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Why the spurious link to deception?

10-Apr-08

From New Scientist (4 April):

Our skin may contain millions of tiny “antennas” in the form of microscopic sweat ducts, say researchers in Israel. In experiments, they found evidence that signals produced by bouncing electromagnetic waves off the tiny tubes might reveal a person’s physical and emotional state from a distance.

So far so good, but then:

The research might eventually result in lie detectors that require no physical contact with the subject.

Why the spurious link to deception? The original article doesn’t mention it - the authors’ comment about the possible application of the technique is this:

This phenomenon can be used as the basis for a generic remote sensing technique for providing a spatial map of the sweat gland activity of the examined subjects. As the mental state and sweat gland activity are correlated it has the potential to become a method for providing by remote sensing information regarding some physiological parameters and the mental state of the patients.

I guess that just isn’t as sexy as “hey, what about this as a lie detector!”.

As several erudite commenters on Slashdot have noted, despite the common misconception, lying does not necessarily lead to a stress reaction in the deceiver. And people can have stress reactions when they are telling the truth. So machines that measure stress can be very unreliable detectors of deceit.

Reference:

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Learning to lie

03-Apr-08

From New York Magazine (10 Feb), a detailed article on how kids learn to lie:

Kids lie early, often, and for all sorts of reasons—to avoid punishment, to bond with friends, to gain a sense of control. But now there’s a singular theory for one way this habit develops: They are just copying their parents.

… In the last few years, a handful of intrepid scholars have decided it’s time to try to understand why kids lie. For a study to assess the extent of teenage dissembling, Dr. Nancy Darling… recruited a special research team of a dozen undergraduate students, all under the age of 21… “They began the interviews saying that parents give you everything and yes, you should tell them everything,” Darling observes. By the end of the interview, the kids saw for the first time how much they were lying and how many of the family’s rules they had broken. Darling says 98 percent of the teens reported lying to their parents.

… For two decades, parents have rated “honesty” as the trait they most wanted in their children. Other traits, such as confidence or good judgment, don’t even come close. On paper, the kids are getting this message. In surveys, 98 percent said that trust and honesty were essential in a personal relationship. Depending on their ages, 96 to 98 percent said lying is morally wrong.

So when do the 98 percent who think lying is wrong become the 98 percent who lie?

Full article here.

See also:

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Voice Stress Analysis: Only 15 Percent of Lies About Drug Use Detected in Field Test

30-Mar-08

The latest issue of the National Institute of Justice journal (NIJ Journal No. 259, March 2008) features a great article by Kelly Damphousse summarising recent research on voice stress analysis (VSA). Here’s an extract:

According to a recent study funded by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), two of the most popular VSA programs in use by police departments across the country are no better than flipping a coin when it comes to detecting deception regarding recent drug use. The study’s findings also noted, however, that the mere presence of a VSA program during an interrogation may deter a respondent from giving a false answer.

The findings of our study revealed:

  • Deceptive respondents. Fifteen percent who said they had not used drugs—but who, according to their urine tests, had—were correctly identified by the VSA programs as being deceptive.
  • Nondeceptive respondents. Eight and a half percent who were telling the truth—that is, their urine tests were consistent with their statements that they had or had not used drugs—were incorrectly classified by the VSA programs as being deceptive.

Using these percentages to determine the overall accuracy rates of the two VSA programs, we found that their ability to accurately detect deception about recent drug use was about 50 percent.

Based solely on these statistics, it seems reasonable to conclude that these VSA programs were not able to detect deception about drug use, at least to a degree that law enforcement professionals would require—particularly when weighed against the financial investment. We did find, however, that arrestees who were questioned using the VSA instruments were less likely to lie about illicit drug use compared to arrestees whose responses were recorded by the interviewer with pen and paper.

Damphousse concludes:

It is important to look at both “hard” and “hidden” costs when deciding whether to purchase or maintain a VSA program. The monetary costs are substantial: it can cost up to $20,000 to purchase LVA. The average cost of CVSA® training and equipment is $11,500. Calculating the current investment nationwide—more than 1,400 police departments currently use CVSA®, according to the manufacturer—the total cost is more than $16 million not including the manpower expense to use it.

