Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Deception Detection

Deception refers to the successful or unsuccessful deliberate attempt, without forewarning, to create in another a belief that the communicator considers to be false. This definition emphasizes that deception is an intentional, strategic act and does not necessarily require the use of words. Although many consider lying to include only outright fabrications, deception can take many forms, including concealment, omissions, exaggerations, half-truths, misdirection, and even playings such as tricking or bluffing. Telling literal truths that are designed to mislead should be considered deception, as well. This entry explores how humans detect deception and the theories that have been posited to explain deception detection. The considerable research on deception and deception detection, along with practical concerns about deception in everyday life, demonstrates the significance of this topic to communication theory.

Studies about Deception Detection

The study of deception detection has a long history. Questions about the morality of deception and how to detect it have been explored by Aristotle, St. Augustine, Aquinas, Kant, Machiavelli, Darwin, and Freud, to name just a few. Despite recent developments in technology used to detect deception, such as polygraphs, MRIs, and voice stress analyzers, most deception detection is done by humans. In the U.S. legal system, as well as in others worldwide, jurors are the sole determinant of honesty and believability of witnesses and the accused. They rely on the person's demeanor and manner of testifying to distinguish between truth and falsehood. Unfortunately, humans lack a high degree of accuracy in their deception detection abilities, rarely perform better than chance when attempting to distinguish lies from truth in research studies, and do even worse when the lie is against the self-interest of the deceiver (such as false confessions). Even deception experts such as law enforcement personnel, judges, psychiatrists, job interviewers, and auditors do not appear to detect deception with greater accuracy than nonexperts.

In order to improve accuracy, many studies have attempted to identify specific cues that differentiate liars from truth-tellers. Specific nonverbal cues, such as a lack of eye contact or foot tapping, are often thought to be associated with deception; however, few cues are reliable indicators of deception, and many behaviors show no discernible links, or only weak links, to deceit. In reality, people often do not discover lies for days, weeks, or even months afterward, and deception is typically revealed by a third party, making nonverbal cues leaked during the deception quite irrelevant. Verbal cues are only slightly more reliable, and research has suggested that deceivers are less forthcoming than those who tell the truth; furthermore, their lies are less plausible, less likely to be structured in a logical, sensible way, and more likely to be internally discrepant or to convey ambivalence than truthful statements. However, given the inconsistency of these findings in the research literature, the best method of deception detection is most likely to be verification of the information presented in a message.

Theories about Deception Detection

Through a series of lectures delivered at Harvard in 1967, Paul Grice presented a theory of language use that has come to be known as his theory of conversational implicature. Among others, one of his principles is the quality maxim—that speakers should try to make their contributions true, refraining from saying anything they know to be false or for which they have inadequate grounds for belief. This maxim, like Grice's other maxims, is an assumption that communicators must make in order to perceive others as cooperative in a conversation. Even deliberate and obvious violations of this maxim, such as irony, require communicators to use mechanisms called implicatures to indicate that the speaker is being truthful and therefore cooperative.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution