I know, I’ve been away a long time, finishing off my doctorate and working hard, so no time for blogging. The doctorate is finally out of the way but I still don’t have masses of spare time. When I can I’ll update these blogs with studies that catch my eye, though I don’t think I’ll [...]
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 [...]
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: [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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”. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
In the latest issue of Journal of Management Inquiry, Carl Keane from Queen’s University, Canada considers organisational secrets. Here’s the abstract:
Organizational scholars, and most social scientists for that matter, have rarely examined the use of the secret in controlling organizational behavior. On one hand, organizational secrets are necessary for the survival of the organization; [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
The 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 [...]
A 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 [...]