The hidden costs are, of course, more difficult to quantify. As VSA programs come under greater scrutiny—due, in part, to reports of false confessions during investigations that used VSA—the overall value of the technology continues to be questioned.

See also:

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Quick round up of deception news

15-Mar-08

Sorry for the slow posting recently - real life is getting in the way of blogging at the moment., and is likely to continue to do so for some time yet, so please bear with me. Perhaps some of these items will give you your deception research fix in the meantime.

If you’d like something to listen to during the daily commute why not download an interview with John F. Sullivan, author of Gatekeeper: Memoirs of a CIA Polygraph Examiner (h/t Antipolygraph Blog).

Alternatively, try a short NPR Morning Edition segment on the neuropsychology of lying (h/t and see also The Frontal Cortex).

The ever-interesting BPS Research Digest discusses a study of how toddlers tell a joke from a mistake. According to the researchers, Elena Hoicka and Merideth Gattis:

…the ability to recognise humorous intent comes after the ability to recognise jokes, but before the ability to recognise pretense and lies. “We propose that humour understanding is an important step toward understanding that human actions can be intentional not just when actions are right, but even when they are wrong,” they concluded.

Karen Franklin has a terrific commentary on the Wall Street Journal’s discussion of a subscale of the MMPI, which claims to detect malingerers but which, according to critics, results in a large number of false positives (i.e., labelling truthful test-takers as malingerers). (See also a short commentary by Steven Erikson).

There are two articles by Jeremy Dean of the glorious PsyBlog on false memories (here and here).

And finally, Kai Chang at Overcoming Bias reports on an unusual teaching technique which involves asking students to spot the Lie of the Day.

Filed in Brain scans, Children, False memories, Malingering, Polygraph | Comments (0) »

Forthcoming conference on interviewing and deception

14-Mar-08

The 3rd International Conference on Investigative Interviewing will be held 16-18 June 2008 in Quebec, Canada. The theme is “The Search for the Truth”. According to the website:

This conference is mainly addressed to:
• investigators and civilian and police personnel from Québec, Canadian, and international police forces;
• investigators from Quebec, Canadian, and international governmental organizations;
• academics and researchers from fields closely related to investigations;
• and Crown Attorneys.

The chair of the Scientific committee, Michel St Yves writes:

The statements of witnesses, victims and suspects, represent a considerable part of the work conducted by investigators. Testimonials and facts must be brought together in order to solve the puzzle. Testimonials bring meaning to the facts and make them live. It is through testimonials that we establish the truth.

It is with tremendous pride that I invite you to participate in the third great assembly. The search for the truth through witness, victim, and suspect accounts, is at the very essence of the pursuit for justice.

More details, including a programme, details of speakers and a registration form on the conference website. (Note: the site doesn’t work properly with Opera but it’s fine with Firefox and IE.)

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To lie or not to lie: To whom and under what circumstances.

01-Feb-08

Here’s an interesting article that I missed from last year on how teenagers judge the acceptabillity of lying in different situations. The abstract explains:

This research examined adolescents’ judgments about lying to circumvent directives from parents or friends in the moral, personal, and prudential domains. One hundred and twenty-eight adolescents (12.1-17.3 years) were presented with situations in which an adolescent avoids a directive through deception. The majority of adolescents judged some acts as acceptable, including deception regarding parental directives to engage in moral violations and to restrict personal activities. Other acts of deception were judged as unacceptable, including deception of parents regarding prudential acts, as well as deception of friends in each domain. In addition, lying to conceal a misdeed was negatively evaluated. Most adolescents thought that directives from parents and friends to engage in moral violations or to restrict personal acts were not legitimate, whereas parental directives concerning prudential acts were seen as legitimate. Results indicate that adolescents value honesty, but sometimes subordinate it to moral and personal concerns in relationships of inequality.

Reference:

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Robots Evolve And Learn How to Lie

20-Jan-08

robot boyI was completely charmed by a report in the online science magazine Discover this week (h/t Slashdot):

Robots can evolve to communicate with each other, to help, and even to deceive each other, according to Dario Floreano of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Floreano and his colleagues outfitted robots with light sensors, rings of blue light, and wheels and placed them in habitats furnished with glowing “food sources” and patches of “poison” that recharged or drained their batteries. Their neural circuitry was programmed with just 30 “genes,” elements of software code that determined how much they sensed light and how they responded when they did.

