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Research round-up 6: And finally, kids’ lies, online lies and my deception book of the year

01-Jan-09

Happy new year! Here is the final part of the 2008 deception research round-up, put together to make amends for having neglected this blog over the past few months. This post includes bits and pieces of deception research that didn’t fit too well into the first five round-up posts. Hope you’ve enjoyed them all!

Children

First, a couple of articles about how children learn to lie:

Eye gaze plays a pivotal role during communication. When interacting deceptively, it is commonly believed that the deceiver will break eye contact and look downward. We examined whether children’s gaze behavior when lying is consistent with this belief. …Younger participants (7- and 9-year-olds) broke eye contact significantly more when lying compared with other conditions. Also, their averted gaze when lying differed significantly from their gaze display in other conditions. In contrast, older participants did not differ in their durations of eye contact or averted gaze across conditions. Participants’ knowledge about eye gaze and deception increased with age. This knowledge significantly predicted their actual gaze behavior when lying. These findings suggest that with increased age, participants became increasingly sophisticated in their use of display rule knowledge to conceal their deception.

The relation between children’s lie-telling and their social and cognitive development was examined. Children (3-8 years) were told not to peek at a toy. Most children peeked and later lied about peeking. Children’s subsequent verbal statements were not always consistent with their initial denial and leaked critical information revealing their deceit. Children’s conceptual moral understanding of lies, executive functioning, and theory-of-mind understanding were also assessed. Children’s initial false denials were related to their first-order belief understanding and their inhibitory control. Children’s ability to maintain their lies was related to their second-order belief understanding. Children’s lying was related to their moral evaluations. These findings suggest that social and cognitive factors may play an important role in children’s lie-telling abilities.

Technotreachery - lying via CMC

It’s a popular topic and the literature is growing all the time. Here’s some of the new research published in 2008 about lying in computer-mediated communication:

This study aimed to elaborate the relationships between sensation-seeking, Internet dependency, and online interpersonal deception. Of the 707 individuals recruited to this study, 675 successfully completed the survey. The results showed high sensation-seekers and high Internet dependents were more likely to engage in online interpersonal deception than were their counterparts.

Deception research has been primarily studied from a Western perspective, so very little is known regarding how other cultures view deception… this study proposes a framework for understanding the role Korean and American culture plays in deceptive behavior for both face-to-face (FTF) and computer-mediated communication (CMC). … Korean respondents exhibited greater collectivist values, lower levels of power distance, and higher levels of masculine values than Americans. Furthermore, deceptive behavior was greater for FTF communication than for CMC for both Korean and American respondents. In addition to a significant relationship between culture and deception, differences were found between espoused cultural values and deceptive behavior, regardless of national culture. These results indicate the need for future research to consider cultural differences when examining deceptive behavior.

This study set out to investigate the type of media individuals are more likely to tell self-serving and other-oriented lies, and whether this varied according to the target of the lie. One hundred and fifty participants rated on a likert-point scale how likely they would tell a lie. Participants were more likely to tell self-serving lies to people not well-known to them. They were more likely to tell self-serving lies in email, followed by phone, and finally face-to-face. Participants were more likely to tell other-oriented lies to individuals they felt close to and this did not vary according to the type media. Participants were more likely to tell harsh truths to people not well-known to them via email.

Detecting deception

OK, I know this probably could have gone into an earlier post. However, it does involve a bit of machinery so it didn’t fit in part 1, but the machinery has been in use for several decades so it couldn’t really fit in post 2.

An increasing number of researchers are exploring variations of the Concealed Knowledge Test (CKT) as alternatives to traditional ‘lie-detector’ tests. For example, the response times (RT)-based CKT has been previously shown to accurately detect participants who possess privileged knowledge. Although several studies have reported successful RT-based tests, they have focused on verbal stimuli despite the prevalence of photographic evidence in forensic investigations. Related studies comparing pictures and phrases have yielded inconsistent results. The present work compared an RT-CKT using verbal phrases as stimuli to one using pictures of faces. This led to equally accurate and efficient tests using either stimulus type. Results also suggest that previous inconsistent findings may be attributable to study procedures that led to better memory for verbal than visual items. When memory for verbal phrases and pictures were equated, we found nearly identical detection accuracies.

Deception book of the year

And finally, an important publication in 2008 was the second edition of Aldert Vrij’s Detecting Lies and Deceit: Pitfalls and Opportunities. The first edition (published in 2000) has been one of my key references for scholarly research on deception, along with Paul Ekman’s Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics and Marriage and Granhag and Stronwall’s edited volume on The Detection of Deception in Forensic Contexts. Not surprising then that Vrij’s second edition is already one of the most frequently consulted volumes on my deception bookshelf.

Vrij says that he did not originally envisage updating his 2000 book until at least 2010, but felt with the increasing amount of new research in this area, and increasing interest from law enforcement and security agencies in detecting deception that he could not wait that long. The result is a volume that is substantially updated with research published up to about the middle of 2007. The book has been completely rewritten and there are several new chapters covering recent developments in mechanical methods of deception detection, including brain scanning technologies (e.g., fMRI, P300 brain waves), thermal imaging and voice stress analysis. Vrij also adds a helpful chapter on how professionals can become better lie detectors.

It’s not perfect - I’d welcome more detail on on understanding the reasons why people lie (the book is mostly about catching liars), more on creating a context in which someone is more likely to tell the truth, and more discussion of cross-cultural differences in deception (though to be fair there is shockingly little research in this area to discuss). But despite these criticisms, Vrij’s new book remains a ‘must have’ reference for academics and professionals interested in up-to-date research on deception detection. Practitioners in particular should heed Vrij’s warning about over-hyped techniques for ‘deception detection’: as Vrij says, the best way to avoid falling for the hype is by keeping up to date with the independent, objective research on deception detection. This book is a great tool for giving yourself a grounding in that research.

Phew. Six months’ blogging in 6 days. Hope you enjoyed it!

Filed in Applications, Children, General, Lie-catchers, Online communication | Comments (0) »

Research Round-up 5: Polygraphy

31-Dec-08

Part 5 in the rapid research round-up for 2008 includes some of the articles to appear over the last year relating to physiological detection of deception.

The first paper here is the most interesting to me, particularly because there are rather few published research findings relating to what happens when people are polygraphed in their non-native language, but the others are probably only really of interest to hard-core psychophysiologists. If these all seem pretty heavy then I’d recommend heading over to a delightful post about William Moulton Marsden, one of the early pioneers of the polygraph, written by Romeo Vitelli at the Providentia blog, for some light relief.

Bilingual speakers frequently report experiencing greater emotional resonance in their first language compared to their second. In Experiment 1, Turkish university students who had learned English as a foreign language had reduced skin conductance responses (SCRs) when listening to emotional phrases in English compared to Turkish, an effect which was most pronounced for childhood reprimands. A second type of emotional language, reading out loud true and false statements, was studied in Experiment 2… Results suggest that two factors influence the electrodermal activity elicited when bilingual speakers lie in their two languages: arousal due to emotions associated with lying, and arousal due to anxiety about managing speech production in non-native language. Anxiety and emotionality when speaking a non-naive language need to be better understood to inform practices ranging from bilingual psychotherapy to police interrogation of suspects and witnesses.

