Deception detection

What is deception

Deception is the deliberate intention to mislead without giving prior notification of that intention - Dr. Paul Ekman

Types of deception

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HISTORY & DECEPTION MYTHS

• Everybody lies and on average twice daily DePaulo et al 1996)

• Humans deceive to maintain social desirability (Zuckernam et al, 1981)

• People lie for self-oriented reasons (Ekman,2009)

Myths:

The eyes are the windows to deception

Itchy nose theory

liars fidget and squirm

Liars use absolute statements & qualifiers

Liars drop words

DECEPTION STEREOTYPES

Deception Cue = behaviour believed to indicate deception is taking place

Stereotype = cognitive categorization used by individuals to quickly process information about other and is formed through schematic processing (Maminto & Trolier, 1986).

Deception Stereotypes are created in two ways from a social cognitive perspective:

1)Information is gathered and processed abc people we have caught in lies

2)Tacit or explicit social learning (media or direct teaching)

Reality = People deceive in their own unique ways (Buller & Burgoon, 1996) and there are no universally reliable deception cues (DePaulo et al., 2003)

Interpersonal Deception Theory (IDT)

• deception is a progression of interactive communication between at least two people: the liar and the target. IDT assumes lying is cognitively taxing (Buller & Burgoon,
  1996).

• A deceiver's success is moderated by their social skills (Burgoon et al., 1999)

• Deceivers are aware of deception stereotypes and will use Countermeasures to avoid detection

• Stakes and consequences matter (Vrij & Mann, 2001; Porter & ten Brinke, 2008)

• DECEPTION DETECTION: WHAT DO WE KNOW?

• No reliable cues to deceit (DePaulo et al., 2003)

• Human judges no better than chance - lacking accuracy for strangers

• Physiological responses are NOT indicative of deception (Vrij, 2015)

•Applying cognitiveely taxing techniques may help amplify cues (Vrij et al 2008)

some promising techniques for analysing verbal behaviour and linguistics (Vrij et al 2011)

• High profile topic since 9-11 and 'War on Terror' - however, the field has not advanced much regarding accuracy and reliability (Meijer et al., 2016)

Emotional Leakage Theory (Ekman
& Friesen, 1969)

• Microexpression = brief involuntary expressions of the face (Ekman, 2002)

• Facial expressions can be subdued but not eliminated (Hurley & Frank, 2011)

• Deception has no specific emotion

• Popular with security organisations

Physiological Responses

Skin conductance

Heat rate & Blood presure

ERP (Event Related Potential)

• P300 - associated with decision-making

• Used with GKT - 85% of liars discriminated from truth-tellers (Lui & Rosenfeld, 2008)

FMRI (BOLD)

• Can discriminate truth and lies to some degree (Abe et al., 2008)

• Neural activity varies extensively between subjects (Christ et al., 2009).

• No one area of the brain linked to deception (Monteleone et al., 2009)

COGNITIVE LOAD

• Inhibition, recall, encoding and attention all load on the same factor of Working memory

• Short Term Memory is limited in the number of simultaneous elements it can contain

• Liars attempt to plan their deception (Hartwig et al., 2007)

• Strategic Interviewing may be the key (Vrij et al., 2008)

Intrinsic cognitive load

complexity of new information

Simplify

Extraneous cognitive load

Distracts working memory from processing new information

Reduce

Germane cognitive load

Deep processing of new information by integrating it with previous learning

Maximise

Amplify cues using Cognitive Load

• Reverse order (Vrij et al., 2008)

• Eye Contact (Mann et al., 2010)

• SUE Technique (Hartwig et al., 2006)

• Unanticipated question (Tekin et al.,

2015)

Establishing base-line behaviour

Guilt presumption

• You will see what you are looking for

• You will get what you expect

Bias

In the Interview:

• Self-fulfilling prophecy

• Expectancy confirmation

• Guilt-presumption

• Confession seeking

issues with science - Construct validity

Are we actually measuring deception or something else?

Issues with science - content variability

What constitutes deception? Does it include,.
Omissions, half-truths, fabrications, and embedded lies? Failure to isolate deception cues due to flawed methods

Issues with science - predictive validity

• There is no way to predict when deception will take place, let alone if it has.

Issues with science - concurrent validity

• Not always good at distinguishing liars from truth-tellers

Issues with science - convergent validity

• Inconsistent methodologies and paradigms.
  Failed generalisability due to context specificity

Issues with science - discriminant validity

• High correlation with physiological measurements (in some samples) despite no theoretically sound underpinning to suggest such a correlation should exist (NRC, 2003)