… To create the next generation of robots, Floreano recombined the genes of those that proved fittest—those that had managed to get the biggest charge out of the food source. The resulting code … was downloaded into the robots to make … offspring… By the 50th generation, the robots had learned to communicate… The fourth colony sometimes evolved “cheater” robots instead, which would light up to tell the others that the poison was food, while they themselves rolled over to the food source and chowed down without emitting so much as a blink.

The research of Floreano and colleagues is reported in the March 2007 issue of Current Biology. The researchers created four conditions for their experiments, varying the relatedness of the robots (how similar their ‘genes’ and programming were) and whether selection was on an individual level or colony level: “In the individual-level selection regime, the genomes of the 20% robots with the highest individual performance … were selected to form the next generation, whereas in the colony-level selection regime, we randomly selected all robots… from the 20% most efficient colonies” (p.514).

‘Deceptive’ communication only evolved when the robots were not closely ‘related’ to each other and selection was on an individual rather than a colony level. In this condition, “an analysis of individual behaviors revealed that … robots tended to emit blue light when far away from the food.” Despite this, and “contrary to what one would expect, the robots still tended to be attracted rather than repelled by blue light… ” (p.517).

The authors suggest that this is because, at least in early stages of evolution, more blue light = more robots, and robots tended to congregate around ‘food’. So, “the greater level of blue light emission associated with the greater density of robots near food provided a useful cue about food location”.

They go on to explain that “emission of light far from the food would then have evolved as a deceptive strategy for decreasing competition near the food. Consistent with this view, the tendency of robots to be attracted by blue light significantly decreased during the last 200 generations” (p.517).

There was a cost, however. This experimental condition (low-relatedness robots and individual-level selection) was the only condition…

… where the possibility to communicate did not translate into a higher foraging efficiency …In this case, the ability to signal resulted in a deceptive signaling strategy associated with a significant decrease in colony performance compared to the situation where robots could not emit blue light (p.517).

In other words, lying about where the food is might be good for the individual, but it doesn’t help the colony very much.

Reference:

Photo credit: baboon™, Creative Commons License

Abstract below the fold.

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How children grow into expert liars

05-Jan-08

secretschildrenThe APA’s Monitor on Psychology this month has an entertaining and interesting article about how children lie, and how we get better at deceiving as we grow up. Here’s a taster, but you can read the whole thing for free on the APA site here.

…As humans, we are as much defined by our economy with the truth as we are by our cooperation. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, say psychologists. Lying is a cognitive signal that people understand what others are thinking, the important cognitive milestone known as theory of mind. As children grow older, their lying becomes more sophisticated and takes on the characteristics of their respective cultures, revealing to psychologists rich cognitive properties beneath the deceptively common practice.

Children first begin lying verbally around age 3, the time when language development and the ability to control one’s own mental skills combine to form a child’s theory of mind. Also at this age, children have learned their parents’ rules and the consequences of breaking them. …A child’s initial lies tend to be of the punishment-escaping variety. They’re not yet aware of the moral qualms associated with lying… It’s essentially a logic puzzle to them.

… By age 4, children can reliably tell the difference between harmful lies and little white ones, and they stop lying indiscriminately. But, as any lawyer can tell you, the lies don’t drop out altogether. Instead, children develop lying into a social skill.

The article goes on to describe several recent research studies, including a great experiment by psychologist Victoria Talwar from McGill University which demonstrated how lying sophistication increases with age.

Reference:

Photo credit: michaelatacker, Creative Commons License.

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Psychopathy and verbal indicators of deception in offenders

05-Dec-07

psychopath bookA new article from Zina Lee, Jessica R. Klaver and Stephen D. Hart reminds us that we need to be careful when assuming that promising results from lie detection studies where people without serious psychopathology are the subjects can be generalised to a forensic context.

Lee et al wondered whether a tool commonly used for assessing credibility of verbal or written statements could be used to discriminate lying from truth-telling psychopaths. It’s been estimated that up to about 2% of the general population and between 15 and 25% of incarcerated criminals meet the criteria for psychopathy. One of the characteristics of psychopaths is their ability and willingness to deceive others - they are pathological liars who think nothing of manipulating and deceiving others for their own gain. This pathological lying, coupled with superficial charm and inability to feel guilt or remorse, makes a psychopath a particularly dangerous and unpleasant individual.