The effects of the state of guilt and the context in which critical information was received on the accuracy of the Concealed Information Test (CIT) were examined in a between-subjects mock crime experiment… Results indicated that accomplices were more effectively detected than innocent participants, although both were given the same critical information. Information gathered in the crime context yielded stronger orientation to the critical items than similar information gathered in a neutral context.

The present mock-crime study concentrated on the validity of the Guilty Actions Test (GAT) and the role of the orienting response (OR) for differential autonomic responding. N = 105 female subjects were assigned to one of three groups: a guilty group, members of which committed a mock-theft; an innocent-aware group, members of which witnessed the theft; and an innocent-unaware group… For informed participants (guilty and innocent-aware), relevant items were accompanied by larger skin conductance responses and heart rate decelerations whereas irrelevant items elicited HR accelerations. Uninformed participants showed a non-systematic response pattern.

Following the idea that response inhibition processes play a central role in concealing information, the present study investigated the influence of a Go/No-go task as an interfering mental activity, performed parallel to the Concealed Information Test (CIT), on the detectability of concealed information… No physiological evidence for an interaction between the parallel task and sub-processes of deception (e.g. inhibition) was found. Subjects’ performance in the Go/No-go parallel task did not contribute to the detection of concealed information.

The Concealed Information Test (CIT) requires the examinee to deceptively deny recognition of known stimuli and to truthfully deny recognition of unknown stimuli. Because deception and orienting are typically coupled, it is unclear how exactly these sub-processes affect the physiological responses measured in the CIT…The present study aimed at separating the effects of deception from those of orienting…The findings further support the notion that psychophysiological measures elicited by a modified CIT may reflect different mental processes involved in orienting and deception.

The final part of this research round-up includes papers on children’s deception, and on technotreachery.

Filed in Polygraph, Psychophysiology | Comments (0) »

Research round-up 4: When people lie

30-Dec-08

On to part 4 of this series on research published in 2008 that I didn’t get a chance to blog about when it came out, where we take a peek at some of the new research on circumstances in which people lie and what makes them seem credible.

Part 1: Catching liars
Part 2: New technologies
Part 3: Magic

First, lying in an extreme situation: Harpster and her colleagues reported results of a study that suggests that detailed linguistic analysis of calls made to the emergency services can help determine whether the caller might have committed the homicide they are reporting:

This study examined verbal indicators to critically analyze 911 homicide statements for predictive value in determining the caller’s innocence or guilt regarding the offense. One hundred audio recordings and transcripts of 911 homicide telephone calls obtained from police and sheriffs departments throughout the United States provided the database for the study. Using qualitative approaches for formulating the linguistic attributes of these communications and appropriate quantitative analyses of the resulting variables, the likelihood of guilt or innocence of the 911 callers in these adjudicated cases was examined. The results suggest that the presence or absence of as many as 18 of the variables are associated with the likelihood of the caller’s guilt or innocence regarding the offense of homicide. These results are suggestive of up to six distinct linguistic dimensions that may be useful for examination of all homicide calls to support effective investigations of these cases by law enforcement.

Staying in the forensic realm, Tess Neal and Stanley Brodsky wondered how expert witnesses can enhance their credibility. They reported results indicating that eye contact with the lawyer cross-questioning them and with mock jurors enhances the credibility of male experts, though it does not seem to have an impact on female experts’ credibility:

The effect of eye contact on credibility was examined via a 3 (low, medium, high eye contact) x 2 (male, female) between-groups design with 232 undergraduate participants. A trial transcript excerpt about a defendant’s recidivism likelihood was utilized as the experts’ script. A main effect was found: Experts with high eye contact had higher credibility ratings than in the medium and low conditions. Although a confound precluded comparisons between the genders, results indicated that males with high eye contact were more credible than males with medium or low eye contact. The female experts’ credibility was not significantly different regardless of eye contact. Eye contact may be especially important for males: Male experts should maintain eye contact for maximum credibility.

If you’re a rape victim, however, police investigators believe you’re more credible when you cry or show despair whilst giving your evidence:

Credibility judgments by police investigators were examined. Sixty-nine investigators viewed one of three video-recorded versions of a rape victim’s statement where the role was played by a professional actress. The statements were given in a free recall manner with identical wording, but differing in the emotions displayed, termed congruent, neutral and incongruent emotional expressions. Results showed that emotions displayed by the rape victim affected police officers’ judgments of credibility. The victim was judged as most credible when crying and showing despair, and less credible when being neutral or expressing more positive emotions. This result indicates stereotypic beliefs about rape victim behavior among police officers, similar to those found for lay persons. Results are discussed in terms of professional expertise.

From detecting lying by the police to police deception: Geoffrey Alpert and Jeffrey Noble published a discussion piece in Police Quarterly in which they consider the circumstances, nature and impact of conscious, unconscious, ‘acceptable’ and unacceptable lying by police officers:

Police officers often tell lies; they act in ways that are deceptive, they manipulative people and situations, they coerce citizens, and are dishonest. They are taught, encouraged, and often rewarded for their deceptive practices. Officers often lie to suspects about witnesses and evidence, and they are deceitful when attempting to learn about criminal activity. Most of these actions are sanctioned, legal, and expected. Although they are allowed to be dishonest in certain circumstances, they are also required to be trustworthy, honest, and maintain the highest level of integrity. The purpose of this article is to explore situations when officers can be dishonest, some reasons that help us understand the dishonesty, and circumstances where lies may lead to unintended consequences such as false confessions. The authors conclude with a discussion of how police agencies can manage the lies that officers tell and the consequences for the officers, organizations, and the criminal justice system.

In everyday life, when do people think it’s ok to lie? BeverlyMcLeod and Randy Genereux’s results suggest that your personality traits influence what sorts of lying you find acceptable, and when:

The present study investigated the role of individual differences in the perceived acceptability and likelihood of different types of lies. Two-hundred and eighty seven college students completed scales assessing six personality variables (honesty, kindness, assertiveness, approval motivation, self-monitoring, and Machiavellianism) and rated 16 scenarios involving lies told for four different motives (altruistic, conflict avoidance, social acceptance, and self-gain lies). Our central hypothesis that the perceived acceptability and likelihood of lying would be predicted by interactions between personality characteristics of the rater and the type of lie being considered was supported. For each type of lie, a unique set of personality variables significantly predicted lying acceptability and likelihood.

