Halfe the world knowes not how the other halfe lies: Investigation of verbal and non‐verbal signs of deception exhibited by criminal offenders and non‐offenders

Purpose. This study examined the verbal and non‐verbal behaviours exhibited by criminal offender and non‐offender participants while they related planned truthful and deceptive accounts about emotional autobiographical events. Methods. In a 2 × 2 (participant group × veracity) quasi‐experimental design, offenders (N = 27) and university students (N = 38) provided videotaped accounts of four autobiographical emotional events: two honest and two fabricated (counterbalanced). Patterns of behaviour exhibited during the truthful and the deceptive accounts were then compared. Results. In general, offenders and non‐offenders showed similar patterns of deceptive behaviour. Deceptive accounts by both groups contained fewer details than honest accounts. Deception was associated with an increase in illustrator usage and self‐manipulations; however, univariate analyses indicated only that offenders exhibited significantly more self‐manipulations when lying. A significant interaction emerged in which offenders showed a reduction in smiles when lying about the emotional events, while students showed no difference. Conclusions. Offenders and students showed similar patterns of lying on most cues. However, unlike non‐offenders, offenders smiled less and showed an increase in self‐manipulations when lying. We theorize that offenders may have been aware that smiling and laughing are negatively related to perceived credibility in the speaker and used self‐manipulations to distract listeners from the content of their lies.     

Offenders’ uncoerced false confessions: A new application of statement analysis?

Purpose. Deception detection research has mainly studied denials and distortions given by students. This study examined true and false confessions as told by offenders. It was hypothesized that the statement analytic techniques Criteria‐Based Content Analysis (CBCA) and Reality Monitoring (RM) would discriminate truths and lies. Methods. Truthful and deceptive confessions to crime were given by 30 offenders (both women and men) in a within‐subject design. The participants were in prison at the time of data collection, and told the truth about a crime they had committed and been sentenced for. In addition, they made up a lie about a different crime after a few minutes of preparation. The transcribed statements were scored for CBCA and RM criteria. Results. Results showed that neither total CBCA nor total RM scores differentiated between lies and truths. Some individual CBCA criteria, however, showed differences: more self‐deprecations and doubts about own testimony in the told lies, and more unexpected complications in the truths. Conclusions. The results are discussed in relation to statement analysis of offenders’ accounts, individual CBCA criteria, as well as the development of criminal experience and familiarity with the event and setting. Implications for triers of fact and suggestions for future research are considered.     

Are reality monitoring differences between truthful and deceptive autobiographical accounts affected by standardisation for word-count and the presence of others?

Although a number of methods have been proposed to control for word-count differences between truthful and deceptive accounts, there is no uniformity amongst researchers using the Reality Monitoring (RM) criteria as to when, why or how to standardise for word-count differences. Another factor that also has received little attention in the literature is whether the number of others present when a person is providing an account alters the lexical profile of accounts such that RM scores are affected. To investigate these issues, 62 autobiographical statements, 31 truthful and 31 deceptive, were generated under 3 conditions, no person present, 1 and 2 persons present, and were analysed before and after standardisation for word-count and duration. Results showed that the criteria successfully discriminated between truthful and deceptive accounts when no attempt to control for word-count was made and, to a lesser extent, when accounts were standardised for duration; however, they failed to discriminate after accounts had been standardised for length. The presence of others did not affect the ability to distinguish between truthful and deceptive accounts. The results highlight the difficulties involved in developing normative standardisation criteria which could be used in the field to classify individual or small numbers of cases.     

Using Named Entities for Computer‐Automated Verbal Deception Detection

There is an increasing demand for automated verbal deception detection systems. We propose named entity recognition (NER; i.e., the automatic identification and extraction of information from text) to model three established theoretical principles: (i) truth tellers provide accounts that are richer in detail, (ii) contain more contextual references (specific persons, locations, and times), and (iii) deceivers tend to withhold potentially checkable information. We test whether NER captures these theoretical concepts and can automatically identify truthful versus deceptive hotel reviews. We extracted the proportion of named entities with two NER tools (spaCy and Stanford's NER) and compared the discriminative ability to a lexicon word count approach (LIWC) and a measure of sentence specificity (speciteller). Named entities discriminated truthful from deceptive hotel reviews above chance level, and outperformed the lexicon approach and sentence specificity. This investigation suggests that named entities may be a useful addition to existing automated verbal deception detection approaches.     

