Loading

Deception & Violent Offending

Detecting Deception & Violence Prediction

Detecting Deception Articles



All Forensic Psychology Articles

Lies, Deception And Identifying Deceptive Strategies

There is no one single way to detect deception i.e., there isn’t a proverbial “Pinocchio’s Nose” which clearly tells us when somebody is engaging in deceit e.g., some people have popularized the myth that people fail to make consistent eye-contact when lying, however many of those who actively engage in deception know about this and will deliberately maintain eye-contact when telling a lie or mistruth. Relying on a single “tell” such as this will probably mean that we miss other signals that might be present when somebody is trying to deceive us. Appling et al. (2015), recognizes four basic types of deception that people engage in. One type is “Falsification”, which involves the telling of outright lies that contradict the truth. Another is “Exaggeration” where somebody embellishes and modifies information and facts. Somebody engaged in deception can also “Omit” information, so that they can conceal things and keep them secret. They could also “Mislead” the person they are talking to by misdirecting them and using irrelevant information. Because most people use a mixture of these things it can be difficult to identify exactly what the lie is.

Detecting deception and deceptive statements i.e., written ones, involves understanding verbal and physical cues as well as content; in a written statement, there is only the content of the statement that is available for analysis. Statement Analysis should not be confused with Forensic Linguistics, which is concerned not with what is being said but in identifying who the author is (attempting to identify their “Linguistic Fingerprint”) etc. Verbal cues can include disfluencies where people pause, and/or use “ums” and “errs” excessively, and physical cues may involve nervous shaking, and/or limb tapping etc. Where statements and content analysis is involved, the structure of the account is studied e.g., does it follow the normal structure of a truthful statement, where there is a short introduction and conclusion, with the majority of the information being presented in the middle, or is this in fact relatively short compared with the introduction etc. It is by looking at all of these things together that we give ourselves the opportunity to identify somebody who is trying to deceive us. Of course, we must be able to distinguish between a person who normally has a lot of disfluencies in their conversation, and not simply identify this as the proverbial smoking gun etc.

One of the reasons that we should want to be able to identify when somebody is engaged in deception is because predatory individuals will often engage us in conversation(s) in order to gain our trust and get us to hand over control of a situation – or even another person, such as our children – to them. If we are able to understand and determine when somebody is engaged in deception, such as a sports coach who is wanting to take one of our children to a sports match, we don’t necessarily have to know what the truth is that they are hiding, but we do know there is some ulterior motive at play, and this is not and individual we should trust with our child’s safety. This is where Forensic Psychology research can help us in discerning who is telling the truth and who is hiding something etc.

References

Appling, S., Briscoe, E., & Hutto, C. J. (2015). Discriminative Models For Predicting Deception Strategies. Association For Computer Machinery. 947-952

Hartwig, M., & Bond, C. F., Jr. (2011). Why do lie-catchers fail? A lens model meta-analysis of human lie judgments. Psychological Bulletin 137(4): 643–659.