Cross cultural verbal cues to deception: truth and lies in first and second language forensic interview contexts

Introduction

The verbal deception literature is largely based upon North American and Western European monolingual English speaker interactions. This paper extends this literature by comparing the verbal behaviors of 88 south Asian bilinguals, conversing in either first (Hindi) or second (English) languages, and 48 British monolinguals conversing in English.

Methods

All participated in a live event following which they were interviewed having been incentivized to be either deceptive or truthful. Event details, complications, verifiable sources, and plausibility ratings were analyzed as a function of veracity, language and culture.

Results

Main effects revealed cross cultural similarities in both first and second language interviews whereby all liar's verbal responses were impoverished and rated as less plausible than truthtellers. However, a series of cross-cultural interactions emerged whereby bi-lingual South Asian truthtellers and liars interviewed in first and second languages exhibited varying patterns of verbal behaviors, differences that have the potential to trigger erroneous assessments in practice.

Discussion

Despite limitations, including concerns centered on the reductionary nature of deception research, our results highlight that while cultural context is important, impoverished, simple verbal accounts should trigger a 'red flag' for further attention irrespective of culture or interview language, since the cognitive load typically associated with formulating a deceptive account apparently emerges in a broadly similar manner.

Detecting ulterior motives from verbal cues in group deliberations

Introduction

Forensic interviewing entails practitioners interviewing suspects to secure valid information and elicit confessions. Such interviews are often conducted in police stations but may also occur in field settings such as border crossings, security checkpoints, bus terminals, and sports venues. Because these real-world interviews often lack experimental control and ground truth, this investigation explored whether results of non-forensic interviews generalize to forensic ones.

Methods

Organizational espionage was simulated to determine (1) what verbal signals distinguish truth from deception, (2) whether deception in groups aligns with deception in dyads, and (3) whether non-forensic venues can be generalized to forensic ones. Engaging in a mock hiring deliberation, participants (4-5 strangers) reviewed and discussed resumes of potential candidates. Surreptitiously, two group members assigned the role of "organizational spies" attempted to persuade the group to hire an inferior candidate. Each group member presented notes from an interview of "their" candidate, followed by a discussion of all candidates. Spies were to use any means possible, including deception, to persuade others to select their candidate. A financial incentive was offered for having one's candidate chosen. The interview reports and discussions were transcribed and analyzed with SPLICE, an automated text analysis program.

Results

Deceivers were perceived as less trustworthy than truth-tellers, especially when the naïve players won but overall, deceivers were difficult for non-spies to detect even though they were seen as less trustworthy than the naïve participants. Deceivers' language was more complex and exhibited an "echoing" strategy of repeating others' opinions. This collusion evolved naturally, without pre-planning. No other verbal differences were evident, which suggests that the difference between spies and non-spies was subtle and difficult for truth-tellers to spot.

Discussion

Whether deception can be successfully detected hinges on a variety of factors including the deceiver's skill to disguise and the detector's ability to sense and process information. Furthermore, the group dynamics and communication context subtly moderate how deception manifests and influence the accuracy of detecting ulterior motives. Our future investigations could encompass non-verbal communication channels and verbal patterns rooted in content, thereby providing a more comprehensive understanding of deception detection.

Power and lie detection

Social power undermines focus on others and increases reliance on stereotype-consistent information. Thus, power may enhance focus on stereotypical cues to deception, thereby decreasing lie detection accuracy. In three studies, we tested whether having power affects lie detection accuracy. Participants (overall N = 502) were asked to identify truthful and lying candidates (N = 12) during mock job interviews. Study 1 was a field experiment involving employees who held managerial and non-managerial positions (N = 88). In the following laboratory experiments, we manipulated power and asked participants to imagine themselves as managers (Study 2, N = 214) or provided them with control over resources and the ability to reward others (Study 3, N = 200). In Studies 2 and 3, we additionally manipulated the method of lie detection (direct vs. indirect). In contrast to the original hypotheses, we found that power led to increased veracity assessment accuracy. Having power over others enhances the accuracy of one’s veracity assessment, although this increase is small and limited to lie detection (Study 1) or direct judgments (Studies 2 & 3). Together, power affects the processing of social information and what aspects of this information are taken into account.

Brain Regions Activity During a Deceitful Monetary Game: An fMRI Study

: Finding neural correlates underlying deception may have implementations in judicial, security, and financial settings. Telling a successful lie may activate different brain regions associated with risk evaluation, subsequent reward/punishment possibility, decision-making, and theory of mind (ToM). Many other protocols have been developed to study individuals who proceed with deception under instructed laboratory conditions. However, no protocol has practiced lying in a real-life environment. We performed a functional MRI using a 3Tesla machine on 31 healthy individuals to detect the participants who successfully lie in a previously-designed game to earn or lose the monetary reward. The results revealed that lying results in an augmented activity in the right dorsolateral and right dorsomedial prefrontal cortices, the right inferior parietal lobule, bilateral inferior frontal gyri, and right anterior cingulate cortex. The findings would contribute to forensic practices regarding the detection of a deliberate lie. They may also have implications for guilt detection, social cognition, and the societal notions of responsibility.

Unraveling the Misconception About Deception and Nervous Behavior

In this article, we attempt to unravel the misconception about deception and nervous behavior. First we will cite research demonstrating that observers believe lie tellers display more nervous behaviors than truth tellers; that observers pay attention to nervous behaviors when they attempt to detect deception; and that lie tellers actually feel more nervous than truth tellers. This is all in alignment with a lie detection approach based on spotting nervous behaviors. We then will argue that the next, vital, step is missing: Research has found that lie tellers generally do not display more than truth tellers the nervous behaviors laypersons and professionals appear to focus on. If observers pay attention to nervous behaviors but lie tellers do not come across as being nervous, lie detection performance is expected to be poor. Research has supported this claim. We finally discuss ideas for research into lie detection based on non-verbal behaviors.

