Detection of Deception in Adults

How to Study Deception Detection

To gain insight into deception, psychologists and other researchers conduct experiments. They instruct some people either to lie or to tell the truth and instruct others to judge the veracity of the resulting statements. Those who lie or tell the truth in these experiments are referred to as senders, the truthful and deceptive statements as messages, and those who judge the messages as receivers. In this entry, the accuracy of these receivers is at focus, more specifically the accuracy of human judgments made without any specialized tools or aids in detecting deception on the basis of verbal content and the liar's behavior. The receivers are typically given videotaped or audiotaped statements, and ordinarily, half the messages a receiver encounters are truths and half are lies; hence, the chance level of correct judgments a receiver could expect is 50%. Lie detection ability is most often expressed as percent correct, but other indices of deception detection accuracy, such as standardized differences between truth and lie detection accuracy, are also calculated.

The standard lie detection experiment contains several factors that have been examined through experimental manipulation. For example, the senders of the message can be adults, adolescents, or children, or they can be persons with or without special skills at lying, such as experienced criminals. Furthermore, the content of the lies (and truths) have been varied: People have lied about their personal feelings, about their committing of transgressions such as adultery or sanctioned crimes, or in placing the blame on someone other than the culprit. Lie detection through different media has also been tested: Are people better lie detectors when having access to video or audio or written transcripts? In addition, characteristics of the receivers have been varied: Are certain groups of people, such as police officers, better lie detectors? These are only some of the factors that have been scientifically examined.

...