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4 Aug 04 @ 9:31 am

Detecting Deception

Science News highlights the current research on detecting deception:

“How can you tell when people are lying?” From Botswana to Belgium, the number-one answer was the same: Liars avert their gaze.

“This is . . . the most prevalent stereotype about deception in the world,” says Charles Bond of Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, who led the research project. And yet gaze aversion, like other commonly held stereotypes about liars, isn’t correlated with lying at all, studies have shown.

…

By studying large groups of participants, researchers have identified certain general behaviors that liars are more likely to exhibit than are people telling the truth. Fibbers tend to move their arms, hands, and fingers less and blink less than people telling the truth do, and liars’ voices can become more tense or high-pitched. The extra effort needed to remember what they’ve already said and to keep their stories consistent may cause liars to restrain their movements and fill their speech with pauses. People shading the truth tend to make fewer speech errors than truth tellers do, and they rarely backtrack to fill in forgotten or incorrect details.

Read the whole thing.

posted in category(s): Points of Interest