Deception Research Research Articles

Finding and using evidence that you can trust

Much of the evidence-base from research is biased. Systematically assembled, quality-appraised, and appropriately summarised reviews of the effects of interventions from all relevant intervention studies are needed, in order to use research evidence to reliably inform health decisions. The Cochrane Library is an online collection of six searchable, up-to-date, evidence-based databases that is available free to access by anyone in India, thanks to a national subscription purchased by the Indian Council of Medical Research. This valuable resource contains the world's single largest collection of systematic reviews and controlled clinical trials, as well as bibliographic details and records of methodological research, health technology assessments and economic analyses. The robust and transparent methods pioneered and used in Cochrane systematic reviews, and independence from industry funding facilitate the detection of biased, deceptive and fraudulent research, and have earned these reviews the reputation of being trusted sources of evidence to inform health decisions. Cochrane reviews have had considerable impact on academic medicine; have informed health practices, policies and guidelines; improved health outcomes; and saved numerous lives.

Criminals in the citadel and deceit all along the watchtower: Irresponsibility, fraud, and complicity in the search for scientific truth

Scientific research aims to use reliable methods to produce generalizable new knowledge in order to understand the human condition and maximize human potential. The sanctity accorded to scientific research has been violated by numerous instances of research fraud, as well as deceptive and conflicted research that have seriously harmed people, subverted the evidence-base, wasted valuable resources, and undermined public trust. This deception by individuals has been fostered by the unrealistic expectations of society; facilitated by the complicity of institutions and organisations; and sanctioned by the inaction of supposed gate-keepers. Re-defining misconduct as occurring on a continuum from irresponsible to fraudulent is the first step in confronting this inconvenient truth. Implementing and evaluating multiple strategies targeting systems and individuals that promote the responsible conduct of research, rather than merely exposing serious instances of misconduct by individuals, is urgently required to restore faith in the aspirations, integrity, and results of scientific research.

Efficacy of Forensic Statement Analysis in Distinguishing Truthful from Deceptive Eyewitness Accounts of Highly Stressful Events*

Laboratory-based detecting deception research suggests that truthful statements differ from those of deceptive statements. This nonlaboratory study tested whether forensic statement analysis (FSA) methods would distinguish genuine from false eyewitness accounts about exposure to a highly stressful event. A total of 35 military participants were assigned to truthful or deceptive eyewitness conditions. Genuine eyewitness reported truthfully about exposure to interrogation stress. Deceptive eyewitnesses studied transcripts of genuine eyewitnesses for 24 h and falsely claimed they had been interrogated. Cognitive Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and assessed by FSA raters blind to the status of participants. Genuine accounts contained more unique words, external and contextual referents, and a greater total word count than did deceptive statements. The type-token ratio was lower in genuine statements. The classification accuracy using FSA techniques was 82%. FSA methods may be effective in real-world circumstances and have relevance to professionals in law enforcement, security, and criminal justice.

Um … they were wearing …: The effect of deception on specific hand gestures

Purpose. Non‐verbal communication researchers have identified specific categories of hand gestures but deception researchers typically ignore these. This experiment refined and developed some of these categories and examined whether there is a difference in the frequency of speech prompting and rhythmic pulsing gestures between liars and truth tellers.Methods. Twenty truth tellers and 20 liars (all undergraduate students) described a person who entered a room where they were playing a game with a confederate. Truth tellers gave a truthful description of an event they had participated in. Liars had previously taken money from a wallet in the room but had not played a game with the confederate, or seen anybody enter the room, they just pretended they did during their interview.Results. Truth tellers made more rhythmic pulsing gestures than liars indicating this type of gesture may be connected with the prosodic flow of speech. Liars made significantly more speech prompting gestures than truth tellers, supporting the notion that greater cognitive load may be experienced during deceptive accounts.Conclusions. This study demonstrates the benefit of examining subcategories of gestures when investigating deceptive behaviour.

Assessing the adequacy of postexperimental inquiries in deception research and the factors that promote participant honesty

The primary aim of this research was to assess the adequacy of postexperimental inquiries (PEI) used in deception research, as well as to examine whether mood state, reward, or administering the PEI as a face-to-face interview or computer survey impacts participants' willingness to divulge suspicion or knowledge about a study. We also sought to determine why participants are not always forthcoming on the PEI. Study 1 examined how frequently PEIs are included in research and found that most researchers employing deception do use a PEI. Studies 2 and 3 showed that participants are often unwilling to divulge suspicion or awareness of deception or to admit to having prior knowledge about a study, though offering a reward and completing the PEI on a computer modestly improved awareness and admission rates. Study 4 indicated several reasons why participants may not reveal suspicion or knowledge about a study on the PEI.