Positive Effects in Detecting Lies from Training to Recognize Behavioral Anomalies

We examined whether training in both the verbal and nonverbal indicators of truth telling and lying would have positive effects on Law Enforcement Officers’ (LEOs) ability to evaluate truths from lies. College course-level training on empirically validated verbal and nonverbal indicators of truth telling and lying was provided to mid- to advanced-career level LEOs, whose accuracy in detecting lies from truths was assessed pre- and post-training using truthful and deceptive videos of mock crimes and opinions. A marginally significant truth bias existed at pre-test; training, however, resulted in a significant improvement in accuracy rates for both truth and lie videos, and the truth bias that existed at pre-test was eliminated. Additional analyses indicated that accuracy rates improved for videos of mock crimes but not for opinions. These findings add to a small but growing literature that indicates that training on validated verbal and nonverbal indicators of truth telling and lying has positive benefits.     

Cold‐blooded lie catchers? An investigation of psychopathy,emotional processing,and deception detection

Purpose. The process of catching liars is challenging, though evidence suggests that deception detection abilities are influenced by the characteristics of the judge. This study examined individual differences in emotional processing and levels of psychopathic traits on the ability to judge the veracity of written narratives varying in emotional valence. Methods. Undergraduate participants (N= 251) judged the veracity of 12 written narratives (truthful/deceptive) across three emotional categories: positive, negative, and neutral events. Levels of psychopathy were assessed to investigate its relation to accuracy and cue use. Results. Overall accuracy was close to chance, although participants were more accurate in determining the veracity of truthful relative to deceptive narratives. Accuracy was impaired for emotional (positive and negative) relative to neutral narratives. Psychopathy was not associated with levels of overall accuracy, but related to discriminative ability, and differential use of cues in decision making. Reported cue use also differed across emotional narrative conditions. Conclusions. We speculated that an emotive truth bias may have detracted judges from attending to valid cues that are indicative of the deceptive nature of stimuli because they were distracted by the emotional content of the report. Implications for deception detection in forensic settings are discussed.     

Detecting truth in suspect interviews: the effect of use of evidence (early and gradual) and time delay on Criteria-Based Content Analysis,Reality Monitoring and inconsistency within suspect statements

The strategic use of evidence in interviews with suspects has been shown to increase the ability of interviewers to accurately and consistently distinguish truthful from deceptive accounts. The present study considers the effect of early and gradual revelation of evidence by the interviewer, and the effect of shorter and longer delay on the verbal quality of truth-teller and liar statements within a mock crime paradigm. It was hypothesised that gradual disclosure of evidence (1) in terms of inconsistencies (a) within statements and (b) between statements and such evidence and (2) of the criteria of Criteria-Based Content Analysis (CBCA) and of Reality Monitoring (RM) would emphasise differences in the verbal quality of truth-teller and liar statements. Forty-two high school students took part in the study. The use of statement-evidence and within-statement inconsistency appears to be a robust cue to deception across interview style and delay. This indicates that gradual disclosure in interviews may increase interviewer accuracy in veracity decisions by eliciting statement inconsistencies. However, gradual revelation and delay affected the ability of CBCA and RM criteria to distinguish the veracity of suspect statements.     

The Impact of Beliefs Concerning Deception on Perceptions of Nonverbal Behavior: Implications for Neuro-Linguistic Programming-Based Lie Detection

Regularly employed in a forensic context, the Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) model purports that the behavioral distinction between somebody who is remembering information and somebody who is constructing information lies in the direction of their eye movements. This strategy reflects numerous current approaches to lie detection, which presume that nonverbal behavior influences perceptions and judgments about deception. The present study emphasized a reverse order by investigating whether beliefs that an individual is deceptive influence perceptions of the respective individual’s nonverbal behavior as indicated by observed eye movement patterns. Sixty participants were randomly assigned to either a group informed that right eye movements indicate constructed and thus deceptive information or a group informed that left eye movements indicate constructed and thus deceptive information. Each participant viewed six investigative interviews depicting the eye movement patterns of mock suspects labeled as deceptive or truthful. The interviews were structured according to different right/left eye movement ratios. Results revealed that participants reportedly observed the deceptive suspects displaying significantly more eye movements in the direction allegedly indicative of deception than did the truthful suspects. This result occurred despite the fact that the actual eye movement ratios in both deceptive/truthful sets of interviews were identical and the eye movements were predominantly in the opposite direction of that allegedly indicative of deception. The results are discussed in the context of encoding-based cognitive-processing theories. Limitations on the generality of the results are emphasized and the applicability (or lack thereof) of NLP-based lie detection in forensic contexts is discussed.     

