Mining Bodily Cues to Deception

A significant body of research has investigated potential correlates of deception and bodily behavior. The vast majority of these studies consider discrete, subjectively coded bodily movements such as specific hand or head gestures. Such studies fail to consider quantitative aspects of body movement such as the precise movement direction, magnitude and timing. In this paper, we employ an innovative data mining approach to systematically study bodily correlates of deception. We re-analyze motion capture data from a previously published deception study, and experiment with different data coding options. We report how deception detection rates are affected by variables such as body part, the coding of the pose and movement, the length of the observation, and the amount of measurement noise. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of a data mining approach, with detection rates above 65%, significantly outperforming human judgement (52.80%). Owing to the systematic analysis, our analyses allow for an understanding of the importance of various coding factor. Moreover, we can reconcile seemingly discrepant findings in previous research. Our approach highlights the merits of data-driven research to support the validation and development of deception theory.</p

Mining Bodily Cues to Deception

A significant body of research has investigated potential correlates of deception and bodily behavior. The vast majority of these studies consider discrete, subjectively coded bodily movements such as specific hand or head gestures. Such studies fail to consider quantitative aspects of body movement such as the precise movement direction, magnitude and timing. In this paper, we employ an innovative data mining approach to systematically study bodily correlates of deception. We re-analyze motion capture data from a previously published deception study, and experiment with different data coding options. We report how deception detection rates are affected by variables such as body part, the coding of the pose and movement, the length of the observation, and the amount of measurement noise. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of a data mining approach, with detection rates above 65%, significantly outperforming human judgement (52.80%). Owing to the systematic analysis, our analyses allow for an understanding of the importance of various coding factor. Moreover, we can reconcile seemingly discrepant findings in previous research. Our approach highlights the merits of data-driven research to support the validation and development of deception theory.</p

Instructing jurors on detecting deception: is the jury still out?

This thesis established the importance of understanding deception in courtrooms, demonstrating that expert evidence can achieve immediate and long-term benefits by correcting jurors&rsquo; biases and misconceptions around flawed stereotypes of deception. Improvements found indicate that psychological evidence can protect jurors from relying on misplaced common sense when assessing witness credibility

Deception and communication media

Much research investigating deception and its detection has focused upon face-to-face communication, but over recent years the variety and extent of new communication media has changed the contexts in which deception might take place. Although work has attempted to characterise communication media, a much smaller body of research exists which has investigated the frequency with which people lie with different media and the detection of deceit under different communication media conditions. Through questionnaires and experimental studies, this work investigated the perceptions that both deceivers (senders) and those attempting to identify lies (receivers) have about communication media and how this relates to their observed behaviour. Results from questionnaire studies suggested that both the characteristics of deception and media influence people's perceived discomfort and believability when lying and the media choices they might make if they are planning to deceive. Some important factors appeared to be the seriousness of the deception, who senders are lying to, and the general frequency with which they use particular means to communicate. Communication media were judged to be similar and dissimilar to each other on a range of characteristics which may impact their appropriateness for deception and lie detection. There was evidence that media used at low frequency in daily life may be more likely to be chosen for deception. In laboratory studies, senders were found to lie more frequently using audio-only media compared to audio-video. There was evidence from experimental studies that detection of deceit was more successful when communication was audio only compared to audio-video. There was little consistent evidence that judgement biases varied between media conditions, but a truth bias was identified in experimental studies. No evidence was identified that interactivity between senders and receivers significantly influenced response biases or lie detection accuracy. A small corpus of messages recorded under audio-video and audio-only conditions were selected for their detectability or believability from two senders, and presented in modified formats to receivers. Stimuli had video removed or introduced, and were presented as audio-only, audio-video, text-only and video-only. The results suggested that detectability of audio-video and audio-only stimuli was dependent upon the condition stimuli were recorded under rather than presented. When messages were only seen and not heard or read, accuracy of lie detection was compromised. There was evidence that judging transcriptions could allow successful detection, but the accuracy of lie detection was typically lower than demonstrated in richer media conditions. These findings may imply that a combination of information channels and/or paraverbal information is important for accurate classification of honesty and lies. Limitations of the studies and directions for further research were discussed

Liar liar neurons fire: how executive control processes contribute to the ability to deceive