Applying Cognitive Models of Deception to National Security Investigations: Considerations of Psychological Research, Law, and Ethical Practice

The current threat of global terrorism has sparked a renewed interest in the development of more effective methods for the detection of deception. In the United States, the American Psychological Association (APA)—spurred by torture allegations involving terrorist suspects—established guidelines for professional practice regarding investigative methods that could be conceptualized as coercive. As affirmed by APA, psychological research can play an active and ethical role in the development of standardized methods for the detection of deception. Instead of focusing on external sources of terrorism, this conceptual paper argues for programmatic research on insider threats, specifically risks to national security posed by government and other employees. In briefly reviewing deception research, recent investigations of cognitive loads and deceptions hold particular promise, especially studies that systematically manipulate levels of cognitive load. These methods can be extended to collateral sources, further minimizing ethical concerns while broadening the scope of deception investigation.

Why do people get phished? Testing individual differences in phishing vulnerability within an integrated, information processing model

This research presents an integrated information processing model of phishing susceptibility grounded in the prior research in information process and interpersonal deception. We refine and validate the model using a sample of intended victims of an actual phishing attack. The data provides strong support for the model's theoretical structure and causative sequence. Overall, the model explains close to 50% of the variance in individual phishing susceptibility. The results indicate that most phishing emails are peripherally processed and individuals make decisions based on simple cues embedded in the email. Interestingly, urgency cues in the email stimulated increased information processing thereby short circuiting the resources available for attending to other cues that could potentially help detect the deception. Additionally, the findings suggest that habitual patterns of media use combined with high levels of email load have a strong and significant influence on individuals' likelihood to be phished. Consistent with social cognitive theory, computer self-efficacy was found to significantly influence elaboration, but its influence was diminished by domain specific-knowledge.

On deception and deception detection: Content analysis of computer-mediated stated beliefs

Deception in computer-mediated communication is defined as a message knowingly and intentionally transmitted by a sender to foster a false belief or conclusion by the perceiver. Stated beliefs about deception and deceptive messages or incidents are content analyzed in a sample of 324 computer-mediated communications. Relevant stated beliefs are obtained through systematic sampling and querying of the blogosphere based on 80 English words commonly used to describe deceptive incidents. Deception is conceptualized broader than lying and includes a variety of deceptive strategies: falsification, concealment (omitting material facts) and equivocation (dodging or skirting issues). The stated beliefs are argued to be valuable toward the creation of a unified multi-faceted ontology of deception, stratified along several classificatory facets such as (1) contextual domain (e.g., personal relations, politics, finances & insurance), (2) deception content (e.g., events, time, place, abstract notions), (3) message format (e.g., a complaint: they lied to us, a victim story: I was lied to or tricked, or a direct accusation: you're lying), and (4) deception variety, each tied to particular verbal cues (e.g., misinforming, scheming, misrepresenting, or cheating). The paper positions automated deception detection within the field of library and information science (LIS), as a feasible natural language processing (NLP) task. Key findings and important constructs in deception research from interpersonal communication, psychology, criminology, and language technology studies are synthesized into an overview. Deception research is juxtaposed to several benevolent constructs in LIS research: trust, credibility, certainty, and authority.

Orchid pollination by sexual deception: pollinator perspectives

The extraordinary taxonomic and morphological diversity of orchids is accompanied by a remarkable range of pollinators and pollination systems. Sexually deceptive orchids are adapted to attract specific male insects that are fooled into attempting to mate with orchid flowers and inadvertently acting as pollinators. This review summarises current knowledge, explores new hypotheses in the literature, and introduces some new approaches to understanding sexual deception from the perspective of the duped pollinator. Four main topics are addressed: (1) global patterns in sexual deception, (2) pollinator identities, mating systems and behaviours, (3) pollinator perception of orchid deceptive signals, and (4) the evolutionary implications of pollinator responses to orchid deception, including potential costs imposed on pollinators by orchids. A global list of known and putative sexually deceptive orchids and their pollinators is provided and methods for incorporating pollinator perspectives into sexual deception research are provided and reviewed. At present, almost all known sexually deceptive orchid taxa are from Australia or Europe. A few sexually deceptive species and genera are reported for New Zealand and South Africa. In Central and Southern America, Asia, and the Pacific many more species are likely to be identified in the future. Despite the great diversity of sexually deceptive orchid genera in Australia, pollination rates reported in the literature are similar between Australian and European species. The typical pollinator of a sexually deceptive orchid is a male insect of a species that is polygynous, monandrous, haplodiploid, and solitary rather than social. Insect behaviours involved in the pollination of sexually deceptive orchids include pre-copulatory gripping of flowers, brief entrapment, mating, and very rarely, ejaculation. Pollinator behaviour varies within and among pollinator species. Deception involving orchid mimicry of insect scent signals is becoming well understood for some species, but visual and tactile signals such as colour, shape, and texture remain neglected. Experimental manipulations that test for function, multi-signal interactions, and pollinator perception of these signals are required. Furthermore, other forms of deception such as exploitation of pollinator sensory biases or mating preferences merit more comprehensive investigation. Application of molecular techniques adapted from model plants and animals is likely to deliver new insights into orchid signalling, and pollinator perception and behaviour. There is little current evidence that sexual deception drives any species-level selection on pollinators. Pollinators do learn to avoid deceptive orchids and their locations, but this is not necessarily a response specific to orchids. Even in systems where evidence suggests that orchids do interfere with pollinator mating opportunities, considerable further research is required to determine whether this is sufficient to impose selection on pollinators or generate antagonistic coevolution or an arms race between orchids and their pollinators. Botanists, taxonomists and chemical ecologists have made remarkable progress in the study of deceptive orchid pollination. Further complementary investigations from entomology and behavioural ecology perspectives should prove fascinating and engender a more complete understanding of the evolution and maintenance of such enigmatic plant-animal interactions.

