obtaining hit rates as high as 88%.     

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.     

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.     

Police officers' credibility judgments: Accuracy and estimated ability

A study was conducted to examine Spanish police officers' and nonofficers' lie‐ and truth‐detection accuracy, as well as their estimated detection ability. The participants were 121 police officers and 146 undergraduates who watched videotaped truthful and deceptive statements. They had to indicate: (1) whether each statement was truthful or deceptive, and (2) how good police officers were, in comparison with the general population, at detecting the truthfulness or deceptiveness of a statement. Results indicate that police officers' accuracy was not higher than that of nonofficers, rather, while the officers reached an accuracy rate close to chance probability, the undergraduates surpassed that probability. Officers had a very strong tendency to judge the statements as deceptive; this made them less accurate than the students in judging the truthful accounts, while both groups reached a similar accuracy when judging the deceptive ones. Both occupational samples considered that the police are more capable of identifying truths and lies than the general population. However, this belief was stronger among the officers themselves than among the nonofficers. No significant correlation between estimated ability and accuracy was found for either sample. The results are explained in terms of the participants' wrong beliefs about the cues to deceit and the socialization process that police officers undergo, which would increase their confidence and perceived ability while hindering their learning of the actual indicators of deceit. The need for officers to receive training is emphasized, and some directions are given on how this training should be carried out.     

Listening, not watching: situational familiarity and the ability to detect deception

In 4 experiments, the authors investigated the influence of situational familiarity with the judgmental context on the process of lie detection. They predicted that high familiarity with a situation leads to a more pronounced use of content cues when making judgments of veracity. Therefore, they expected higher classification accuracy of truths and lies under high familiarity. Under low situational familiarity, they expected that people achieve lower accuracy rates because they use more nonverbal cues for their veracity judgments. In all 4 experiments, participants with high situational familiarity achieved higher accuracy rates in classifying both truthful and deceptive messages than participants with low situational familiarity. Moreover, mediational analyses demonstrated that higher classification accuracy in the high-familiarity condition was associated with more use of verbal content cues and less use of nonverbal cues.     

Full House of Fears: Evidence That People High in Attachment Anxiety Are More Accurate in Detecting Deceit

Lying is deep‐rooted in our nature, as over 90% of all people lie. Laypeople, however, do only slightly better than chance when detecting lies and deceptions. Recently, attachment anxiety was linked with people's hypervigilance toward threat‐related cues. Accordingly, we tested whether attachment anxiety predicts people's ability to detect deceit and to play poker—a game that is based on players' ability to detect cheating. In Study 1, 202 participants watched a series of interpersonal interactions that comprised subtle clues to the honesty or dishonesty of the speakers. In Study 2, 58 participants watched clips in which such cues were absent. Participants were asked to decide whether the main characters were honest or dishonest. In Study 3, we asked 35 semiprofessional poker players to participate in a poker tournament, and then we predicted the amount of money won during the game. Results indicated that attachment anxiety, but not other types of anxiety, predicted more accurate detection of deceitful statements (Studies 1–2) and a greater amount of money won during a game of poker (Study 3). Results are discussed in relation to the possible adaptive functions of certain personality characteristics, such as attachment anxiety, often viewed as undesirable.     

Why do lie-catchers fail? A lens model meta-analysis of human lie judgments

Decades of research has shown that people are poor at detecting lies. Two explanations for this finding have been proposed. First, it has been suggested that lie detection is inaccurate because people rely on invalid cues when judging deception. Second, it has been suggested that lack of valid cues to deception limits accuracy. A series of 4 meta-analyses tested these hypotheses with the framework of Brunswik's (1952) lens model. Meta-Analysis 1 investigated perceived cues to deception by correlating 66 behavioral cues in 153 samples with deception judgments. People strongly associate deception with impressions of incompetence (r = .59) and ambivalence (r = .49). Contrary to self-reports, eye contact is only weakly correlated with deception judgments (r = -.15). Cues to perceived deception were then compared with cues to actual deception. The results show a substantial covariation between the 2 sets of cues (r = .59 in Meta-Analysis 2, r = .72 in Meta-Analysis 3). Finally, in Meta-Analysis 4, a lens model analysis revealed a very strong matching between behaviorally based predictions of deception and behaviorally based predictions of perceived deception. In conclusion, contrary to previous assumptions, people rarely rely on the wrong cues. Instead, limitations in lie detection accuracy are mainly attributable to weaknesses in behavioral cues to deception. The results suggest that intuitive notions about deception are more accurate than explicit knowledge and that lie detection is more readily improved by increasing behavioral differences between liars and truth tellers than by informing lie-catchers of valid cues to deception.     

