Psychology Of Deception Research Paper

2. Definition Of Deception

Deception is ‘a successful or unsuccessful deliberate attempt, without forewarning, to create in another a belief which the communicator considers to be untrue’ (Vrij 2000). Lying is an intentional act. The schizophrenic man who believes he is Napoleon is not lying in his claims. He believes his own story and so does not have the intention of deceiving other people. More-over, people are only lying when they do not inform others in advance about their intentions to lie. Magicians are therefore not lying, as people in the audience expect to be deceived.

3. Lying Is A Daily Life Event

People tell on average 1.5 lies a day (DePaulo et al. 1996). The frequency of lying depends on the personality of the liar, the person to whom the lie is told and the situation. Extraverted people and people high in Machiavellianism lie more often than introverted people do and people low in Machiavellianism (Kashy and DePaulo 1996).

People tell fewer lies to people whom they feel emotionally closer to (Anderson et al. 1999). However, the lies they tell are relatively serious. People probably would like to be honest to their romantic partners, but believe that this is not always possible, especially when the truth might harm the relationship. Therefore, the adulterous husband will not inform his wife about his mistress, and the wife addicted to shopping will hide several purchases.

How often people lie also depends on the situation: 83 percent of students would lie to get a job (Robinson et al. 1998) and 90 percent of students are willing to lie on their first date in order to make a favorable impression (Rowatt et al. 1998).

4. The Human Lie Detector

In the scientific lie detection studies, observers are typically given videotapes or audiotapes and asked to judge whether each of a number of people is lying. The alternatives to choose from are ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ resulting in a 50 percent chance of being correct. A review of 39 studies (Vrij 2000) revealed an average accuracy rate of 56.6 percent. Males are no better (or worse) than females and professional lie catchers (police officers and customs officers) are generally no better than lay persons in detecting deceit (Vrij 2000). Even studies investigating the ability to detect lies in children rarely exceeds an accuracy rate of 60 percent (Vrij in press).

5. Why Are People Poor Lie Detectors

There are numerous reasons why people are poor at detecting lies and some of these reasons are discussed.

First, conversation rules prevent lie detectors from analyzing an accused liar properly. Conversation rules prescribe that conversation partners look each other into the eyes. Eye movements, however, do not give reliable information about deception (Vrij 2000).

Second, differences between liars and truth tellers are usually very small (Vrij 2000).

Third, there is no behavior or set of behaviors that all liars exhibit (Vrij 2000). Obviously, the fact that generic deceptive behavior does not exist makes it difficult for observers to decide what to look for.

Fourth, observers often fail to take individual differences in behavior into account (Ekman 1992). Naturally, some people make many movements, whereas others exhibit a lot of gaze aversion, and so on. This hampers lie detection. One way of detecting deceit is comparing someone’s behavior with his or her baseline truthful behavior. People are more accurate at detecting lies when they are aware of someone’s baseline truthful behavior (Feeley et al. 1995).

Finally, people often look at the wrong cues to detect deceit. Although there is nothing like Pinocchio’s nose, some behaviors are more likely to occur than others (Vrij 2000). It is perhaps remarkable how little observers know about deceptive behavior. For example, although observers often believe that liars increase their movements, research has shown that liars often decrease their movements (Vrij 2000). Liars tend to control their behavior, both in order to avoid giving possible nonverbal indicators of their deception and to enhance the credibility of the impression they make on others. Paradoxically, deceivers’ very attempts to control their behavior serve as cues to deception. The controlled behavior will appear as planned, rehearsed, and lacking in spontaneity (DePaulo and Kirkendol 1989). Also, it is sometimes more difficult to fabricate a plausible and convincing lie that is consistent with everything the observer knows or might find out than it is to tell the truth. Evidence has demonstrated that people engaging in cognitively complex tasks make fewer hand and arm movements (Ekman and Friesen 1972), possibly because a greater cognitive load results in a neglect of body language, reducing overall animation.