What is the impact of lying? Robert Lount and his colleagues warned that it’s difficult to recover from an early breach of trust in a relationship:

Few interpersonal relationships endure without one party violating the other’s expectations. Thus, the ability to build trust and to restore cooperation after a breach can be critical for the preservation of positive relationships. Using an iterated prisoner’s dilemma, this article presents two experiments that investigated the effects of the timing of a trust breach—at the start of an interaction, after 5 trials, after 10 trials, or not at all. The findings indicate that getting off on the wrong foot has devastating long-term consequences. Although later breaches seemed to limit cooperation for only a short time, they still planted a seed of distrust that surfaced in the end.

And finally, a couple outside the psychology/criminology literature that may be of interest:

Next round up (part 5): research on the psychophysiology of lying.

Filed in Aetiology, Applications, General, Individual differences, Lie-catchers | Comments (0) »

Research round-up 3: It’s magic

29-Dec-08

This is the third in the series of posts on research published in 2008 that I didn’t get a chance to blog about when it came out. The last two were pretty long posts so treat this one as a brief bit of light relief before we get down to the serious business of when people lie, in part 4.

Magic is mostly deception for fun, but studying how magicians pull the wool over our eyes can also teach us about how we are deceived by serious and determined liars. 2008 saw not one but two articles arguing for the study of magicial tricks as a vehicle for better understanding human cognition:

  • Gustav Kuhn, Alym A. Amlani and Ronald A. Rensink (2008). Towards a science of magic. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12(9): 349-354

It is argued here that cognitive science currently neglects an important source of insight into the human mind: the effects created by magicians. Over the centuries, magicians have learned how to perform acts that are perceived as defying the laws of nature, and that induce a strong sense of wonder. This article argues that the time has come to examine the scientific bases behind such phenomena, and to create a science of magic linked to relevant areas of cognitive science. Concrete examples are taken from three areas of magic: the ability to control attention, to distort perception, and to influence choice. It is shown how such knowledge can help develop new tools and indicate new avenues of research into human perception and cognition. [Pre-print pdf available]

Just as vision scientists study visual art and illusions to elucidate the workings of the visual system, so too can cognitive scientists study cognitive illusions to elucidate the underpinnings of cognition. Magic shows are a manifestation of accomplished magic performers’ deep intuition for and understanding of human attention and awareness. By studying magicians and their techniques, neuroscientists can learn powerful methods to manipulate attention and awareness in the laboratory. Such methods could be exploited to directly study the behavioural and neural basis of consciousness itself, for instance through the use of brain imaging and other neural recording techniques.

The NRN paper got more press attention, with extensive coverage in the New York Times (11 August 2008) and the Boston Globe (3 August 2008). It was also very nicely summarised by the always-fabulous PsyBlog and commented on by the wonderful Mind Hacks. Meanwhile, the TiCS paper, which got little more than a nod in the Boston Globe, was covered in more detail in the Guardian (25 July).

There’s some more background and links over at the web home of NRN article co-author Susanna Martinez-Conde and at Stephen Macknick’s web site. For fun, here’s another Mind Hacks post on magic. Enjoy!

Next post: Part 4: When people lie

Filed in Miscellaneous | Comments (0) »

Research round-up 2: New technologies and deception detection

28-Dec-08

Part two of the Deception Blog round-up of “all those articles I haven’t had a chance to blog about”. Part one was about catching liars via non-mechanical techniques. This post covers articles and discussion about new technologies to detect deception, including fMRI and measurement of Event-Related Potentials.

fMRI and deception: discussion on the journal pages

It’s been quite a year for advances in neuroscience and deception detection, so much so that in a recent paper in of the American Academy of Psychiatry & Law, Daniel Langleben and Frank Dattilio suggested that a new discipline of “forensic MRI” was emerging. One interesting exchange appeared recently in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry & Law:

…The new approach promises significantly greater accuracy than the conventional polygraph—at least under carefully controlled laboratory conditions. But would it work in the real world? Despite some significant concerns about validity and reliability, fMRI lie detection may in fact be appropriate for certain applications. This new ability to peer inside someone’s head raises significant questions of ethics. Commentators have already begun to weigh in on many of these questions. A wider dialogue within the medical, neuroscientific, and legal communities would be optimal in promoting the responsible use of this technology and preventing abuses.

…The present article concludes that the use of functional imaging to discriminate truth from lies does not meet the Daubert criteria for courtroom testimony.

…we update and interpret the data described by Simpson, from the points of view of an experimental scientist and a forensic clinician. We conclude that the current research funding and literature are prematurely skewed toward discussion of existing findings, rather than generation of new fMRI data on deception and related topics such as mind-reading, consciousness, morality, and criminal responsibility. We propose that further progress in brain imaging research may foster the emergence of a new discipline of forensic MRI.

Earlier this year Kamila Sip and colleagues challenged proponents of neuroimaging for deception detection to take more account of the real world context in which deception occurs, which led to a robust defence from John-Dylan Haynes and an equally robust rebuttal from Sip et al. It all happened in the pages of Trends in Cognitive Sciences:

With the increasing interest in the neuroimaging of deception and its commercial application, there is a need to pay more attention to methodology. The weakness of studying deception in an experimental setting has been discussed intensively for over half a century. However, even though much effort has been put into their development, paradigms are still inadequate. The problems that bedevilled the old technology have not been eliminated by the new. Advances will only be possible if experiments are designed that take account of the intentions of the subject and the context in which these occur.

In their recent article, Sip and colleagues raise several criticisms that question whether neuroimaging is suitable for lie detection. Here, two of their points are critically discussed. First, contrary to the view of Sip et al., the fact that brain regions involved in deception are also involved in other cognitive processes is not a problem for classification-based detection of deception. Second, I disagree with their proposition that the development of lie-detection requires enriched experimental deception scenarios. Instead, I propose a data-driven perspective whereby powerful statistical techniques are applied to data obtained in real-world scenarios.

…Valid experimental paradigms for eliciting deception are still required, and such paradigms will be particularly difficult to apply in real-life settings… We agree with Haynes, however, that there are important ethical issues at stake for researchers in this field. In our opinion, one of the most important of these is careful consideration of how results derived from highly controlled laboratory settings compare with those obtained from real-life scenarios, and if and when imaging technology should be transferred from the laboratory to the judicial system.

fMRI and deception: new research findings

Of course discussion is worth nothing if you don’t have research results to discuss. Shawn Christ and colleagues delved deeper into to the cognitive processes associated with deception:

Previous neuroimaging studies have implicated the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and nearby brain regions in deception. This is consistent with the hypothesis that lying involves the executive control system….Our findings support the notion that executive control processes, particularly working memory, and their associated neural substrates play an integral role in deception. This work provides a foundation for future research on the neurocognitive basis of deception.

Meanwhile, two groups of researchers reported that fMRI techniques can differentiate between mistakes and false memories vs deliberate deception, with Tatia Lee and colleagues showing that in the case of feigning memory impairment, deception “is not only more cognitively demanding than making unintentional errors but also utilizes different cognitive processes”:

fMRI and deception in the blogosphere

Commentary and discussion of fMRI was not limited to the pages of scholarly journals, however. A terrific post by Vaughan over at Mind Hacks on the limitations of fMRI studies zipped around the blogosphere (and rightly so) and is well worth a read if you are interested in becoming a more critical consumer of fMRI deception detection studies (see also Neurophilosophy’s post MRI: What is it good for? ).