Good Liars

A neglected area in deception research is what constitutes a good liar. On the basis of deception theory, people's views about how liars respond, impression formation theory, and persuasion theory, we describe eighteen attributes which in our view are present in a good liar. Insight into these characteristics will help law enforcement personnel in two ways: It provides insight into who would be suitable for undercover operations, and it may help lie detectors, because one reason why people make errors in lie detection is that they do not take the full complexity of deception into account and seem to have limited knowledge about what is actually going on in a liar's mind.

Inclusion of authorized deception in the informed consent process does not affect the magnitude of the placebo effect for experimentally induced pain

The ethics of placebo research have been of paramount concern since the discovery of the phenomenon. To address these ethical concerns, Miller and colleagues (PLoS Med 2005 Sep;2(9):e262, 0853–0859) propose an alternate approach to placebo research, called “authorized deception”, in which participants are alerted of the use of deception in the research prior to study enrollment and thus knowingly permit its use if they decide to participate. The present study sought to investigate the authorized deception methodology in experimentally induced placebo analgesia. The participants were randomly assigned to an authorized deception or non-authorized deception group. A commonly used protocol was employed wherein heat pain stimulation was surreptitiously lowered following the application of a placebo cream during a series of conditioning trials and the magnitude of the placebo effect was subsequently assessed in test trials for which the stimulus intensity was the same for both the placebo and control creams. Authorized deception did not have any negative impact on the magnitude of the placebo effect, recruitment and retention of participants, nor did it result in any significant psychological harm. The majority of participants who received this form of consent preferred it to the traditional approach in which the participants are not alerted to the presence of deception. These findings suggest that the use of authorized deception is a viable and ethically preferable alternative consent process for laboratory-based studies on placebo analgesia. Further studies are needed to examine the effect of authorized deception in clinical trials and other placebo research within a clinical setting.

The truth about lies: What works in detecting high‐stakes deception?

In this paper, we provide our view of the current understanding of high‐stakes lies often occurring in forensic contexts. We underscore the importance of avoiding widespread pitfalls of deception detection and challenging prevailing assumptions concerning strategies for catching liars. The promise and limitations of each of non‐verbal/body language, facial, verbal/linguistic, and physiological channels in detecting deception are discussed. In observing the absence of a single cue or behavioural channel that consistently reveals deception, a holistic approach with concurrent attention to multiple channels of a target's behaviour (ideally videotaped for review) and changes from baseline behaviour is recommended whenever possible. Among the best‐validated cues to be considered together include: illustrators, blink and pause rate, speech rate, vague descriptions, repeated details, contextual embedding, reproduction of conversations, and emotional ‘leakage’ in the face. While advocating a reliance on empirical evidence, we observe that few studies of high‐stakes deception yet have been conducted. Further, some manifestations of lying are highly idiosyncratic and difficult to address in quantitative research, pointing to the need for keen observation skills, and psychological insight. A recurring theme is the need for the field to devise innovative approaches for studying high‐stakes lies to promote ecological validity. Ultimately, such work will provide a strong foundation for the responsible application of deception research in forensic and security settings.

