Detecting deception: Practice, practitioners, and theory

Conclusions Of the forty-six types of detectives studied, all but one used the same general procedures to detect deception. (The exception was the adversarial method used by trial lawyers working in the American judicial system.) All others used standard logical systems (both deductive and inductive) in combination with intuitive methods. The more successful detections seemed to be closely associated with intuitive methods, particularly so-called “indirect thinking”. Authors'Note: The “I” in this chapter refers to the principal author, Bart Whaley. Since it was first written in 1999, Whaley has increased the number of types of detectives studies to over 100, and the number of major works cited to over 500. The most important finding was to reinforce the recommendation that effective detection and deception is crucially dependent on large and accurate data bases based on systematically collected and analyzed case studies.