Previous studies of psychopaths’ deceptive behaviour have reported mixed results, with some suggesting that psychopaths are effective at deceiving others, whilst others report no differences between psychopathic and non-psychopathic individuals. When it comes to verbal behaviour, there is some evidence that psychopaths’ deceptive verbal behaviour may differ from that of non-psychopaths’, being less coherent and less cohesive. Lee et al’s study is, however, the first to investigate psychopathy and verbal indicators of deception in a systematic fashion, using Criteria Based Content Analysis (CBCA).

The researchers asked 45 randomly selected prisoners to tell the truth about the crime for which they had been convicted and to lie about a theft they did not commit. In summary, the authors “found fewer, and different, distinguishing features between true and false accounts among psychopathic and non-psychopathic offenders” (p.81). The results included:

  • More appropriate details provided by psychopathic offenders compared to nonpsychopathic offenders when lying (but no difference when telling the truth)
  • No difference in narrative length between the true and false conditions among psychopathic offenders, and for both groups, truthful narratives were longer than false narratives
  • For psychopathic offenders, spontaneous corrections more frequent when lying compared to telling the truth. This is opposite to the finding with non-criminal populations - according to CBCA, the presence of spontaneous corrections is thought to be associated with credibility.
  • Psychopathic offenders judged less credible than non-psychopathic offenders, even when telling the truth. Seven times less likely to be judged credible to be precise.
  • Narratives produced by psychopathic offenders were judged to be less coherent overall than narratives produced by non-psychopathic offenders.

The study has limitations, the most important being the relatively small sample size, the lack of stakes (the participants had no particular motivation to lie) and the fact that participants were given very little time to prepare their lies. The authors also wonder whether the fact that participants gave uninterrupted narratives might have given an unrealistic impression of psychopaths’ lying ability:

It may be that during an interaction, psychopathic individuals are able to pick up on subtle cues or adjust their speech and presentation based on feedback from the listener. Future studies examining individual variables within the listener (e.g. naive or gullible) or situational factors associated with the interaction (e.g. greater distractions in the environment) may provide further insight into how psychopaths successfully manipulate and deceive others.

Reference:

See also:

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Abstract below the fold.

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Hat tip to Dr Steve

03-Dec-07

Two posts on lying by Dr Steve over at The Top Two Inches blog:

In Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying! Dr Steve discusses different types of falsehood, mendacity and self-deception, in an effort to “show how tricky it is to define lying or the lie”. He concludes that

What qualifies something as a lie, then, is not its truth or falsity, but the conscious (or unconscious) attempt to deceive (or be deceived by) others (and/or oneself).

Great post and some lovely comments, and followed up the next day with 35 aphorisms on liars and lying. My favourites:

3. Mark Twain: “One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat only has nine lives.” Mark Twain also has number 29: “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.”

4. Samuel Butler: “The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.”

11. Mr Justice Darling: “Much truth is spoken, that more may be concealed.”

and finally:

32. Dr. Johnson: “A man would rather have a hundred lies told of him, than one truth which he does not wish to be told.” Indeed.

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Simple test improves accuracy of polygraph results

02-Dec-07

polygraphA press release from Blackwell Publishing (28 Nov) highlights a new study coming out in the next issue of the journal Psychophysiology.

In order to prevent false positive results in polygraph examinations, testing is set to err on the side of caution. This protects the innocent, but increases the chances that a guilty suspect will go unidentified. A new study published in Psychophysiology finds that the use of a written test, known as Symptom Validity Testing (SVT), in conjunction with polygraph testing may improve the accuracy of results.

SVT is an independent measure that tests an entirely different psychological mechanism than polygraph examinations. It is based on the rationale that, when presented with both real and plausible-but-unrelated crime information, innocent suspects will show a random pattern of results when asked questions about the crime. SVT has previously been shown as effective in detecting post-traumatic stress disorder, amnesia and other perceptual deficits for specific events.

