Liespotting_Proven Techniques to Detect Deception
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Rubbing the eyes (men)
Touching below the eyes (women)
Hand wringing
Inward-curled feet
Stiff upper body, inappropriate stillness
Pursed lips or biting of the lips
Slumped or self-protective posture
Moving objects around the table or floor
Post-interview relief expression
Excessive sweating, breathing, finger tapping
Shift in blink rate
Shrugs, clenched fists, winks, palms turned up out of sync with dialogue
Fake smile
Closed eyes or eyes that indicate use of imagination rather than memory when telling a story
VERBAL CLUES
Qualifying statements: “As far as I know…” “To tell you the truth…”
Bolstering statements: “I certainly did not.”
Repeating your question verbatim
Non-spontaneous response time
Weak and apologetic tone of voice
Inappropriate detail
Short, clipped answers
Religious references: “I swear on the Bible.”
Objections to irrelevant specifics: “No—I had the chicken, not the steak.”
Whining: “How much longer will this take?”
Uncooperative or dismissive attitude
More emphasis on persuading you than on the facts
Story with a long prologue, a glossed-over main event, and no epilogue
Lack of appropriate emotion in the story
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BASIC | Intuit the Gaps
Goal: Keeping your instincts in mind, identify and fill in the holes.
Note any differences:
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BASIC | Confirm
Goal: Test your hunches and move toward a conclusion.
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APPENDIX II
TEST YOUR LIESPOTTING SKILLS
Think you’re a liespotting pro? The true test of your skills will come in the real world, but the following questions will quiz you on some of the liespotting fundamentals that are covered in this book.
The answers are available at www.Liespotting.com. Good luck!
Which of the following is the least reliable indicator of deception?
Presence or absence of illustrators when talking
Vocal quality
Facial micro-expressions
Fake smiles
When asked the direct question “At what time did you leave the office last Friday afternoon?” a deceptive person is more likely to:
Repeat the question in full before answering
Repeat just a few words of the question before answering
A deceptive person will avoid direct eye contact with you when asked a question:
True
False
Which of these two smiles is real, and which is fake?
When someone says “To be honest,…” in response to a direct question:
It indicates he is likely telling the truth
It suggests he is lying or omitting something
Instead of asking someone “why” they did something, how should you phrase the question to minimize a defensive response?
____________________________
Fake smiles can be most easily identified because of the lack of action in which muscles?
Muscles orbiting the eye
Muscles at the corners of the mouth
Muscles around the jaw
When a person is lying, the mistakes that can reveal his deception are more likely to be found in:
The words of his story
His nonverbal behavior
Which seven primary emotions are expressed facially in the same way worldwide?
___________ ___________ ___________ ___________
___________ ___________ ___________
People telling a lie will often involuntarily blink more than they do when they’re telling the truth.
True
False
Which of the following verbal clues to deception are found in Bill Clinton’s notorious denial: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”
Distancing statement
Specific denial
Non-contracted denial
All of the above
Which one of the seven primary emotions appears as an asymmetrical expression in its truthful form? ___________
Choose whether the following are more likely to be found in a true story or a deceptive story.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. Any improvement rate we gain through training builds upon the roughly 50 percent accuracy rate in deception detection we already have without training.
A review of numerous training studies appears in Aldert Vrij’s Detecting Lies and Deceit. (Chichester, En gland: John Wiley & Sons, 2000), 93–100. Among those listed, note Mark deTurck, “Training Observers to Detect Spontaneous Deception: Effects of Gender,” Communication Reports 4 (Summer 1991): 81–89, which reports the results of a study of 183 students who improved from 54 percent to 69 percent accuracy after being instructed to pay attention to vocal and nonverbal clues including message duration, response latency, pauses, non-fluencies, self-manipulations, and hand gestures. Also note K. Fiedler and I. Walka, “Training Lie Detectors to Use Nonverbal Cues Instead of Global Heuristics,” Human Communication Research 20 (December 1993): 199–223, a study of 72 students who improved from 53 percent to 65 percent accuracy after being trained on the relationship between deception and smiles, head movements, self-manipulations, pitch of voice, speech rate, pauses, and outcomes.
