Vrij, Aldert

Aldert Vrij is an internationally recognized expert in deception. He is a Dutch researcher, author, and since 2000, professor of applied social psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom (UK). He has written more than 350 publications, articles, and book chapters describing his research into nonverbal, verbal, and neurophysiological cues to deception and lie detection. Vrij's latest book, Detecting Lies and Deceit: Pitfalls and Opportunities (2008), is a comprehensive summary of deception detection research.

In 1991, Vrij earned his Ph.D. at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Four years later, he joined the Psychology Department at the University of Portsmouth and became a senior lecturer before being promoted to a professorship. Since his arrival at Portsmouth, he has coordinated the Psychology and Law Unit and the Social Psychology Unit at the university. He supervises dissertations at the undergraduate level, and he has supervised more than 20 Ph.D. students at the postgraduate level. His research is funded by the UK government, the U.S. government, and the British Academy.

Vrij is the editor of Legal and Criminological Psychology and serves on the editorial boards of several journals, including Law and Human Behavior, Human Communication Research, Applied Cognitive Psychology, and Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling. He is a member of the Board of Governors of the Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. In addition to holding academic responsibilities, Vrij consults with police forces, presents workshops on lie detection to practitioners and scholars, and serves as an expert witness in court. He is the point of contact for the European consortium of Psychological Research on Deception Detection (E-PRODD).

Vrij is recognized for his many contributions to the field of deception and the detection of lies. Most notably, his work has found only a weak association between nonverbal behaviors and deception, an increased need for understanding verbal communication and deception, and a call for additional empirical proof for lie detection tools that produce advances in detection accuracy. He has also called for more research that examines deception in real-world contexts. Unlike many other researchers, Vrij's experiments often involve collecting interview data from suspects in realistic high-stake situations.

Vrij has articulated a frequently cited definition of deception: “a successful or unsuccessful deliberate attempt, without forewarning, to create in another a belief which the communicator considers to be untrue.” His definition differs from others because it does not imply that unconsciously misleading other people should be classified as [Page 923]deception. The definition also emphasizes that attempts to lie that are unsuccessful should still be classified as deception. Vrij has also categorized several motivations for why people lie: (1) for one's own benefit (self-oriented) or for the benefit of others (other-oriented), (2) to gain advantage or to avoid costs, and (3) for materialistic reasons or for psychological reasons.

As a pioneer in the field of nonverbal behavior and deception, Vrij argues that a liar's behavior depends on factors such as interpersonal differences, age, personality traits, and idiosyncratic patterns. Vrij's perspective emphasizes that there is no single nonverbal behavior that is uniquely associated with lying. In a 2000 experiment, he found that at least 70 percent of truths and lies could be correctly classified if a combination of nonverbal cues was examined, rather than examining these clues individually. Identifying nonverbal cues to deceit is a two-step approach, including the recognition of behavior change and interpreting if such changes are meaningful.

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