Increasing pressure does not benefit lie detection: a reply to Ten Brinke et al. (2015)

When passively attending to suspects, observers are poor at distinguishing lies from truths. Deception research has therefore shifted to examining interview styles aimed at eliciting and enhancing deception cues. Based upon a literature review and three empirical studies, ten Brinke, L., Khambatta, P., and Carney, D. R. [2015. Physically scarce (vs. enriched) environments decrease the ability to successfully tell lies. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144, 982–992. doi:10.1037/xge0000103] recommend increasing pressure on interviewees as it would increase lie detection accuracy. In this comment, we argue that these authors (1) misinterpret the literature when concluding that lie detection benefits from increasing pressure on interviewees, and (2) their data do not show that lie detection is more accurate when pressure is increased. In absence of such data, we recommend that increasing pressure on interviewees should be avoided: it hampers the elicitation of valuable information and can lead to false confessions.     

You cannot hide your telephone lies: Providing a model statement as an aid to detect deception in insurance telephone calls

Deception research regarding insurance claims is rare but relevant given the financial loss in terms of fraud. In Study 1, a field study in a large multinational insurance fraud detection company, truth telling mock claimants (N = 19) and lying mock claimants (N = 21) were interviewed by insurance company telephone operators. These operators classified correctly only 50% of these truthful and lying claimants, but their task was particularly challenging: Claimants said little, and truthful and deceptive statements did not differ in quality (measured with Criteria‐Based Content Analysis [CBCA]) or plausibility. In Study 2, a laboratory experiment, participants in the experimental condition (N = 43) were exposed to an audiotaped truthful and detailed account of an event that was unrelated to insurance claims (a day at the motor races). The number of words, quality of the statement (measured with CBCA), and plausibility of the participants' accounts were compared with participants who were not given a model statement (N = 40). The participants who had listened to the model statement provided longer statements than control participants, truth tellers obtained higher CBCA scores than liars, and only in the model statement condition did truth tellers sound more plausible than liars. Providing participants with a model statement is thus an innovative and successful tool to elicit cues to deception. Providing such a model has the potential to enhance performance in insurance call interviews, and, as we argue, in many other interview settings.     

The devil is in the detail: deception and consistency over repeated interviews

ABSTRACT

Research indicates that truthful statements typically contain more details than fabricated statements, and that truth tellers are no more consistent than liars over multiple interviews. In this experiment, we examine the impact of (i) multiple interviewers and (ii) reverse order recall on liars’ and truth tellers’ consistency and amount of reported detail over repeated recall attempts. Participants either took part in a mock crime (lying condition) or an innocent event (truth telling condition) which they were subsequently interviewed about in two separate interview phases. Truth tellers provided more details overall, and more reminiscent details than liars. There were no differences between veracity groups for the number of omissions made or repetitions reported. Despite the popular belief that inconsistency is a cue to deception, we found little support for the notion that consistency (or lack of consistency) offers a diagnostic cue to deception. We found little evidence that switching interviewer or recalling in reverse order induced inconsistencies in liars. In fact, due to the number of reminiscent details in truth tellers’ accounts, our findings suggest that accounts provided by liars tend to be slightly more consistent than those provided by truth tellers. Materials for this paper can be found at osf.io/hgvmk/.     

Exploring liars’ strategies for creating deceptive reports

Purpose. Most past research on detecting deception has relied on the assumption that liars often fabricate a story to account for their whereabouts, whereas truth tellers simply recall an autobiographical memory. However, little research has examined whether liars, when free to choose the topic of their own reports, will actually choose to fabricate information rather than use a different strategy for constructing their lies. We describe two studies that evaluated liars’ strategies for selecting the content of their lies when given the freedom to choose whatever content they desired. Method. In Studies 1 (N= 35) and 2 (N= 22) participants (a) described a truthful story in order to identify a salient event, then (b) lied about the event, and finally (c) described their strategies for choosing the content of the reported lies. Results. Liars overwhelmingly chose to report a previously experienced event for the time period they were to be deceptive about (67% and 86% in Studies 1 and 2, respectively). The majority of discrete details reported were experienced, occurred relatively frequently, occurred relatively recently, and were typical or routine. Conclusions. These findings have significant implications for the development of cognitive‐based interventions for detecting deception. In particular, some methods of deception that rely on content analysis may be ineffective if liars choose to report previous experiences rather than outright fabrications.     