A meta-study of literature on lie-detection training suggested that training does significantly raise lie-detection accuracy rates. “Current research in lie detection training may actually underestimate the ability to train lie detectors due to the stimulus materials employed in most experiments.” (Numbers are not given in the abstract.) See Mark G. Frank and Thomas Hugh Feeley, “To Catch a Liar: Challenges for Research in Lie Detection Training,” Journal of Applied Communication Research 31, no. 1 (February 2003): 58–75, http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a713770973~db=all.
Last, one study to test the effectiveness of Ekman’s Micro-Expression Training Tool (METT) found that both schizophrenic subjects and healthy control subjects improved their micro-expression recognition ability with the training. See T. A. Russell, E. Chu, and M. L. Phillips, “A Pi lot Study to Investigate the Effectiveness of Emotion Recognition Remediation in Schizophrenia Using the Micro-Expression Training Tool,” British Journal of Clinical Psychology 45 (2006): 579–583, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=17076965.
CHAPTER ONE: The Deception Epidemic
1. Coalition Against Insurance Fraud, “Go Figure: Fraud Data,” http://www.insurancefraud.org/consumerattitudes.htm. In 2003, Accenture commissioned Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS) Intersearch to conduct a national survey about insurance fraud. The study comprised telephone interviews with 1,030 U.S. adults (at least eighteen years of age). The results revealed that “nearly one of four Americans says it’s OK to defraud insurers (8 percent say it’s ‘quite acceptable’ to bilk insurers, and 16 percent say it’s ‘somewhat acceptable’).” http://newsroom.accenture.com/article_print.cfm?article_id=3970.
2. Jeffrey Kluger, “Pumping Up Your Past,” Time, June 2, 2002, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101020610-257116,00.html.
3. http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-90089018.html. Ernst & Young LLP, one of the world’s largest professional services firms, announced the results of a groundbreaking study on workplace fraud that found that one in five American workers are personally aware of fraud in their workplace and that 80 percent would be willing to turn in a colleague thought to be committing a fraudulent act, however, only 43 percent actually have. The study, conducted by the research firm Ipsos Reid, surveyed 617 American workers by telephone.
; 4. Aldert Vrij, Detecting Lies and Deceit (Chichester, En gland: John Wiley & Sons, 2000), 9–10. In this questionnaire study, participants estimated that 75 percent of lies went undetected; Bella DePaulo, Deborah Kashy, Susan Kirdendol, and Melissa Wyer, “Lying in Everyday Life,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70, no. 5 (May 1996): 979–995. This study put the figure at 82 percent.
5. Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, “2008 Report to the Nation on Occupational Fraud and Abuse,” 4, http://www.acfe.com/documents/2008-rttn.pdf.
6. James Geary, “How to Spot a Liar,” Time Magazine Europe, March 2000, http://www.time.com/time/europe/magazine/2000/313/lies.html, stated by Jerald Jellison, social psychologist at the University of Southern California. Some Internet sources claim Jellison says that humans tell two hundred lies a day. The original quote can be found in Jellison’s 1977 book, I’m Sorry, I Didn’t Mean To, and Other Lies We Love to Tell (New York: Chatham Square Press, 1977).
These findings are also supported by Robert Feldman, social psychologist at the University of Massachusetts, in Robert S. Feldman, James A. Forrest, and Benjamin R. Happ, “Self-Presentation and Verbal Deception: Do Self-Presenters Lie More?,” Journal of Basic and Applied Social Psychology 24, no. 2 (June 2002): 163–170. Feldman found that on average, people told two to three lies in a ten-minute conversation.
7. Charles F. Bond, Jr., and Bella M. DePaulo, “Accuracy of Deception Judgments,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 10 (2006): 214–234. In the largest and most recent meta-analysis, Bond and DePaulo synthesized the research results from 206 studies involving a total of 24,000 judgments of lies and truths, and found the mean to be 54 percent. A listing of the 206 studies included is available at http://www.leaonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1207/s15327957/pspr1003_2A.