There’s a detailed write-up by Hank Greely of the University of Akron Law School’s conference on Law and Neuroscience held in September, which covers the science, the practicalities and the ethics of using neuroscience in forensic contexts (see also his summary of a presentation at an earlier conference on ‘neurolaw’). Judges too, are “waking up to the potential misuse of brain-scanning technologies” with a recent judges’ summit in the US to “discuss protecting courts from junk neuroscience”, reports New Scientist .

Nevertheless, purveyors of MRI lie-detection technology continue to push their wares. For instance, the Antipolygraph Blog picked up a radio discussion on commercial fMRI-based lie detection in June (the audio download is still available as an mp3 download).

ERP and deception: the controversial BEOS test

Earlier this year I and many others blogged about the disturbing use of brain scanning in a recent murder trial in India. The technique is known as the Brain Electrical Oscillations Signature test and is based on measuring Event-Related Potentials (electrical activity across the brain). Neurologica blog and Neuroethics and Law have a write-ups and links for those who wish to know more.

Neuroethics and Law blog links to a pdf of the judge’s opinion in the case, where pages 58-64 include a summary of the judge’s understanding of the BEOS procedure and what it ‘revealed’ in this case. Most disturbing is the apparent certainty of the judge that the tests were appropriate, scientifically robust and applied correctly by “Sunny Joseph who is working as Assistant Chemical Analyser in Forensic Science Laboratory, Mumbai” (p.55-56):

…competency of this witness to conduct the Test is not seriously challenged. His evidence also reveals that he was working as Clinical Psychologist in National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences at Bangalore and he has experience in the field of Neuro psychology since last 6 years and in forensic technique since last 1½ years. He has himself conducted approximately 15 Polygraph Tests and has been associated with almost 100 Polygraph Tests. He has conducted 16 BEOS Tests and has been associated in conducting of about 12 Neuro Psychology Tests. Therefore his expertise in my opinion, can in no way be challenged and nothing is brought on record in his cross examination to show that the Tests conducted were not proper and requisite procedure was not followed (p.62).

On a happier note, my hot tip for the New Year is to keep your eye on Social Neuroscience - there are several articles on neural correlates of deception in press there which they are saving up for a special issue in 2009.

More soon - part 3 covers the 2008 flurry of interest in deception and magic!

Filed in Applications, Brain scans, Courtroom, Ethics, Mechanical methods, fMRI | Comments (2) »

Research round-up 1: Catching liars

27-Dec-08

I know I’ve really neglected this blog over the past few months (pressure of work and a doctorate to finish). Over the next few posts I’ll share with you all the articles and stories I hoped I’d have time to comment on this year but just didn’t. I’d like to promise to be better in 2009, but for the first half at least I’m going to struggle. Hang in there, eventually I’ll get back to being a better blogger!

The second post in this series deals with research and commentary on new technologies, like fMRI, for lie detection. But first I round up some recent research on deception detection methods which don’t require a $1 million giant magnet or wiring your subject up to a polygraph or brain scanner.

Who can catch a liar?

Let’s start with a bit of back and forth that began with an article by Charles Bond and Bella Depaulo which appeared in Psychological Bulletin this year. Bond and Depaulo’s analysis suggested that individual differences in lie detection ability are vanishingly small. Accuracy in lie detection, argue Bond and Depaulo, is more to do with how good the liar is at lying than individuals are at detecting deceit.

The authors report a meta-analysis of individual differences in detecting deception… Although researchers have suggested that people differ in the ability to detect lies, psychometric analyses of 247 samples reveal that these ability differences are minute. In terms of the percentage of lies detected, measurement-corrected standard deviations in judge ability are less than 1%. In accuracy, judges range no more widely than would be expected by chance, and the best judges are no more accurate than a stochastic mechanism would produce. When judging deception, people differ less in ability than in the inclination to regard others’ statements as truthful. People also differ from one another as lie- and truth-tellers. They vary in the detectability of their lies. Moreover, some people are more credible than others whether lying or truth-telling. Results reveal that the outcome of a deception judgment depends more on the liar’s credibility than any other individual difference.

This is a direct challenge to, in particular, the work of psychologists Maureen O’Sullivan and Paul Ekman, who have been investigating people they claim are extraordinarily accurate at deception detection - people they have dubbed ‘wizards’ of deception detection. So here comes O’Sullivan, right back at Bond and Depaulo:

…[Bond and Depaulo’s] conclusions are based principally on studies with college students as lie detectors and lie scenarios of dubious ecological validity. When motivated professional groups have been shown either high stakes lie scenarios or scenarios involving appropriate liars and truth-tellers, average accuracies significantly above chance have been found for 7 different professional groups reported by 12 researchers in 3 countries. The replicated and predicted performance of extremely accurate individual lie detectors (”truth wizards”) also undermines the claim of no individual differences in lie detection accuracy…

Therese Pigott and Meng-Jia Wu also weigh in highlighting some methodological problems with Bond and Depaulo’s novel meta-analytic technique:

…[Bond and Depaulo] have presented a creative solution to the problem of estimating the standard deviation of deception judgments in the literature. Their article raises methodological questions about how to synthesize a measure of variation across studies. Although the standard deviation presents a number of problems as an effect size measure, more methodological research is needed to address directly the question raised by Bond and DePaulo (p.500).

Of course Bond and Depaulo get a right to reply. They repeat their analyses using the suggestions made by Piggott and Wu, and come to the same conclusion. They also take on O’Sullivan’s criticism and analyse data on experience to see what differences exist between college students and judges with ‘professional experience’. They conclude: “In moderator analyses, we looked separately at inexperienced and experienced judges. The individual differences in lie-detection accuracy were actually smaller among experienced judges than inexperienced ones” (p. 503).

Some empirical research that appears to support Bond and Depaulo’s claim was published online earlier this year, in advance of print in Law and Human Behaviour:

We examined whether individuals’ ability to detect deception remained stable over time. In two sessions, held one week apart, university students viewed video clips of individuals and attempted to differentiate between the lie-tellers and truth-tellers. Overall, participants had difficulty detecting all types of deception. When viewing children answering yes-no questions about a transgression (Experiments 1 and 5), participants’ performance was highly reliable. However, rating adults who provided truthful or fabricated accounts did not produce a significant alternate forms correlation (Experiment 2). This lack of reliability was not due to the types of deceivers (i.e., children versus adults) or interviews (i.e., closed-ended questions versus extended accounts) (Experiment 3). Finally, the type of deceptive scenario (naturalistic vs. experimentally-manipulated) could not account for differences in reliability (Experiment 4). Theoretical and legal implications are discussed.