The study finds that SVT is also an easy and cost-effective method for determining whether or not a suspect is concealing information. In simulated cases of mock crime questioning and feigned amnesia, it accurately detected when a participant was lying.

Furthermore, when used in combination with the preexisting but relatively uncommon concealed information polygraph test (CIT), test accuracy is found to be higher than when either technique is used alone.

“We showed that the accuracy of a Concealed Information Test can be increased by adding a simple pencil and paper test,” says lead author Ewout Meijer of Maastricht University. “When ‘guilty’ participants were forced to choose one answer for each question, a substantial proportion did not succeed in producing the random pattern that can be expected from ‘innocent’ participants.”

Reference:

Abstract below the fold

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The Construction of Truth and Lies in Drug Court

22-Nov-07

teendrugAn article in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography reports on a long-term study of how drug-using offenders tell truth and lies in a US drug court. Mackinem (the paper’s first author) is a member of drug court staff, and the discussion of how he and his co-author negotiated the challenges of ‘participant observation’ is as interesting as the results of their observations.

In the course of a multiyear investigation of three drug courts in a southeastern state, we explored how drug-court staff decides whether clients are telling the truth or lying when the staff confronts them with a positive test for drugs… The drug-court staff’s construction of truths and lies is one occasion of many when staff members create moral identities for their clients and for those applying to be clients

They found that when confronted with a positive result, a third of clients responded with denials (32%), while the other two thirds admitted to using drugs. A variety of excuses were put forward as mitigaiton, with personal stress and the influence of peers being the most common. The authors argue that the way in which drug court staff treat lies by drug-using offenders is bound up with the creation of ‘moral identities’ for the offenders:

The drug-court staff’s judgment as to whether clients are telling the truth or lying when confronted with a positive test for drugs is one occasion of many when the staff creates moral identities for its clients and for those applying to be clients. Are the drug-using offenders morally worthy drug addicts attempting to become sober, or are they unworthy criminals with no willingness to kick their habit? Staffers increasingly make these judgments as they evaluate the potential of drug-using offenders to participate successfully in drug court, as they monitor the progress of drug court clients in the program, and as they assess the performance of clients in deciding whether the clients will graduate or be removed from the program (page 244).

Sage Journals is currently offering open access to all journals, so you can read the article for free until the end of November 2007.

Reference :

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NPR on lie detection

07-Nov-07

Hat tip to blog.bioethics.net (a great blog associated with the American Journal of Bioethics):

This past week NPR’s Morning Edition carried a three-part series about lie detection reported by Dina Temple-Raston. (The segments are posted as both audio and text, so they’re easy to scan if you can’t listen.) The series covers the questionable accuracy of polygraphs, the emerging field of lie detection by fMRI, and the examination of facial “micro expressions” for hints of lies.

Head over to blog.bioethics.net for some commentary, or go straight to the NPR site for more details.

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Applying fMRI to the question of guilt versus innocence - on TV and then in an academic journal…

05-Nov-07

brainscan2 A press release (2 Nov) heralds the publication of a new study by Professor Sean Spence from the University of Sheffield, who claims the research shows that fMRI “could be used alongside other factors to address questions of guilt versus innocence”. It’s an interesting study on two counts: one, it appears to be the first time that fMRI lie-detection research has been carried out using a real world case (as opposed to contrived experiments), and two, the research was funded by a TV company and featured on a TV documentary earlier this year. The study is currently in press in the journal European Psychiatry (reference below).

The press release gives a summary of the findings:

An academic at the University of Sheffield has used groundbreaking technology to investigate the potential innocence of a woman convicted of poisoning a child in her care. Professor Sean Spence, who has pioneered the use of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to detect lies, carried out groundbreaking experiments on the woman who, despite protesting her innocence, was sentenced to four years in prison. ….Using the technology, Professor Spence examined the woman´s brain activity as she alternately confirmed her account of events and that of her accusers. The tests demonstrated that when she agreed with her accusers´ account of events she activated extensive regions of her frontal lobes and also took significantly longer to respond – these findings have previously been found to be consistent with false or untrue statements.