Bond and DePaulo’s results are supported by earlier findings. R. E. Kraut, who published reviews of detection accuracy in 1980 in Journal of Communications 30 (April 1978): 209–216 and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36, 380–391, found a mean accuracy rate of 57 percent. Also, Bella DePaulo, J. L. Stone, and G. D. Lassiter, who published a review of thirty-nine detection accuracy studies in 1985, as “Deceiving and Detecting Deceit” in The Self and Social Life, B. R. Schenkler, ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985), found a mean accuracy rate of 56.6 percent.
8. P. B. Seager and R. Wiseman, “Can the Use of Intuition Improve Lie Detection Accuracy?” (paper presented at the Annual Conference of the British Psychological Society, 2002), as noted in P. B. Seager, “Detecting Lies: Are You As Good As You Think You Are?,” Forensic Update 77 (2004): 5–9. Some preliminary research by Seager and Wiseman (2002) suggests that, in fact, claiming to be highly intuitive can be detrimental to lie-detection accuracy. They tested 196 participants, of whom 96 claimed to be highly intuitive and to use their intuition on a regular basis. The remaining 100 participants made no such claim about being highly intuitive. Using a standard lie-detection paradigm (e.g., see Vrij, Detecting Lies and Deceit, results suggested that the highly intuitive participants were significantly less accurate at detecting lies than the non-intuitive group (56 percent vs. 66 percent). Preliminary conclusions therefore suggest that intuition may not be a good tool to use in detecting lies.
9. David B. Buller, “Interpersonal Deception II,” Communications Monographs 58 (March 1991). Buller found that participants in conversations were more likely to believe another person than were neutral observers who watched videotapes of the interactions. The existence of a truth bias is supported by numerous other researchers: O’Sullivan, Ekman, and Friesen, 1988; McCornack and Parks, 1986; Stiff, Kim, and Ramesh, 1988; Zuckerman, DePaulo, and Rosenthal, 1981; Kraut and Higgins, 1984; Clark and Clark, 1977, and others. (See Buller, “Interpersonal Deception II,” 26.)
10. DePaulo, Stone, and Lassiter, “Deceiving and Detecting Deceit”—a review of thirty-nine detection accuracy studies.
11. Bowyer J. Bell and Barton Whaley, Cheating and Deception (New Jersey: Transaction Books, 1991), 16.
12. “Phishing attacks in the United States soared in 2007 as $3.2 billion was lost to these attacks, according to a survey by Gartner, Inc. The survey found that 3.6 million adults lost money in phishing attacks in the 12 months ending in August 2007, as compared with the 2.3 million who did so the year before.” http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=565125.
13. Julia Kollewe, “Société Générale Rogue Trader to Stand Trial Next Year,” Guardian.co.uk, September 1, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/sep/01/societe-generale-rogue-trader-trial.
14. Reuters, “China’s Milk Scandal Highlights Risks, Raises Questions,” ABSCBN News, http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/world/09/19/08/chinas-milk-scam-highlights-risks-raises-questions.
15. Simon Baron-Cohen, “I Cannot Tell a Lie—What People with Autism Can Tell Us about Honesty,” In Character, Spring 2007, http://www.incharacter.org/article.php?article=101.
16. Thomas Bugnyar and Kurt Kotrschal, “Leading a Conspecific Away from Food in Ravens (Corvus Corax)?,” Animal Cognition 7 (2004): 69–76, as reported by David Berreby, “Deceit of the Raven,” New York Times, September 4, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/magazine/04IDEA.html.
17. “The capacity to lie has also been claimed to be possessed by non-humans in language studies with Great Apes. One famous case was that of Koko the Gorilla; confronted by her handlers after a tantrum in which she had torn a steel sink out of its moorings, she signed in American Sign Language, ‘cat did it,’ pointing at her tiny kitten. It is unclear if this was a joke or a genuine attempt at blaming her tiny pet.” Http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/Lie_-_Psychology_of_lying/id/5040009.
18. Stan B. Walters, Principles of Kinesic Interview and Interrogation (New York: CRC Press, 1996).
19. Jeff Hancock et al., Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (2004), as reported in “Online Liars’ Noses Don’t Grow, but Their Wordiness Does, Cornell Researchers Find,” Cornell News, October 18, 2004, http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Oct04/liars.talkmore.ssl.html. The Interview Room, “Working Inside ‘The Room,’” vol. 2, no. 5, The Third Degree Publishing, June 2003, p. 3.