Heuristic versus Systematic Processing of Information in Detecting Deception: Questioning the Truth Bias

Research on nonverbal detection of deception has normally been conducted by asking observers to judge the veracity of a number of videotaped communications. These video clips have typically been very short. Observers have a tendency to judge most of these statements as truthful. An experiment was conducted in which 52 participants (44 women, 8 men; M age = 22.2 yr., SD = 2.2) who were taking a psychology and law course were requested to make judgments of credibility at different points of the senders' statements. A strong truth bias was apparent when judgments were made at the beginning of the statements, suggesting that when exposed to brief communications, the observers make heuristic judgments. Over time, a decrease in the truth bias and an increase in overall accuracy were found, suggesting that later judgments were increasingly based on systematic information processing. These results suggest that the truth bias that has been found in previous deception research may be a result of having used very brief and uninformative behavioral samples as stimuli.

Deceptive Research

Deceptive Research

Deceptive Research—Reply

Deceptive Research—Reply

Nonverbal Dominance Versus Verbal Accuracy in Lie Detection

With the exclusion of some specific circumstances, police officers typically pay more attention to nonverbal behavior than verbal behavior when they attempt to detect deceit. One of the reasons for this is that they believe that suspects are less able to control their nonverbal than verbal behavior and, consequently, nonverbal cues to deception are more likely to leak through. The author states that this assumption is not necessarily valid; deception research has revealed that many verbal cues are more diagnostic cues to deceit than nonverbal cues. Paying attention to nonverbal cues results in being less accurate in truth/lie discrimination, particularly when only visual nonverbal cues are taken into account. Also, paying attention to visual nonverbal cues leads to a stronger lie bias (i.e., indicating that someone is lying). The author recommends a change in police practice and argues that for lie detection purposes it may be better to listen carefully to what suspects say.

Moral Accountability and Debriefing

What is the ethical significance of debriefing in deceptive research? The standard view of debriefing is that it serves to disclose the deception to the participant and is a means of evaluating and mitigating potential harms that may have resulted from involvement in the research. However, as the article by Miller, Gluck, and Wendler in this issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal points out, there has been little systematic attention to the ethics of debriefing, particularly with regard to the role of debriefing in addressing the prima facie moral wrong of deception itself. They argue that in addition to mitigating the harms of deception, debriefing should include an apology to participants for being deceived. In the current paper, I argue that an apology is not morally obligatory in most research contexts. Debriefing should be considered an opportunity to further define the researcher-participant relationship without the need to be remorseful about the research practice.

Debriefing and Accountability in Deceptive Research

Debriefing is a standard ethical requirement for human research involving the use of deception. Little systematic attention, however, has been devoted to explaining the ethical significance of debriefing and the specific ethical functions that it serves. In this article, we develop an account of debriefing as a tool of moral accountability for the prima facie wrong of deception. Specifically, we contend that debriefing should include a responsibility to promote transparency by explaining the deception and its rationale, to provide an apology to subjects for infringing the principle of respect for persons, and to offer subjects an opportunity to withdraw their data. We also present recommendations concerning the discussion of deception in scientific articles reporting the results of research using deception.

Cross-cultural deception in social networking sites and face-to-face communication

Deception research has been primarily studied from a Western perspective, so very little is known regarding how other cultures view deception. Cross-cultural deception research is important due to the escalation of cross-cultural communication. Therefore, this study proposes a framework for understanding the role Korean and American culture plays in deceptive behavior for both face-to-face (FTF) and computer-mediated communication (CMC). The goal of this paper is to test theoretical explanations about the role of culture in deception by the development of a set of hypotheses predicting the conditions under which deception is likely to emerge. A research strategy and construct measures to test the hypotheses are presented. Results from online questionnaires indicated Korean respondents exhibited greater collectivist values, lower levels of power distance, and higher levels of masculine values than Americans. Furthermore, deceptive behavior was greater for FTF communication than for CMC for both Korean and American respondents. In addition to a significant relationship between culture and deception, differences were found between espoused cultural values and deceptive behavior, regardless of national culture. These results indicate the need for future research to consider cultural differences when examining deceptive behavior.

Interviewing to Detect Deception

DePaulo et al.’s (2003) meta-analysis of verbal and nonverbal cues to deception showed that cues to deception are faint and unreliable. If liars do not spontaneously display diagnostic cues to deceit, a logical step is to make sure that investigators elicit or enhance such cues in interviews through specific interview technique. Such interview techniques were scarce in the nonverbal and verbal cues to deception domain, but recently researchers have developed alternative protocols that have their roots in cognition and are based on the assumption that questions can be asked that are more difficult for liars to answer than for truth tellers. They will be discussed in the first part of this article. Traditionally, lie detection in a forensic context concentrated on police-suspect interview settings. However, in the wake of high-profile international terrorist attacks, the importance of identifying terrorist networks and gathering intelligence about the activities of such groups has become paramount. Deception detection in intelligence interviews differs in several ways from deception detection in traditional police-suspect interviews and requires innovative deception research. In the second part of this article we discuss the emerging literature in this domain.