But just in case you think it’s all over for the ‘wizards’, here’s a study from Gary Bond which suggests it can’t be dismissed quite yet. Out of more than 200 participants (law enforcement officers and college students) G. Bond discovered eleven (all LEOs) who could detect deception at greater than 80% chance, and from these, two potential ‘wizards’ who could maintain this accuracy rate over time. All of which indicates that there may indeed be ‘wizards’, but that they are (as O’Sullican has always recognised) very rare.

…Two experiments sought to (a) identify expert(s) in detection and assess them twice with four tests, and (b) study their detection behavior using eye tracking. Paroled felons produced videotaped statements that were presented to students and law enforcement personnel. Two experts were identified, both female Native American BIA correctional officers. Experts were over 80% accurate in the first assessment, and scored at 90% accuracy in the second assessment. In Signal Detection analyses, experts showed high discrimination, and did not evidence biased responding. They exploited nonverbal cues to make fast, accurate decisions. These highly-accurate individuals can be characterized as experts in deception detection.

How do you catch a liar?

What about the rest of us who aren’t ‘wizards’? Another discussion piece, which appeared earlier this year in a special issue of Criminal Justice and Behaviour focusing on scientific and psuedoscientific practices in law enforcement, was by Aldert Vrij who issued a challenge to law enforcement professionals to focus on verbal rather than non-verbal cues to lie detection:

…deception research has revealed that many verbal cues are more diagnostic cues to deceit than nonverbal cues. Paying attention to nonverbal cues results in being less accurate in truth/lie discrimination, particularly when only visual nonverbal cues are taken into account. Also, paying attention to visual nonverbal cues leads to a stronger lie bias (i.e., indicating that someone is lying). The author recommends a change in police practice and argues that for lie detection purposes it may be better to listen carefully to what suspects say.

Signs of lying

Continuing with their programme of research on the ‘cognitive load’ hypothesis Vrij, Sharon Leal and their colleagues published some psychophysiological evidence that lying does indeed increase mental effort, and that this increased effort can be detected by studying blink rates and skin conductance:

Previous research has shown that suspects in real-life interviews do not display stereotypical signs of nervous behaviours, even though they may be experiencing high detection anxiety. We hypothesised that these suspects may have experienced cognitive load when lying and that this cognitive load reduced their tonic arousal, which suppressed signs of nervousness. We conducted two experiments to test this hypothesis. Tonic electrodermal arousal and blink rate were examined during task-induced (Experiment 1) and deception-induced cognitive load (Experiment 2). Both increased cognitive difficulty and deception resulted in decreased tonic arousal and blinking. This demonstrated for the first time that when lying results in heightened levels of cognitive load, signs of nervousness are decreased. We discuss implications for detecting deception and more wide-ranging phenomena related to emotional behaviour.

And finally in this round-up, an article published in Psychology of Aging this year which tested older adults’ ability to detect deceit and whether any impairments were related to a lesser ability to recognise facial emotion expressed by the lie-teller.

Facial expressions of emotion are key cues to deceit (M. G. Frank & P. Ekman, 1997). Given that the literature on aging has shown an age-related decline in decoding emotions, we investigated (a) whether there are age differences in deceit detection and (b) if so, whether they are related to impairments in emotion recognition. Young and older adults (N = 364) were presented with 20 interviews (crime and opinion topics) and asked to decide whether each interview subject was lying or telling the truth. There were 3 presentation conditions: visual, audio, or audiovisual. In older adults, reduced emotion recognition was related to poor deceit detection in the visual condition for crime interviews only.

Next round-up will cover recent research on new technologies for lie detection!

Filed in Lie-catchers, Signs of cognitive demand, Signs of stress | Comments (4) »

“The more sophisticated the animal, it seems, the more commonplace the con games”

24-Dec-08

New York Times reports on deception in the animal kingdom in A Highly Evolved Propensity for Deceit (22 Dec)

…Deceitful behavior has a long and storied history in the evolution of social life, and the more sophisticated the animal, it seems, the more commonplace the con games, the more cunning their contours.

In a comparative survey of primate behavior, Richard Byrne and Nadia Corp of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland found a direct relationship between sneakiness and brain size. The larger the average volume of a primate species’ neocortex — the newest, “highest” region of the brain — the greater the chance that the monkey or ape would pull a stunt like this one described in The New Scientist: a young baboon being chased by an enraged mother intent on punishment suddenly stopped in midpursuit, stood up and began scanning the horizon intently, an act that conveniently distracted the entire baboon troop into preparing for nonexistent intruders.

There’s much more, including tales of deception by dophins, butterflies, chimps and college students.

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Could brain scans ever be safe evidence?

18-Oct-08

New Scientist (3 Oct) asks: Could brain scans ever be safe evidence?

DONNA insists that she met friends for lunch on the afternoon of 25 January 2008 and did not violate a restraining order against Marie. But Marie told police that Donna broke the terms of the order by driving up to her car while it was stopped at a traffic light, yelling and cursing, and then driving off.

A polygraph test proved unsatisfactory: every time Marie’s name was mentioned Donna’s responses went sky-high. But when Donna approached Cephos of Tyngsboro, Massachusetts, for an fMRI scan, which picks up changes in blood flow and oxygenation in the brain, it was a different story.

“Her results indicated that she was telling the truth about the January 25 incident,” says Steven Laken of Cephos, who maintains that when people are lying, more areas of the brain “light up” than when they are telling the truth (see the scans of Donna’s brain).

Unfortunately the rest of the article is secured to subscribers.

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True and False Memories - a new paper

12-Oct-08

No time to blog properly, but just wanted to draw your attention to a new paper (download via SSRN) on separating true from false memories. Here’s the abstract:

Many people believe that emotional memories (including those that arise in therapy) are particularly likely to represent true events because of their emotional content. But is emotional content a reliable indicator of memory accuracy? The current research assessed the emotional content of participants’ pre-existing (true) and manipulated (false) memories for childhood events. False memories for one of three emotional childhood events were planted using a suggestive manipulation and then compared, a long several subjective dimensions, with other participants’ true memories. On most emotional dimensions (e.g., how emotional was this event for you?), true and false memories were indistinguishable. On a few measures (e.g., intensity of feelings at the time of the event), true memories were more emotional than false memories in the aggregate, yet true and false memories were equally likely to be rated as uniformly emotional. These results suggest that even substantial emotional content may not reliably indicate memory accuracy.

Reference:

Hat tip to the ever-interesting Neuroethics and Law Blog.

Filed in False memories | Comments (1) »

New research: Outsmarting the Liars: The Benefit of Asking Unanticipated Questions

04-Oct-08

In press in the journal Law and Human Behavior, Aldert Vrij and colleagues test a method of questioning that (in lab situations) exposes liars with an up to 80% success rate. Here’s the abstract:

We hypothesised that the responses of pairs of liars would correspond less with each other than would responses of pairs of truth tellers, but only when the responses are given to unanticipated questions. Liars and truth tellers were interviewed individually about having had lunch together in a restaurant. The interviewer asked typical opening questions which we expected the liars to anticipate, followed by questions about spatial and/or temporal information which we expected suspects not to anticipate, and also a request to draw the layout of the restaurant. The results supported the hypothesis, and based on correspondence in responses to the unanticipated questions, up to 80% of liars and truth tellers could be correctly classified, particularly when assessing drawings.