In the acknowledgements section of the paper the authors reveal that the study “was funded by Quickfire Media in association with Channel Four Television”. The case Spence et al. describe as that of “Woman X” was featured in Channel 4’s Lie Lab series (and if you’re really interested, you can easily identify X in a couple of clicks). Although unusual, this isn’t the first time that research featured on TV has found its way into academic journals: see, for example, Haslam and Reicher’s academic publications based on their controversial televised replication of Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment .

In theory, I am not sure it necessarily matters if a study is done for the TV, if the study is carried out in an ethical and scientific way, and the subsequent article(s) meet rigorous standards of peer review. Nor does it always matter if the academic research then receives wider publicity as a result. In this case, however, I hope that anyone picking up and reporting further on this story reads the actual paper, in which Spence and his co-authors consider carefully the implications of the study and the caveats that should be applied to the results:

To our knowledge, this is the first case described where fMRI or any other form of functional neuroimaging has been used to study truths and lies derived from a genuine ‘real-life’ scenario, where the events described pertain to a serious forensic case. All the more reason then for us to remain especially cautious while interpreting our findings and to ensure that we make explicit their limitations: the weaknesses of our approach (p.4).

The authors go on to discuss alternative interpretations of their results: Perhaps X had told her story so many times that her responses were automatic? Perhaps the emotive nature of the subject under discussion (poisoning a child) gave rise to the observed pattern of activation? Maybe X used countermeasures (such as moving her head or using cognitive distractions)? Perhaps she “has ‘convinced herself’ of her innocence … she answered sincerely though ‘incorrectly’”? In this case, perhaps the researchers have “merely imaged ‘self-deception’” (p.5)? For each argument, the authors discuss the pros and cons, remaining careful not to claim too much for their results, and pointing out that further empirical enquiry is needed.

These cautions are also echoed in Spence’s comments at the end of the press release:

“This research provides a fresh opportunity for the British legal system as it has the potential to reduce the number of miscarriages of justice. However, it is important to note that, at the moment, this research doesn´t prove that this woman is innocent. Instead, what it clearly demonstrates is that her brain responds as if she were innocent.”

Reference:

See also :

  • Mind Hacks discusses an article in which Raymond Tallis “laments the rise of ‘neurolaw’ where brain scan evidence is used in court in an attempt to show that the accused was not responsible for their actions”.
  • Deception Blog posts on brain scanning and deception

Abstract below the fold.

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Computer voice stress analyzer tests debated

05-Nov-07

Another TV expose of the use of Computer Voice Stress Analyzers in the USA, this time from Colorado’s 9 News (1 November):

A device used by Colorado law enforcement agencies to identify when someone is lying, may not work and may be costing taxpayers money. Computer Voice Stress Analyzers (CVSAs) claim to measure changes in a person’s voice that indicate a lie. However, three recent studies say the device does not accurately tell the difference between a person lying and a person telling the truth. CVSAs have been used by 21 law enforcement agencies in Colorado.

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A job for a deception researcher

02-Nov-07

joblessA recently advertised job that might appeal to a reader of the Deception Blog:

Research Associate: Language Use and Deception, Department of Psychology, Lancaster University

Applications are invited for a Postdoctoral Research Associate to work on a 21-month project investigating language use and deception. The project seeks to broaden our understanding of verbal indicators of deception by studying the language use of non-student populations over a range of tasks. Its particular focus will be on testing and developing innovative methods of linguistic analysis to capture such verbal indicators.

The closing date is 8 November so you’ll have to hurry!

Photo credit: Khalilshah, Creative Commons License

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Lie acceptability

09-Oct-07

When do people think it might be ok to lie? religionSusanna Robinson Ning and Angela M. Crossman from John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York have just published the results of an interesting study of lie acceptability.

The authors start off with a good summary of the literature on lie acceptability, and age, gender, cultural and religious differences in attitudes to different types of lie. Different types of lie may be more or less acceptable, depending on the motivaton for telling them and the context in which they are told. Broadly, lies which are told for personal gain or to harm others - so-called ‘antisocial lies’ - are generally considered less acceptable than those told to help another or for politeness - ‘prosocial lies’.

