LIE DETECTION

Lie Detection



Lie Detection

Introduction

Much recent psychological research has centered on our capability to identify deception and lies. The ability to detect lies can be beneficial to many organizations including the criminal justice system, the police and even potential employers. Recent studies have endeavoured to show what characteristics are prevalent when we tell lies and what skills are necessary to detect them. There are many psychological processes that take place when we aim to deceive; our body language may change, our speech may alter and we may experience physiological differences. Most of us are already aware of the technological benefits of the polygraph test which measures our physiological changes, but can our verbal and nonverbal signals of deception be detected?

The research conducted by Ekman and O'Sullivan (1991) evaluates lie detecting abilities from a range of participants who work within the criminal justice system or intelligence services, in other words, people who would encounter lies in a professional capacity or "professional lie catchers".

What is it to lie?

As generally understood, lying requires conscious intent to deceive on the part of the liar. This definition requires clarification. While some, such as Thomas Aquinas, have written that any communication of false information is a lie regardless of whether the liar actually knows that the information is false (Coon, 1992), the majority of writers on the topic include knowing intent as a prerequisite for lying. According to Kleinmuntz (1984), deception, or more specifically lying, is only possible if the deceiver believes a message to be false (Bunn, 2007). The converse situation is not as clearly described. Is a person lying if they impart information that they genuinely think is false, even if it turns out to be true? Using the definition above, this would not be considered lying because the person imparting the information is not trying to deceive by claiming that the information is true. Whether the information is true or not, the intent of a liar must be to deliver information that they do not believe to be true in a way that is intended to convince the receiver that it is true. For example, a four-year-old who describes a dream as real is not lying because in their cognitive domain, the events are real. Therefore, I will be using conscious intent to convince as true information believed to be false as the requirement for the action of lying.

The fairly narrow definition of lying described above has been written about most specifically in humans. However, broader forms of deception occur across the spectrum of living species (for the purposes of this paper, lying will be presumed to occur only definitively in humans). Sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers and the like have categorized this deception according to the cognitive function involved. One major classification describes four levels of deception in the plant and animal kingdoms on a spectrum of increasing intent and range of deceptive maneuvers(Ash, 1988). The more “advanced” species are able to more easily move between and among the different forms of ...