Detecting deception in suspects: verbal cues as a function of interview strategy

Research on deception has consistently shown that people are poor at detecting deception, partly due to lack of consistent cues to deception. This research focuses on eliciting verbal cues to deception when questioning suspects who deny crime and how such cues differ due to type of questioning. An experiment examined verbal differences between innocent and guilty mock suspects (N=96) as a function of veracity and interview style (Free recall, Probes, or Free recall plus Probes). Guilty (vs innocent) suspects omitted more crime-relevant information and their statements were more likely to contradict the evidence, showing that statement–evidence inconsistency was a cue to deception. This cue to deception was more pronounced when the interview contained probes. Lie-catchers (N=192) obtained an accuracy rate higher than chance (61.5%) for detecting deceptive denials. Implications for further research on verbal cues to deception are discussed.     

Will get fooled again: Emotionally intelligent people are easily duped by high‐stakes deceivers

Purpose. There is major disagreement about the existence of individual differences in deception detection or naturally gifted detection ‘wizards’ (see O'Sullivan & Ekman, 2004 vs. Bond & Uysal, 2007 ). This study aimed to elucidate the role of a specific, and seemingly relevant individual difference – emotional intelligence (EI) and its subcomponents – in detecting high‐stakes, emotional deception. Methods. Participants (N= 116) viewed a sample of 20 international videos of individuals emotionally pleading for the safe return of their missing family member, half of whom were responsible for the missing person's disappearance/murder. Participants judged whether the pleas were honest or deceptive, provided confidence ratings, reported the cues they utilized, and rated their emotional response to each plea. Results. EI was associated with overconfidence in assessing the sincerity of the pleas and greater self‐reported sympathetic feelings to deceptive targets (enhanced gullibility). Although total EI was not associated with discrimination of truths and lies, the ability to perceive and express emotion (a component of EI), specifically, was negatively related to detecting deceptive targets (lower sensitivity [d′]). Combined, these patterns contributed negatively to the ability to spot emotional lies. Conclusions. These findings collectively suggest that features of EI, and subsequent decision‐making processes, paradoxically may impair one's ability to detect deceit.     

Suspects,Lies, and Videotape: An Analysis of Authentic High-Stake Liars

This study is one of the very few, and the most extensive to date, which has examined deceptive behavior in a real-life, high-stakes setting. The behavior of 16 suspects in their police interviews has been analyzed. Clips of video footage have been selected where other sources (reliable witness statements and forensic evidence) provide evidence that the suspect lied or told the truth. Truthful and deceptive behaviors were compared. The suspects blinked less frequently and made longer pauses during deceptive clips than during truthful clips. Eye contact was maintained equally for deceptive and truthful clips. These findings negate the popular belief amongst both laypersons and professional lie detectors (such as the police) that liars behave nervously by fidgeting and avoiding eye contact. However, large individual differences were present.     

The language of deceit: An investigation of the verbal clues to deception in the interrogation context

We examined the hypothesis that reliable verbal indicators of deception exist in the interrogation context. Participants were recruited for a study addressing security effectiveness and either committed a theft to test the effectiveness of a new security guard or carried out a similar but innocuous task. They then provided either (1) a truthful alibi, (2) a partially deceptive account, (3) a completely false alibi, or (4) a truthful confession regarding the theft to an interrogator hired for the purpose of investigating thefts with a monetary incentive for convincing the interrogator of their truthfulness. Results indicated that only 3 out of the 18 (16.7%) clues tested significantly differentiated the truthful and deceptive accounts. All 3 clues were derived from the Statement Validity Analysis (SVA) technique (amount of detail reported, coherence, and admissions of lack of memory). Implications for credibility assessment in forensic interrogations are discussed.     

The Accuracy of Auditors' and Layered Voice Analysis (LVA) Operators' Judgments of Truth and Deception During Police Questioning*

The purpose of this study was to determine if auditors could identify truthful and deceptive persons in a sample (n = 74) of audio recordings used to assess the effectiveness of layered voice analysis (LVA). The LVA employs an automated algorithm to detect deception, but it was not effective here. There were 31 truthful and 43 deceptive persons in the sample and two LVA operators averaged 48% correct decisions on truth‐tellers and 25% on deceivers. Subsequent to the LVA analysis the recordings were audited by three interviewers, each independently rendering a decision of truthful or deceptive and indicating their confidence. Auditors' judgments averaged 68% correct decisions on truth‐tellers and 71% on deceivers. Auditors' detection rates, generally, exceeded chance and there was significantly (p < 0.05) greater confidence on correct than incorrect judgments of deceivers but not on truth‐tellers. These results suggest that the success reported for LVA analysis may be due to operator's judgment.