Reference:

At the moment you can download the article for free here (pdf).

Filed in Lie-catchers, Police interviewing | Comments (0) »

New research: Recording lying, cheating, and defiance in an Internet Based Simulated Environment

30-Sep-08

Over in the latest issue of Computers in Human Behavior, Sara Russell and Lawrence James report on research on lying and cheating in a virtual environment. This paper is less about lying and cheating per se, however, and more about a new method for eliciting and recording such behaviour. Why does this matter? The authors explain:

… most psychological research being conducted on the Internet includes simply changing the delivery method of questionnaires from paper-and-pencil to an electronic equivalence. Although this transition will offer advantages over traditional methods and is a step forward, it does not embrace the full capabilities of an Internet environment as a tool. The authors found no reports of Internet research being conducted in which behavior was both elicited and recorded in a pre-defined, controlled Internet environment…

Other than highly complex and expensive software creations of virtual realities such as flight training simulations, research is lacking in utilizing electronically generated environment such as an Internet Based Simulated Environment (IBSE) to mimic experiences that can elicit and record specific pre-defined behaviors of interest to scientists. More specifically, research utilizing such technology to record behavioral manifestations of human personality traits is needed. This need for an electronic environment such as an IBSE will be driven by the inherent difficulty of utilizing direct observation in a real or laboratory setting which often leads researchers to rely on self-reports of behavior. (p.2015)

The researchers asked participants to complete (on paper) the Conditional Reasoning Test of Aggression (CRT-A), a test that measures the tendency to “respond to frustrating situations in an aggressive way” (p.2016) and then directed them to an online quiz that was designed “to initially and continually cause frustrating situations to occur from the start to the end of user experience” (p.2017). These included patronising instructions (”use your keyboard to type your username”), and random ‘errors’ that were not the participant’s fault (“Page cannot be found, you performed an incorrect operation. Click here to retrieve your quiz”). (The authors said that when constructing the test they drew inspiration from their own experiences - I think many of us will identify with the sort of situations they created!)

In response, participants were given the opportunity to lie (about whether or not they had read a detailed set of instructions) or cheat (when a link they clicked took them apparently to an administrator site that allowed them to change their scores). Defiant participants (those who, for instance, truthfully said they had not read the instructions but nevertheless started the quiz) were also logged.

In all, a quarter of the 191 participants in this study cheated, with around 11% defiant and 7% lying, with just under 40% performing at least one of these behaviours. Those who received high scores on the CRT-A were significantly more likely to engage in one or more of these behaviours.

So what? Well, the researchers rightly note that there are problems with this research, the most significant being that it the method cannot measure offline behaviours such as “yelling, cursing, or possibly physical aggression towards the computer” (p2023), and that it does not provide an objective - or even subjective - measure of ‘frustration’ (we all have different thresholds and experience different levels of frustration). But the research does show that it is possible to conduct internet-based research in a more creative and productive way than simply transposing questionnaires from paper to a website. In particular, the study demonstrated a method for getting away from reliance on self-reports and instead easily (and covertly) measuring actual occurrances of particular (potentially socially undesirable) behaviours, which has application in a range of scenarios, not just deception-related.

Reference:

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Facial expressions and verbal cues to deception

27-Sep-08

Hat tip to Neuroethics and Law blog for pointing us towards an article in New Scientist (17 Sept) about lies and spin in the current US Presidential campaign.

NS briefly touches on Paul Ekman’s work on microfacial expressions before devoting more attention to the work of David Skillicorn:

Skillicorn has been watching out for verbal “spin”. He has developed an algorithm that evaluates word usage within the text of a conversation or speech to determine when a person “presents themselves or their content in a way that does not necessarily reflect what they know to be true”.

NS then turns to Branka Zei Pollermann, who combines voice and facial analysis:

“The voice analysis profile for McCain looks very much like someone who is clinically depressed,” says Pollermann… [who] uses auditory analysis software to map seven parameters of a person’s speech, including pitch modulation, volume and fluency, to create a voice profile. She then compares that profile with the speaker’s facial expressions, using as a guide a set of facial expressions mapped out by Ekman, called the Facial Action Coding System, to develop an overall picture of how they express themselves.

This story prompted quite a flurry of comments on the website (some of which are worth reading!).

Skillicorn has posted more about his research and its theoretical basis (James Pennebaker’s LIWC technique - pdf here) at his blog Finding Bad Guys in Data.

Filed in Applications, Facial microexpressions, Non-verbal behaviour, Verbal behaviour | Comments (0) »

Deception in the news

26-Sep-08

I’ve been lax posting on the blogs recently, I know (real life interferes with blogging). Consider this a catch-up post with some of the deception-related issues hitting the news stands over the last few weeks.

Polygraphing sex offenders gains momentum in the UK: A new pilot scheme to polygraph test sex offenders to see if they “are a risk to the public or are breaking the terms of their release from jail”, according to The Times (20 Sept 2008).

Brain fingerprinting in the news again: Brain test could be next polygraph (Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 14 Sept):

A Seattle scientist who has developed an electronic brain test that he says could improve our ability to force criminals to reveal themselves, identify potential terrorists and free those wrongly convicted may have finally broken through the bureaucratic barriers that he believes have served to stifle adoption of the pioneering technique.

“There seems to be a renewed surge of interest in this by the intelligence agencies and the military,” said Larry Farwell, neuroscientist and founder of Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories based at the Seattle Science Foundation.

Not-brain-fingerprinting deception detection brain scan procedure isn’t scientific, according to a well-qualified panel (The Hindu, 8 Sept). India’s Directorate of Forensic Sciences chooses not to accept the panel’s findings:

The Directorate of Forensic Sciences, which comes under the Union Ministry of Home, will not accept the findings of the six-member expert committee that looked into brain mapping and its variant “brain electrical oscillation signature (BEOS) profiling” on the ground that the committee has been dissolved.

The six-member technical peer review committee, headed by National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS) Director D. Nagaraja, started work in May 2007. The panel had concluded that the two procedures were unscientific and had recommended against their use as evidence in court or as an investigative tool.

  • See also: more on “BEOS profiling” in The Times of India (21 July) which claims that “This brain test maps the truth”.

Perhaps the answer can be found with infrared light? New Scientist (22 Sept) reports on a patent application to develop a new type of brain scanning lie detection technology:

Scott Bunce, at Drexel University’s College of Medicine in Philadelphia, thinks a better solution [to the problem of detecting lies] is to send near-infrared light through the scalp and skull into the brain and see how much is reflected back. And he has designed a special headband that does just that. The amount of reflected light is dependent on the levels of oxygen in the blood, which in turn depends on how active the brain is at that point.

