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Deception Detection Accuracy

Deception detection accuracy, along with nonverbal cues, has been a mainstay of deception research in the social sciences. More than 200 deception detection experiments have been conducted to assess how accurate people are at distinguishing truthful communications from lies. The conclusion from this research is that people are typically only slightly better than chance at distinguishing truths from lies. On average, people are 54 percent accurate, compared with 50 percent accuracy expected by pure chance. People are better than chance at distinguishing truths from lies, but they are not much better than chance.

The typical deception detection experiment exposes research subjects to a series of truths and lies. Subjects are asked to make judgments about which are honest and which are lies. Deception detection accuracy is calculated as the number of correct judgments divided by the total number of judgments that the subject has made. Accuracy is typically reported as a percentage of the correct judgments averaged across both truths and lies.

Research on deception detection accuracy has been summarized in meta-analysis, showing that the findings from experiments have been remarkably consistent across studies and over time. The slightly better-than-chance outcome is reliable and consistent. Almost all studies report accuracy within 10 percentage points of this across-study average. Further, more discrepant results tend to be from small-scale studies.

Deception detection experiments typically find that people are truth biased. Truth bias is the tendency to believe a message, that is, to judge that it was honest, regardless of whether or not it is actually honest or deceptive. In experiments in which research subjects judge an equal number of truths and lies, 57 percent of messages are judged as honest. As a consequence, accuracy is typically higher for truths than for lies. Across studies, accuracy for truths is 61 percent, compared with 47 percent for lies. This difference is referred to as the “veracity effect.”

Variables and Accuracy

A number of variables have been shown to have relatively little impact on detection accuracy. For example, it does not seem to matter who does the judging. College students perform similarly to police officers and people of other professions. Age, biological sex, and intelligence have little effect on deception detection accuracy. It also seems to matter little over which media the truths or lies are communicated. The slightly better-than-chance accuracy finding appears to hold for face-to-face communication, videotaped communication such as television, audio-only communication such as the telephone, and text-based communication such as letters, e-mail, and texting.

It also matters little how motivated the senders are, or whether or not the judge knows or has a relational history with the sender. Judge suspicion, asking probing questions, and nonverbal training do not appear to substantially affect accuracy. Instead, the slightly better-than-chance finding has been found to hold up, regardless of these other factors that might be expected to affect accuracy.

Generally, who the sender is affects accuracy more than the identity of who is judging. Some people are better liars than others. While most people lie well most of time, there are some people who are transparent liars.

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