Ning and Crossman set out to explore how perceptions of lie acceptability vary across situations and by different cultural or subcultural groups at a detailed level. They argue that:

These issues are important, as one’s perceptions of the acceptability of lies may relate to the frequency with which one lies and to the facility with which one lies (e.g., whether or not one provides obvious cues that give away deceptive attempts out of discomfort with the act of lying). (p.2131)

They authors also note that understanding how liars and deceived people feel about the acceptability of the particular lies may also be important once a liar has been found out: “perceptions of lie acceptability predict reactions to the discovery that one has been deceived (DePaulo et al., 2004), which could be relevant to issues such as relationship stability in the wake of such a discovery” (p.2131).

In this study, individuals from various different religious denominations, including 44% from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS), 28% claiming to be athiest or agnostic, and 20% claiming to be non-LDS Christian, rated the acceptability of lies in 12 different scenarios in which types of lie and context were varied. There’s a lot in the results, but briefly:

  • Unsurprisingly, prosocial lies were considered by all to be more acceptable than anti-social lies.
  • “Lies told to strangers were generally considered more acceptable than were lies told to spouses” (p.2147)
  • “Women in this study tended to rate both self- and other-oriented lies as more acceptable than did men, particularly for lies told to strangers” (p.2148)
  • Lie acceptability decreased overall with age and “age was negatively associated with [acceptability of] lies told to avoid conflict in a spousal relationship, but was not related to perceptions of such lies told to a stranger” (p.2149)
  • “As predicted, LDS participants consistently rated lies as significantly less acceptable overall than did non-LDS participants, regardless of lie motivation, relationship category, or participant sex”. (p. 2149)

There are some important caveats, notably that the sample was biased towards females (77%) and was relatively young (mean age approximately 27 years). Furthermore, the manner of recruiting the LDS sample, via a church listserv (the others were recruited via a secular listserv), may have led to an increase in socially desirable responding. As the authors acknowledge, this study does little more than highlight some interesting areas for more detailed research.

Reference:

Abstract below the fold

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Faking bad on the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scales

02-Oct-07

Julian Boon, Lynsey Gozna and Stephen Hall have a paper forthcoming in the journal Personality and Individual Differences exploring whether it’s possible to ‘fake bad’ on the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scales (GSS). These tests measure ‘Interrogative Suggestibility’ (IS), which is defined as “the extent to which, within a closed social interaction, people come to accept messages communicated during formal questioning, as a result of which their subsequent behavioural response is affected” (Gudjonsson & Clark, 1986, p. 84). People who are high in IS are more susceptible to making false confessions under interrogative pressure, in a police or military interrogation scenario, for instance. However, as the authors point out, some offenders might be motivated to appear suggestible or vulnerable even if they are not. For instance, if an offender wanted to retract a statement or confession, or “in circumstances where the successful demonstration of vulnerability may lead to a reduction in a fine or sentence or even to escaping a custodial sentence”.

Gudjonsson’s tests for suggestibility are now quite widely known and it’s relatively easy to find information about the procedure on the internet. This presents a problem: the reliability of the GSS depends on test takers being unaware of the purpose of the test. Boon et al. thus explored whether knowledge of the purpose of the test influenced performance, as well as examining the performance of those who deliberately tried to fake bad.

The ‘test aware’ group in this study performed differently on the suggestibility measures compared to the fakers and to a control group who had just been given the standard test. The fakers also produced a different pattern of results. Comparing the fakers’ results on suggestibility measures to the norms for individuals who are mentally impaired revealed that the results were almost identical. However, fakers could be discriminated from genuinely mentally impaired people because they performed better on a test of memory. The authors suggest that this unusual combination of results could be a ‘red flag’ for faking bad:

Specifically, this red flag could be where individuals’ scoring profiles revealed near identical scores on the principal suggestibility measures to those of the intellectually disabled norms, while simultaneously they were scoring significantly higher on the free recall measures.

The authors report that the interviewer administering the tests didn’t know which conditions participants had been allocated to, but tried to guess. She was only correct 58% of the time, suggesting that participants were good at fooling the interviewer. This shows the value of being able to detect faking via measures in the tests rather than simply relying on the judgement of the interviewer.

The limitations of this study are the usual ones - participants were undergraduate students whose motivation for faking bad is probably rather less than that of real criminals trying to escape a prison sentence.

Reference:

Abstract below the fold.