This thesis presents a series of empirical investigations into the executive demands of deception. The first two experiments investigated whether the executive demands of deception are sufficient to influence receiver perceptions of credibility. Participant-senders in Study 1 (n = 52) and Study 2 (n = 97) completed a false opinion task and a battery of cognitive tasks. Deception performance was operationalized via participant-receiver judgements of veracity (Study 1, n = 624; Study 2, n = 1140). While the results from Study 1 showed a small positive relationship between executive abilities and deception performance, the results from Study 2 were stronger. They indicated that while working memory skill had a moderate positive relationship with deception performance, set shifting and inhibitory control skills were unrelated to deception performance once working memory skill had been taken into account. The third study used a resource depletion framework to experimentally manipulate executive abilities. Participant-senders (n = 114) completed two false opinion tasks; one before the administration of a cognitive task (either an executive task designed to deplete the availability of executive resources or one of two control tasks) and the other immediately after. Once again deception performance was operationalized via participant-receiver judgements of veracity (n = 798). The results indicated that while deception performance was impaired by the executive task, it was relatively unaffected by either of the control tasks. The fourth study presents a theoretical analysis assessing the appropriateness of standard by-judge and by-sender aggregating procedures commonly used in deception detection research. A series of Monte Carlo simulations demonstrated that the aggregation of deception data can cause inflated Type 1 error rates and poor statistical power and that Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMMs) may overcome these problems. Consequently, a series of GLMMs were used to re-analyze the data from Study 3. The results were consistent with previous analyses. Overall, the evidence reported in this thesis demonstrates that the demands of deceiving in false opinion tasks are sufficient to influence a person’s behaviours such that those with poor executive abilities tend to be worse liars than those with good executive abilities

Deception and communication media

Much research investigating deception and its detection has focused upon face-to-face communication, but over recent years the variety and extent of new communication media has changed the contexts in which deception might take place. Although work has attempted to characterise communication media, a much smaller body of research exists which has investigated the frequency with which people lie with different media and the detection of deceit under different communication media conditions. Through questionnaires and experimental studies, this work investigated the perceptions that both deceivers (senders) and those attempting to identify lies (receivers) have about communication media and how this relates to their observed behaviour. Results from questionnaire studies suggested that both the characteristics of deception and media influence people's perceived discomfort and believability when lying and the media choices they might make if they are planning to deceive. Some important factors appeared to be the seriousness of the deception, who senders are lying to, and the general frequency with which they use particular means to communicate. Communication media were judged to be similar and dissimilar to each other on a range of characteristics which may impact their appropriateness for deception and lie detection. There was evidence that media used at low frequency in daily life may be more likely to be chosen for deception. In laboratory studies, senders were found to lie more frequently using audio-only media compared to audio-video. There was evidence from experimental studies that detection of deceit was more successful when communication was audio only compared to audio-video. There was little consistent evidence that judgement biases varied between media conditions, but a truth bias was identified in experimental studies. No evidence was identified that interactivity between senders and receivers significantly influenced response biases or lie detection accuracy. A small corpus of messages recorded under audio-video and audio-only conditions were selected for their detectability or believability from two senders, and presented in modified formats to receivers. Stimuli had video removed or introduced, and were presented as audio-only, audio-video, text-only and video-only. The results suggested that detectability of audio-video and audio-only stimuli was dependent upon the condition stimuli were recorded under rather than presented. When messages were only seen and not heard or read, accuracy of lie detection was compromised. There was evidence that judging transcriptions could allow successful detection, but the accuracy of lie detection was typically lower than demonstrated in richer media conditions. These findings may imply that a combination of information channels and/or paraverbal information is important for accurate classification of honesty and lies. Limitations of the studies and directions for further research were discussed

Spotting lies and reading minds: development of mentalizing and deception in autistic and non-autistic individuals

Deception is ever-present in day-to-day life. One cognitive process underlying deception, which has been observed to evolve throughout development, is mentalizing i.e. the ability to attribute mental-states to others. Autistic individuals have been found to struggle with mentalizing even in adulthood, so it is possible that they show difficulties in detecting deception as well. The main aims of this PhD were to investigate how mentalizing and deception develop in autistic and non-autistic individuals from pre-adolescence to early adulthood, and to investigate other factors that may affect deception judgement, specifically intergroup bias. In my first study, I collected deception stimuli for two novel deception detection tasks, and investigated if mentalizing ability and autistic traits in a non-autistic sample were related to how successful one is at deceiving. I found that, contrary to expectations, deception production success did not correlate with either mentalizing or autistic traits. For my second study, I tested 11-30 years old autistic and non-autistic participants, using a well-established detection paradigm as well as two novel deception detection tasks, and found that autistic individuals were weaker at detecting deception than non-autistic individuals. While both mentalizing and deception detection abilities improved with age in non-autistic individuals, neither were affected by age in autistic individuals. Furthermore, deception detection was found to predict peer-victimization, and through peer-victimization effect psychological distress. For my final study, I investigated neurotype-based intergroup bias in the context of deception and found that, instead of better deception detection for the in-group (vs out-group) that was expected, both autistic and non-autistic adults were better at detecting deception from other autistic adults. I discuss the theoretical implications of these finding in terms of our understanding of the cognitive underpinnings of deception, the implications this has for autistic individuals’ quality of life, and future avenues for deception and autism research

What science can teach us about “Enhanced Interrogation”

No abstract available