20. Jeffrey Hancock, with Jennifer Thom-Santelli and Thompson Ritchie, “Deception and Design: The Impact of Communication Technology on Lying Behavior,” presented at the Computer-Human Interaction conference in Vienna, Austria, April 2004. Hancock’s study involved thirty college students who were asked to keep a diary of all their social communications for one week. A total of 1,198 communications were recorded, of which 310 contained lies. Hancock compared the rates of lying in four mediums: on the phone, in person, in e-mail, and in instant messaging. Http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=2363; http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/02/040219075947.htm.
At the time of the study, IM was not paper trailed. Now that it is, it’s possible that the statistics regarding lying via IM have changed.
21. http://gizmodo.com/5422415
22. Jim Van Meggelen, “The Problem with Video Conferencing,” O’Reilly Merging Telephony, April 19, 2005, http://www.oreillynet.com/etel/blog/2005/04/the_problem_with_video_confere.html.
23. Matthew Boyle, “Liar Liar!” Fortune, May 26, 2003. Poll conducted by job-search Web site Netshare, which caters to careerists making $100,000 / year or more.
24. W. P. Robinson, A. Shepherd, and J. Heywood, “Truth, Equivocation, Concealment, and Lies in Job Applications and Doctor-Patient Communication,” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 17, no. 2 (1998): 149–164.
25. As noted on http://www.workforce.com/archive/feature/22/14/56/index.php and http://www.nickroy.com/hrblog/2008/09/11/ethics-and-hr/, “…study by the American Society of Chartered Life Underwriters and Chartered Financial Consultants and the Ethics Officers Association found that 56 percent of all workers feel some pressure to act unethically or illegally. The study also revealed that 48 percent of workers admitted they had engaged in one or more unethical and/or illegal actions during th
e last year. Among the most common violations: cutting corners on quality, covering up incidents, lying to supervisors, deceiving customers, and taking credit for a colleague’s ideas.”
26. Maurice Schweitzer, “Deception in Negotiations,” in Wharton on Making Decisions, eds. Stephen J. Hoch and Howard C. Kunreuther (Hoboken, N.J., John Wiley & Sons, (2001), 199, which references an earlier Schweitzer paper, cowritten with R. Croson, “Curtailing Deception: The Impact of Direct Questions on Lies and Omissions,” International Journal of Conflict Management 10, no. 3 (1999): 225–248. The paper presents results from two studies, one a questionnaire where students were asked to assume the role of a used-car seller, and the other a negotiation experiment involving the sale of a used computer with a faulty hard drive.
27. Gil Luria and Sara Rosenblum, “Comparing the Handwriting Behaviours of True and False Writing with Computerized Handwriting,” Applied Cognitive Psychology (2009), www.interscience.wiley.com; as reported by Cynthia Graber, “Lie Detection with Handwriting,” Scientific American Podcast, September 8, 2009, http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=lie-detection-with-handwriting-09-09-08.
28. Robin Marantz Henig, “The New Science of Lying,” New York Times Magazine, February 5, 2006. In addition, a paper by Mark Frank and Paul Ekman, “The Ability to Detect Deceit Generalizes Across Different Types of High-stake Lies,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 72, no. 6 (1997): 1429–1439, about a study involving male participants who were instructed to lie in interviews about a mock-theft of money and about their opinion of capital punishment for a study measuring the lie-detection abilities of others, showed that a nonverbal (i.e., emotion-based) approach to detecting deception could yield 70 percent accuracy in detecting truths and 90 percent in detecting lies. See Vrij, Detecting Lies and Deceit, 217.
CHAPTER TWO: DECEPTION 101—WHO, WHEN, AND WHY
1. Featured on the Web site of Richard Wiseman, psychologist at University of Hertfordshire, http://www.quirkology.com/USA/Experiment_AnalyseYourself.shtml.
2. Melissa Paugh, “Following Suit,” Research/Penn State 19, no. 2 (May 1998).