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Investigating the Features of Truthful and Fabricated Reports of Traumatic Experiences

23-Sep-07

painStephen Porter and colleagues have a paper in the April 2007 issue of Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science exploring the differences between truthful and fabricated accounts of traumatic experiences.

They examined the written accounts of students fabricating and giving truthful accounts of traumatic events and found that:

… narratives based on false and genuine traumatic events showed several qualitative differences, some contrasting our predictions. Whereas we predicted that participants would be able to produce fabricated events that appeared to be as credible as truthful accounts, we found that fabricated events were rated lower on plausibility by coders with no knowledge of their actual veracity. This suggests that mistakes in the courtroom may result from liars who are able to effectively distract attention from their stories by manipulating their demeanour and speech (e.g., tone) (p.88).

In other words, lie catchers need to focus on what is being said, and try avoid being misled by non-verbal behaviour.

In addition, attention to specific types of details in the narratives helped to discriminate honesty from deception. When relating a fabricated experience, participants were unable to provide the same level of contextual information as when relating a genuine experience. They provided fewer time and location details and their reports were abbreviated overall, despite our prediction that they may be more detailed in an attempt to make their trauma stories more credible and to elicit sympathy (p.88).

As far as I can see, the following is the only attempt to motivate participants, during the instructions for the study:

Your goal in this section is to provide a believable (but fabricated) traumatic memory report. These reports will be shown to legal professionals and students (if you consented to this aspect of the study) in future research for them to determine how credible your experience appears (p.83).

It doesn’t appear from the description of the method that participants had much time to prepare their truthful or fabricated accounts. Perhaps it is not surprising then, that the results did not confirm to the researchers’ predictions? Perhaps real life malingerers, with the results of a court case at stake, and time to practice their account, might try harder to make their stories credible, and be better at it?

Participants also completed three widely used measures: the Revised Impact of Event Scale, which measures the level of traumatic stress associated with traumatic experience, the Trauma Symptom Inventory, which measures trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms, and the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Checklist, which also screens for the presence of PTSD symptomology. Analysis of the results suggested that

…genuine and fabricated reports of trauma could be differentiated based on the patterns of traumatic stress or symptoms reported. It was anticipated that symptoms on the three measures of traumatic stress would be exaggerated when participants were fabricating. The results provided strong evidence for this hypothesis (p.88).

Abstract below the fold.

Reference:

Photo credit: aussie_patches, Creative Commons License

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Can lie detectors be trusted?

18-Sep-07

Detailed commentary from Patrick Barkham in the Guardian (18 Sept), exploring the use of ‘lie detecting’ machines in the UK. He covers the use of voice stress analysis in benefit offices and insurance companies, and polygraphy for sex offenders. Interesting stuff, and well worth reading in full over on the Guardian site. Here’s a flavour:

[Harrow] council prefers the phrase “voice risk analysis” and Capita calls its combination of software, special scripts and training for handlers the “Advanced Validation Solution”. Just don’t say it’s a lie detector. “Please don’t call it that. We’re not happy with that. It’s an assessment,” says Fabio Esposito, Harrow’s assistant benefit manager.

… Voice stress analysis systems have been used for more than five years in the British insurance industry but have yet to really catch on, according to the Association of British Insurers. There was an initial flurry of publicity when motor insurance companies introduced the technology in 2001 but it is still “the exception rather than the norm,” says Malcolm Tarling of the ABI. “Not many companies use it and those that do use it in very controlled circumstances. They never use the results of a voice risk analysis alone because the technology is not infallible.”

… Next year, in a pilot study, the government will introduce a mandatory polygraph for convicted sex offenders in three regions. … Professor Don Grubin, a forensic psychiatrist at Newcastle University… admits he was initially sceptical but argues that polygraphs are a useful tool. “We were less concerned about accuracy per se than with the disclosures and the changes in behaviour it encourages these guys to make,” he says. “It should not be seen as a lie detector but as a truth facilitator. What you find is you get markedly increased disclosures. You don’t get the full story but you get more than you had.”

…critics argue that most kinds of lie-detector studies are lab tests, which can never replicate the high stakes of real lies and tend to test technology on healthy individuals (usually students) of above-average intelligence. Children, criminals, the psychotic, the stupid and even those not speaking in their first language (a common issue with benefit claimants) are rarely involved in studies.

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