Gah, Twitter update widget broken. Here are the deception-relevant tweets from the last few weeks:
Polygraph and similar:
Detecting concealed information w/ reaction times: Validity & comparison w/ polygraph App Cog Psych 24(7) http://is.gd/fhPMW
Important (rare) study on polygraph w/ UK sex offenders: leads to more admissions; case mgrs perceive increased risk http://is.gd/eoW4Q
fMRI and other brain scanning:
If Brain [...]
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 [...]
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? [...]
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”. [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
A 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 [...]
Stephen 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 [...]
An interesting article in the September 2007 issue of International Journal of Human-Computer Studies explores various aspects of deception in online chat.
The researchers were particularly interested in the use of avatars (“a virtual representation of oneself that other users can see or interact with in a virtual environment”, p.770) in deception. Are people influenced in [...]
If you were a police officer, what sort of interview style would offer you the best chance of detecting whether or not your interviewee was telling lies? Aldert Vrij and his colleagues ran a study to find out:
In Experiment 1, we examined whether three interview styles used by the police, accusatory, information-gathering and behaviour [...]
… according to a press release from the Economic and Social Research Council (7 June):
Shifting uncomfortably in your seat? Stumbling over your words? Can’t hold your questioner’s gaze? Police interviewing strategies place great emphasis on such visual and speech-related cues, although new research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and undertaken by academics [...]
From The Sunday Times, 25 Feb:
People who lie in their e-mails and text messages face being rumbled by new “truth detection” software being developed by researchers.
The academics have analysed tens of thousands of electronic messages and claim to have identified telltale signs that show if a person is being economical with the truth. [...] The [...]
From BBC News Online (10 Jan):
Workers do not like lying to colleagues face-to-face and prefer the anonymity of the phone or e-mail, a study says.
About a third of all work communication involves some kind of deception, the study of North West firms found.
Withholding or distorting information and changing the subject of e-mails to confuse colleagues [...]
Friends Provident (a financial services company) has garnered a fair amount of interest in the media with a pop survey of deception behaviour. Here’s how Reuters (28 Dec) covered it:
Gadgets seen as best way to tell white lies
More than four out of five people admit to telling little white lies at least once a [...]
…according to a recent article on Forbes.com (3 Nov):
In business, politics and romance, it would be nice to know when we’re being lied to. Unfortunately humans aren’t very good at detecting lies. Our natural tendency is to trust others, and for day-to-day, low-stakes interactions, that makes sense. We save time and energy by taking statements [...]
The latest issue of the International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law carries an article by Susan H. Adams and John P. Jarvis, both from the Federal Bureau of Investigation Academy at Quantico, reporting the results of a study of veracity and deception in written statements to the police.
Various different types of statement analysis [...]
The latest issue of Psychology, Crime and Law features an article by Aldert Vrij and Sam Mann from Portsmouth University (UK) on Criteria-Based Content Analysis
Here’s the abstract:
Criteria-Based Content Analysis (CBCA) is a tool to assess the veracity of written statements, and is used as evidence in criminal courts in several countries in the world. CBCA [...]
Ubiquitous British psychologist Richard Wiseman gave a talk earlier this month in Kuala Lumpur, organised by the British Council, entitled “How to Catch a Liar”, reports Malaysian news site Sun2Surf.com (10 July).
Although lying is actually difficult to do convincingly, we’ve evolved to lie because it is an effective strategy for human survival, he said. [...] [...]
In the latest edition of Applied Cognitive Psychology, Siegfried Sporer and Barbara Schwandt present a meta-analysis of paraverbal cues to deception. The article also serves as a pretty good critique of previous deception studies. As the authors explain, meaningful meta-analyses are not as easy to do as they perhaps should be, because of [...]
A Comparison of Deception Behavior in Dyad and Triadic Group Decision Making in Synchronous Computer-Mediated Communication
Lina Zhou and Dongsong Zhang
Published in the April 06 issue of Small Group Reseach 27(2)
Here’s an extract from the abstract:
This study is the first attempt to investigate whether deceivers behave differently in dyads and triadic groups in synchronous computer-mediated [...]