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.     

Are criminals better lie detectors? Investigating offenders' abilities in the context of deception detection

The present research examined lie detection abilities of a rarely investigated group, namely offenders. Results of the studies conducted thus far indicated a better performance of offenders compared to non‐offenders when discriminating between true and false messages. With two new studies, we aimed at replicating offenders' superior abilities in the context of deception detection. Results of Study 1 (N = 76 males), in contrast, revealed that offenders were significantly worse at accurately classifying true and false messages compared to non‐offenders (students). Results of Study 2 (N = 175 males) revealed that offenders' discrimination performance was not significantly different compared to non‐offenders (clinic staff). An internal meta‐analysis yielded no significant difference between offenders and non‐offenders, questioning the generalizability of previous findings.     

On-the-Job Experience and Skill at Detecting Deception1

The role of on-the-job experience in fostering skill at detecting deception was examined. A deception-detection test was administered to three samples of more than 100 subjects each: a group of undergraduates with no special experiences at detecting deceit; a group of new recruits to a federal law enforcement training program, who had some limited on-the-job experience at detecting deceit; and a group of advanced federal law enforcement officers, with years of experience working at jobs in which the detection of deception is very important. Although the officer samples were more confident about their judgments of deceptiveness than were the students, they were no more accurate than the students. None of the three groups showed a significant improvement in deception-detection success from the first half to the second half of the test; however, the advanced officers felt increasingly confident about their performance as they progressed through the test. Correlational analyses of the relationship between accuracy and confidence provided further evidence that experience does not improve people's awareness oi the accuracy or inaccuracy of their judgments. The findings from this research are compared to the results of research on other kinds of professional decision-makers (e.g., clinical psychologists), and several theoretical perspectives on the role of experience in decision making are discussed.     

The View from the Driver's Seat: What Good Is Salience?

A set of experiments gauged the value of salient and non‐salient visual information to drivers' decision making. Stimuli were images of traffic scenes viewed from a drivers' approximate perspective, and the subjects' task was to make stop‐or‐go driving judgments. Under some experimental conditions (Experiment 1), subjects viewed only the salient information from within each scene. Under other conditions (Experiments 2–3), they viewed only the non‐salient information. A signal detection measure of sensitivity served as the primary dependent measure. Data indicated that an above‐chance amount of the information needed for accurate judgments was contained within salient image regions and that some information was available only from the salient regions. Other critical information, however, was contained exclusively within non‐salient regions. Results suggest that an attentional bias toward visual salience would serve as an economical information‐seeking strategy for drivers but by itself would overlook many task‐critical cues. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

The fundamental attribution error in detecting deception: the boy-who-cried-wolf effect

Most people are unable to detect accurately when others are lying. Many explanations for this inability have been suggested but the cognitive heuristics involved in lie detection have received little attention. The present study offers evidence from two experiments, based on two different groups of observers, judging two different kinds of lies, presented in two different testing situations, that the fundamental attribution error significantly undermines the ability to detect honesty and deception accurately. Trait judgments of trustworthiness were highly correlated with state judgments of truthfulness, leading, as predicted, to positive correlations with honest detection accuracy and negative correlations with deception detection accuracy. More accurate lie detectors were significantly more likely than less accurate lie detectors to separate state and trait judgments of honesty. The effect of other biases, such as the halo effect and the truthfulness bias, also are examined. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.     

Lie Detection from Multiple Cues: A Meta‐analysis

Despite the importance of judgments of veracity in many settings, research suggests that it is difficult to detect lies. In this meta‐analysis, we assess the detectability of lies from constellations of multiple cues, with a particular focus on whether lie detectability increases as the conditions approach real‐life, forensic settings, as some critics of laboratory research have argued. We synthesized 144 samples, including 9380 liars and truth tellers providing a total of 26,866 messages. We examined the accuracy with which deception could be predicted on the basis of multiple behavioral cues and to what extent lie detectability was moderated by the motivation of the sender, the presence of strong emotion, the content of the lie, the context in which the lie was told, and the demographics of the senders. The findings show that lies can be detected with nearly 70% accuracy. This level of detectability is stable across settings. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.