This, he says, gives a detailed picture of real-time activity within the brain that can be used to determine whether the subject is lying. The technique is both cheaper and easier to apply than fMRI and gives a higher resolution than an EEG. …Of course, nobody knows whether brain activity can reliably be decoded to reveal deception, but that’s another question.

Filed in Applications, Brain scans, Polygraph | Comments (0) »

Adults easily fooled by children’s false denials

25-Sep-08

University of California - Davis press release (17 August):

Adults are easily fooled when a child denies that an actual event took place, but do somewhat better at detecting when a child makes up information about something that never happened, according to new research from the University of California, Davis….

“The large number of children coming into contact with the legal system – mostly as a result of abuse cases – has motivated intense scientific effort to understand children’s true and false reports,” said UC Davis psychology professor and study author Gail S. Goodman. “The seriousness of abuse charges and the frequency with which children’s testimony provides central prosecutorial evidence makes children’s eyewitness memory abilities important considerations. Arguably even more important, however, are adults’ abilities to evaluate children’s reports.”

In an effort to determine if adults can discern children’s true from false reports, Goodman and her co-investigators asked more than 100 adults to view videotapes of 3- and 5-year-olds being interviewed about “true” and “false” events. For true events, the children either accurately confirmed that the event had occurred or inaccurately denied that it had happened. For “false” events – ones that the children had not experienced – they either truthfully denied having experienced them or falsely reported that they had occurred.

Afterward, the adults were asked to evaluate each child’s veracity. The adults were relatively good at detecting accounts of events that never happened. But the adults were apt to mistakenly believe children’s denials of actual events.

“The findings suggest that adults are better at detecting false reports than they are at detecting false denials,” Goodman said. “While accurately detecting false reports protects innocent people from false allegations, the failure to detect false denials could mean that adults fail to protect children who falsely deny actual victimization.”

Filed in Children, Courtroom | Comments (0) »

Polygraph reasoning applied to spotting terrorists…

23-Sep-08

Remember that the rationale behind the polygraph is that (with an appropriate questioning regime) guilty people are assumed have physiological responses that differ from innocents? Well, the new “anxiety-detecting machines” that the DHS hopes might one day spot terrorists seem to work on the same basis. Here’s the report from USA Today (18 Sept):

A scene from the airport of the future: A man’s pulse races as he walks through a checkpoint. His quickened heart rate and heavier breathing set off an alarm. A machine senses his skin temperature jumping. Screeners move in to question him. Signs of a terrorist? Or simply a passenger nervous about a cross-country flight?

It may seem Orwellian, but on Thursday, the Homeland Security Department showed off an early version of physiological screeners that could spot terrorists. The department’s research division is years from using the machines in an airport or an office building— if they even work at all. But officials believe the idea could transform security by doing a bio scan to spot dangerous people.

Critics doubt such a system can work. The idea, they say, subjects innocent travelers to the intrusion of a medical exam.

According to the news report, there is some effort going into testing the equipment, though if the details in the news report are to be believed it sounds like the research is still at a very early stage:

To pinpoint the physiological reactions that indicate hostile intent, researchers… recruited 140 local people with newspaper and Internet ads seeking testers in a “security study.” Each person receives $150.

On Thursday, subjects walked one by one into a trailer with a makeshift checkpoint. A heat camera measured skin temperature. A motion camera watched for tiny skin movements to measure heart and breathing rates. As a screener questioned each tester, five observers in another trailer looked for sharp jumps on the computerized bands that display the person’s physiological characteristics.

Some subjects were instructed in advance to try to cause a disruption when they got past the checkpoint, and to lie about their intentions when being questioned. Those people’s physiological responses are being used to create a database of reactions that signal someone may be planning an attack. More testing is planned for the next year.

The questioning element does make it sound like what is being developed is a ‘remote’ polygraph.

Hat tip to Crim Prof Blog.

UPDATE: Lots of places picking this up all over the www. New Scientist has a post on the same topic here, and an earlier article on the system here. The Telegraph’s report adds some new information.

Filed in Airline security, Polygraph, Psychophysiology, Signs of stress | Comments (0) »

India’s Novel Use of Brain Scans in Courts Is Debated

21-Sep-08

According to a report in the New York Times (14 Sept), an Indian judge has taken the results a brain scan as “proof that the [murder] suspect’s brain held ‘experiential knowledge’ about the crime that only the killer could possess”, and passed a life sentence.

The Brain Electrical Oscillations Signature test, or BEOS, was developed by Champadi Raman Mukundan, a neuroscientist who formerly ran the clinical psychology department of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences in Bangalore. His system builds on methods developed at American universities by other scientists, including Emanuel Donchin, Lawrence A. Farwell and J. Peter Rosenfeld.

Neuroethics and Law Blog comments, as does Dr Lawrence Farwell (inventor of the controversial ‘Brain Fingerprinting’ technique, which bears a passing resemblence to the BEOS test used in India).

Scary stuff.

Filed in Applications, Brain scans, Courtroom | Comments (2) »

Lie Detector Technology in court - seduced by neuroscience?

19-Sep-08

Jeffrey Bellin from the California Courts of Appeal has a paper forthcoming in Temple Law Review on the legal issues involved in deploying new lie detection technology - specifically fMRI technology - in real-world courtroom settings (hat tip to the Neuroethics and Law blog ).

Bellin examines the ’scientific validity’ requirements and argues that the research has progressed to the point where fMRI evidence in deception detection issues will soon reach the standard required to be admissible under the Daubert criteria. However, Bellin’s key issue with using fMRI evidence in court is not on scientific but on legal grounds: he claims that fMRI evidence would fall foul of the hearsay prohibition. He explains that “The hearsay problem arises because lie detector evidence consists of expert analysis of out-of-court statements offered for their truth (i.e., hearsay) and is consequently inadmissible under Federal Rule of Evidence 801 absent an applicable hearsay exception” (p.102).

I am not a lawyer so can’t really comment on the hearsay issue raised by Bellin, except to say that it’s an interesting observation and not one I’ve heard before. I feel better placed to assess his analysis that fMRI technology is only a small step from reaching the Daubert standard. In this Bellin is - in my judgement - way off-beam. His argument runs something like this:

1. The US Government has poured lots of money into lie detection techologies (Bellin quotes a Time magazine guess-timate of “tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars” - an uncorroborated rumour, not an established fact).

2. fMRI is “the most promising of the emerging new lie detection technologies” (p.106) because “brain activities will be more difficult to suppress than typical stress reactions measured by traditional polygraph examinations, [so] new technologies like fMRI show great promise for the development of scientifically valid lie detectors” (p.106).

3. Thus, “The infusion of money and energy into the science of lie detection coupled with the pace of recent developments in that science suggest that it is only a matter of time before lie detector evidence meets the Daubert threshold for scientific validity.” (p.107).

