{"id":50676,"date":"2021-03-28T11:23:13","date_gmt":"2021-03-28T16:23:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=50676"},"modified":"2021-03-29T11:30:56","modified_gmt":"2021-03-29T16:30:56","slug":"new-directions-in-deception-detection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=50676","title":{"rendered":"New directions in deception detection?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jessica Seigel, \"The truth about lying<\/a>\", Knowable Magazine<\/em> 3\/25\/2021<\/p>\n

You can\u2019t spot a liar just by looking \u2014 but psychologists are zeroing in on methods that might actually work<\/span><\/p>\n

The featured research is a review by Aldert Vrij, Maria Hartwig, and P\u00e4r Anders Granhag, \"Reading Lies: Nonverbal Communication and Deception<\/a>\", Annual Review of Psychology<\/em> 2019:<\/p>\n

The relationship between nonverbal communication and deception continues to attract much interest, but there are many misconceptions about it. In this review, we present a scientific view on this relationship. We describe theories explaining why liars would behave differently from truth tellers, followed by research on how liars actually behave and individuals\u2019 ability to detect lies. We show that the nonverbal cues to deceit discovered to date are faint and unreliable and that people are mediocre lie catchers when they pay attention to behavior. We also discuss why individuals hold misbeliefs about the relationship between nonverbal behavior and deception\u2014beliefs that appear very hard to debunk. We further discuss the ways in which researchers could improve the state of affairs by examining nonverbal behaviors in different ways and in different settings than they currently do.<\/span><\/p>\n

That review focuses on why peoples' ideas about clues to deception are mostly wrong, and why nobody is very good at detecting deception from behavioral cues.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Knowable article has some suggestions about ways to train interrogators to do better, but these better methods are not about non-verbal cues or other \"tells\", but rather about ways to get liars to trip themselves up in laying out content:<\/p>\n

For example, interviewers can strategically withhold evidence longer, allowing a suspect to speak more freely, which can lead liars into contradictions. In\u00a0one experiment,<\/a>\u00a0Hartwig taught this technique to 41 police trainees, who then correctly identified liars about 85 percent of the time, as compared to 55 percent for another 41 recruits who had not yet received the training. \u201cWe are talking significant improvements in accuracy rates,\u201d says Hartwig.<\/span><\/p>\n

Another interviewing technique taps spatial memory by asking suspects and witnesses to sketch a scene related to a crime or alibi. Because this enhances recall, truth-tellers may report more detail. In a\u00a0simulated spy mission study<\/a>\u00a0published by Mann and her colleagues last year, 122 participants met an \u201cagent\u201d in the school cafeteria, exchanged a code, then received a package. Afterward, participants instructed to tell the truth about what happened gave 76 percent more detail about experiences at the location during a sketching interview than those asked to cover up the code-package exchange.\u00a0<\/em>\u201cWhen you sketch, you are reliving an event \u2014 so it aids memory,\u201d says study coauthor Haneen Deeb, a psychologist at the University of Portsmouth.<\/span><\/p>\n

The article doesn't examine the sad history of lie-detection technology, an industry that continues to take in millions of dollars from law-enforcement agencies and others, for devices that have no credible validation of performance.\u00a0 Some earlier posts discussing that history:<\/p>\n

\"Analyzing voice stress<\/a>\", 7\/2\/2004
\n\"BS conditional semantics and the Pinocchio Effect<\/a>\", 8\/29\/2004
\n\"Determining whether a lottery ticket will win, 99.999992849% of the time<\/a>\", 8\/29\/2004.
\n\"KishKish BangBang<\/a>\", 1\/17\/2007
\n\"Industrial bullshitters censor linguists<\/a>\", 4\/30\/2009 (see especially the comments threads, e.g.\u00a0here<\/a>,\u00a0here<\/a>,\u00a0here<\/a>,\u00a0here<\/a>.)
\n\"Speech-based lie detection in Russia<\/a>\", 6\/8\/2011
\n\"Speech-based 'lie detection'? I don't think so<\/a>\", 11\/10\/2011
\n\"Reputable linguistic 'lie detection'?<\/a>\", 12\/5\/2011
\n\"Linguistic Deception Detection: Part 1<\/a>\", 12\/6\/2011
\n\"More deceptive statements about Voice Stress Analysis<\/a>\", 5\/18\/2014
\n\"PR push for 'Voice Stress Analysis' products?<\/a>\", 4\/24\/2017<\/p>\n

Update — the Knowable<\/em> article also appears in The Atlantic<\/em> magazine, as \"You\u2019ve Been Lied to About Lying<\/a>\", 3\/27\/2021.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jessica Seigel, \"The truth about lying\", Knowable Magazine 3\/25\/2021 You can\u2019t spot a liar just by looking \u2014 but psychologists are zeroing in on methods that might actually work The featured research is a review by Aldert Vrij, Maria Hartwig, and P\u00e4r Anders Granhag, \"Reading Lies: Nonverbal Communication and Deception\", Annual Review of Psychology 2019: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[191,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonverbal-communication","category-psychology-of-language"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50676"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50699,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50676\/revisions\/50699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}