6. Reasons For Misconceptions About Deceptive Behavior

There are several reasons why observers have misconceptions about deceptive behavior (Vrij 2000). It might be a matter of experience. Almost everybody can think of somebody at some time who acted nervously during deception, and who was subsequently caught out because of this nervousness. Lie catchers may then wrongly assume that all liars behave this way.

People often lack feedback to find out how good they are at detecting lies (DePaulo and Pfeifer 1986). For example, although customs officers gain feedback from those travelers that they stopped and searched, they will almost never find out whether the travelers they did not search were smuggling goods, and they therefore cannot learn from these cases.

Also, people do not know how they behave when they are lying (Vrij et al. 1996, 2001). In the experiment of Vrij et al. (1996), liars actually showed fewer movements while lying, although they thought that they had made more movements during deception. Hence, while detecting lies in others, people are looking for cues, which they think (incorrectly), reveal their own lies.

Several lie detection techniques have been introduced to tackle some of the problems raised above, including the ‘baseline technique’ and the ‘indirect lie detection technique.’ They address the issues of idiosyncrasy in people’s natural truthful behavior and the tendency to look at the wrong cues, respectively.

6.1 Baseline Method

Knowing someone’s baseline truthful behavior would facilitate lie detection, as comparisons can be made with the behavior under investigation. During a videotaped real-life police interview a man was asked to describe his activities during a particular day (Vrij and Mann 2001). The murder suspect gave descriptions of his activities during the morning, afternoon and evening. Detailed analyses of the videotape, however, revealed a sudden change in behavior as soon as he started to describe his activities during the afternoon and evening. He spoke slower, added more pauses, and made fewer movements. It made the impression that he had to think hard. One possible reason for this may have been that he was lying. Evidence supported this view. Police investigations could confirm his story about his morning activities, but revealed that his statement about the afternoon and evening were fabricated. In reality, he met the victim and killed her later on that day. Apparently, lying about the afternoon and evening required mental effort which was revealed by his change in behavior.

Crucial in the use of the baseline technique is that the correct parts of the interview are compared. One should not compare apples with pears. Unfortunately, that happens often in police interviews (Moston and Engelberg 1993). Small talk at the beginning of the interview is used to establish a baseline, which is then compared with the behavior shown in the actual interview. This is an incorrect way of employing the technique as small talk and the actual police interviews are totally different situations. Not surprisingly, both guilty and innocent people tend to change their behavior the moment the actual interview starts (Vrij 2000). In the case of the murderer, we were able to make a good comparison. There are no reasons why different behaviors would emerge while describing the morning or the afternoon and evening. Interestingly, the question on which we based the baseline method ‘What did you do that particular day?’ could be asked in almost every police interview.

6.2 Indirect Lie Detection Method

People know more about deception than it appears when they are asked directly whether they think someone is lying (DePaulo 1994). In some studies, after watching a truthful or deceptive story, partici-pants were asked to detect deception both in a direct way (i.e. ‘is the person lying?’) and in an indirect way (i.e. ‘Does the speaker sincerely like the person (s)he just described?’). These studies found greater accuracy on the indirect measures (see Vrij in press). It might be the result of conversation rules, which regulates politeness. Observers are often unsure as to whether someone is lying to them. In these cases it will be impolite or for other reasons undesirable to accuse someone of being a liar (e.g. ‘I do not believe you’), but it might be possible to challenge the words of a speaker more subtly (e.g. ‘Do you really like that person so much?’). Alternatively, people might look at different cues when detecting lies than when applying an indirect method. In a study by Vrij et al. (in press), police officers could distinguish between truths and lies, only by using an indirect method (by judging whether truth tellers and liars had to think hard instead of by judging whether they were lying). Moreover, only in the indirect method they paid attention to the cues that actually discriminated between the truth tellers and liars, such as a decrease in hand movements.

7. Final Conclusion And Future Directions

People are generally poor at detecting lies. However, recently it has been discovered that improvements could be made by using the baseline technique or the indirect lie detection technique. Both techniques need to be assessed further, both inside the laboratory and in real life.

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