Police accuracy in truth/lie detection when judging baseline interviews

Research has shown that a comparable truth baseline (CTB) approach elicits more cues to deception and results in higher accuracy rates than a small talk baseline. Past research focused on laypeople's accuracy rates. We examined whether the CTB also has a positive effect on law enforcement personnel accuracy. In this study, 95 police officers judged 10 interviews, whereby half of the senders told the truth, and the other half lied about a mock undercover mission. Half of the interviews included only questioning about the event under investigation, whereas the other half also included questioning aimed at creating a CTB. Total and truth accuracy did not differ, but observers who watched interviews with a CTB obtained higher lie detection accuracy rates than those who watched interviews without the baseline questioning. Signal detection analyses showed that this effect could be attributed to a decreased response bias in the CTB condition.

Observers' performance at evaluating truthfulness when provided with comparable truth or small talk baselines

Research has shown that the comparable truth baseline technique outperforms the small talk with respect to the elicitation of cues to deception. However, their impact on observers' accuracy has not been evaluated yet. In this experiment, participants (N = 74) watched ten interviews where senders either lied or told the truth about a set of tasks. Half of the interviews were conducted with a comparable truth baseline, the other half with a small talk baseline. As predicted, results showed that observers in the comparable truth baseline condition outperformed participants in the small talk baseline condition in terms of total accuracy rates. The article sheds light on the impact of the two baseline techniques in distinguishing truth-tellers from liars and discourages the use of a small talk baseline. It also provides insights for future studies.

Detecting Lies via a Theme-Selection Strategy

Most of deception research has focused on past events that were either completely truthful or a complete fabrication. However, people often tell a mixture of truths and lies. This could enable investigators to make within-subjects comparisons between different themes discussed in one interview, which we examined in the current experiment. Seventy-three participants took part in the experiment and were asked to either tell the truth about two themes, or to tell the truth about one theme and lie about the second theme in a HUMINT setting. Results showed that examining the differences in the amount of detail provided by the interviewees for each theme- obtained through a Theme-Selection strategy (a within-subjects measure)- yielded stronger results than examining differences between truth tellers and liars based on the entire interview without accounting for themes (between-subjects measure). The present study therefore highlighted the effectiveness of within-subjects measurements to both discriminate truth tellers from liars and to discover which section of a statement is false.

The Effect of Senders’ Perceived Ability to Control Emotion on Raters’ Deception Judgments

Abstract. The present studies aimed to examine whether the raters’ impressions of the senders’ ability to control emotion could influence the raters’ judgments of deceit and to explore the underlying mechanism. It was proposed that perceived emotional control ability would influence individuals’ deception judgments either by itself or by interacting with actual lie-related behaviors. Two experiments were conducted to examine our hypotheses. The results revealed that if participants were informed that the sender had a higher emotional control ability, they would judge the sender as less truthful in an actual deception judgment task (Study 1). It was also found that perceived emotional control ability did interact with actual lie-related behaviors: participants judged behaviors violating expectations or social norms as more deceptive (Study 2).

Strategic Interviewing to Detect Deception: Cues to Deception across Repeated Interviews

Previous deception research on repeated interviews found that liars are not less consistent than truth tellers, presumably because liars use a “repeat strategy” to be consistent across interviews. The goal of this study was to design an interview procedure to overcome this strategy. Innocent participants (truth tellers) and guilty participants (liars) had to convince an interviewer that they had performed several innocent activities rather than committing a mock crime. The interview focused on the innocent activities (alibi), contained specific central and peripheral questions, and was repeated after 1 week without forewarning. Cognitive load was increased by asking participants to reply quickly. The liars’ answers in replying to both central and peripheral questions were significantly less accurate, less consistent, and more evasive than the truth tellers’ answers. Logistic regression analyses yielded classification rates ranging from around 70% (with consistency as the predictor variable), 85% (with evasive answers as the predictor variable), to over 90% (with an improved measure of consistency that incorporated evasive answers as the predictor variable, as well as with response accuracy as the predictor variable). These classification rates were higher than the interviewers’ accuracy rate (54%).

Is This Testimony Truthful, Fabricated, or Based on False Memory?

In 1989, Steller and Köhnken presented a systematic compilation of content characteristics for distinguishing between truthful and fabricated testimonies (criteria-based content analysis – CBCA) designed to be applied within a more comprehensive overall diagnostic procedure known as statement validity assessment (SVA; Steller, 1989 ). The subsequent 25 years have seen a marked increase in knowledge about the distinction between experience-based and non-experience-based statements. This supports the SVA approach and permits a better explanation of the underlying processes. The rationale of CBCA is that a true statement differs in content quality from a fabricated account because (a) a truth teller can draw on an episodic autobiographical representation containing a multitude of details, whereas a liar has to relate to scripts containing only general details of an event; and (b) a liar is busier with strategic self-presentation than a truth teller. The present article proposes a modified model of content characteristics that pays greater attention than before to these underlying processes. SVA takes into account that content quality is influenced not only by the veracity of a statement but also by other (personal and contextual) variables that need to be considered in the individual credibility assessment. Theoretical analyses and empirical research do not indicate comparable qualitative differences between true statements and those based on false memories. Witnesses giving testimony based on false memories do not fabricate false statements actively, and they make no effort to conceal a deception; they are not deceiving but mistaken. In these cases, a noncritical application of content criteria can lead to false results. To examine the hypothesis that a statement is based on a false memory, it is necessary to focus on the way in which the statement has emerged and evolved.