And the references he provides for this analysis? Steve Silberman’s “Don’t Even Think About Lying” in Wired Magazine from 2006, a piece in Time magazine the same year, entitled “How to Spot a Liar“, by Jeffrey Kluger and Coco Masters. Now both of these articles are fine pieces of journalism, but they hardly constitute good grounds for Bellin’s assertion that fMRI techology is almost ready to be admitted in court. (And if you’re going to use journalistic pieces as references, can I recommend, as a much better source, an excellent article: “Duped: Can brain scans uncover lies?” by Margaret Talbot from The New Yorker [July 2, 2007].)

Let’s just remind ourselves of the Daubert criteria. To paraphrase the comprehensive Wikipedia page, before expert testimony can be entered into evidence it must be relevant to the case at hand, and the expert’s conclusions must be scientific. This latter condition means that a judge deciding on whether to admit expert testimony based on a technique has to address five points:

1. Has the technique been tested in actual field conditions (and not just in a laboratory)?
2. Has the technique been subject to peer review and publication?
3. What is the known or potential rate of error? Is it zero, or low enough to be close to zero?
4. Do standards exist for the control of the technique’s operation?
5. Has the technique been generally accepted within the relevant scientific community?

As far as fMRI for lie detection is concerned I think the answers are:

  1. No, with only a couple of exceptions.
  2. Yes, though there is a long way to go before the technique has been tested in relevant conditions.
  3. In some lab conditions, accuracy rates reach 95%. But what about in real life situations? We don’t have enough research to say.
  4. There are no published or agreed standards for undertaking deception detection fMRI scans.
  5. No, the arguments are still raging!

As an example of 5, one of the crucial arguments is over the interpretation of the results of fMRI experiments (Logothetis, 2008). Mind Hacks had a terrific article a few weeks ago in which they summarise the key issue:

It starts with this simple question: what is fMRI measuring? When we talk about imaging experiments, we usually say it measures ‘brain activity’, but you may be surprised to know that no-one’s really sure what this actually means.

And as Jonah Lehrer points out more recently :

[…T]he critical flaw of such studies is that they neglect the vast interconnectivity of the brain… Because large swaths of the cortex are involved in almost every aspect of cognition - even a mind at rest exhibits widespread neural activity - the typical fMRI image, with its highly localized spots of color, can be deceptive. The technology makes sense of the mind by leaving lots of stuff out - it attempts to sort the “noise” from the “signal” - but sometimes what’s left out is essential to understanding what’s really going on.

Bellin is not alone in perhaps being seduced by the fMRI myth, as two recent studies (McCabe & Castel, 2007; Wiesberg et al., 2008) demonstrate very nicely. McCabe and Castel showed that participants judged news stories as ‘more scientific’ when accompanied by images of brain scans than without, and Weisberg et al.’s participants rated bad explanations of psychological phenomena as more scientifically sound when they included a spurious neuroscience reference. Why are people so beguiled by the blobs in the brain? Here are McCabe and Castel, quoted in the BPS Research Blog:

McCabe and Castel said their results show people have a “natural affinity for reductionistic explanations of cognitive phenomena, such that physical representations of cognitive processes, like brain images, are more satisfying, or more credible, than more abstract representations, like tables or bar graphs.”

References:

See also:

Filed in Courtroom, Mechanical methods | Comments (0) »

Ways for repairing trust breakdowns in one-off online interactions

02-Aug-08

What can you do if you’ve unintentionally offended someone by being or appearing deceptive online? Here’s a recent article on restoring trust online, from the June 2008 issue of International Journal of Human-Computer Studies:

Online offences are generally considered as frequent and intentional acts performed by a member with the aim to deceive others. However, an offence may also be unintentional or exceptional, performed by a benevolent member of the community. This article examines whether a victim’s decrease in trust towards an unintentional or occasional offender can be repaired in an online setting, by designing and evaluating systems to support forgiveness. We study which of three systems enable the victim of a trust breakdown to fairly assess this kind of offender. The three systems are: (1) a reputation system, (2) a reputation system with a built-in apology forum that may display the offender’s apology to the victim and (3) a reputation system with a built-in apology forum that also includes a “forgiveness” component. The “forgiveness” component presents the victim with information that demonstrates the offender’s trustworthiness as judged by the system. We experimentally observe that systems (2) and (3), endorsing apology and supporting forgiveness, allow victims to recover their trust after online offences. An apology from the offender restores the victim’s trust only if the offender cooperates in a future interaction; it does not alleviate the trust breakdown immediately after it occurs. By contrast, the “forgiveness” component restores the victim’s trust directly after the offence and in a subsequent interaction. The applicability of these findings for extending reputation systems is discussed.

Reference:

Filed in Online communication | Comments (0) »

Deceptive Self-Presentation in Online Dating Profiles

05-Jul-08

In the latest issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Catalina Toma and colleagues consider how people lie in online dating profiles, and what they lie about. Here’s the abstract:

This study examines self-presentation in online dating profiles using a novel cross-validation technique for establishing accuracy. Eighty online daters rated the accuracy of their online self-presentation. Information about participants’ physical attributes was then collected (height, weight, and age) and compared with their online profile, revealing that deviations tended to be ubiquitous but small in magnitude. Men lied more about their height, and women lied more about their weight, with participants farther from the mean lying more. Participants’ self-ratings of accuracy were significantly correlated with observed accuracy, suggesting that inaccuracies were intentional rather than self-deceptive. Overall, participants reported being the least accurate about their photographs and the most accurate about their relationship information. Deception patterns suggest that participants strategically balanced the deceptive opportunities presented by online self-presentation (e.g., the editability of profiles) with the social constraints of establishing romantic relationships (e.g., the anticipation of future interaction).

Reference:

See also:

Filed in Applications, Online communication | Comments (0) »

Increasing Cognitive Load to Facilitate Lie Detection: The Benefit of Recalling an Event in Reverse Order

26-Jun-08

Continuing with their research on the ‘cognitive load hypothesis’, Aldert Vrij and colleagues from Portsmouth University report on a technique for facilitating lie detection - telling the story in reverse order. This article appears in the latest issue of Law and Human Behavior, although the study featured extensively in the press a few months ago (see here ).

Here’s the abstract:

In two experiments, we tested the hypotheses that (a) the difference between liars and truth tellers will be greater when interviewees report their stories in reverse order than in chronological order, and (b) instructing interviewees to recall their stories in reverse order will facilitate detecting deception. In Experiment 1, 80 mock suspects told the truth or lied about a staged event and did or did not report their stories in reverse order. The reverse order interviews contained many more cues to deceit than the control interviews. In Experiment 2, 55 police officers watched a selection of the videotaped interviews of Experiment 1 and made veracity judgements. Requesting suspects to convey their stories in reverse order improved police observers’ ability to detect deception and did not result in a response bias.

Reference:

Filed in Police interviewing, Signs of cognitive demand | Comments (0) »