Deceptive Responses Research Articles

Cortical oscillations and event-related brain potentials during the preparation and execution of deceptive behavior.

Deception often occurs in response to a preceding cue (e.g., a precarious question) alerting us about the need to subsequently lie. Here, we simulate this process by adapting a previously established paradigm of intentionally false responding, now instructing participants about the need for deception (vs. truthful responses) by means of a simple cue occurring before each response-relevant target. We analyzed event-related brain potentials (ERPs) as well as cortical oscillations recorded from the scalp. In an experimental study (N = 44), we show that a cue signaling the need for deception involves increased attentional selection (P2, P3a, P3b). Moreover, in the period following the cue and leading up to the target, ERP and oscillatory signatures of anticipation and preparation (Contingent Negative Variation, alpha suppression) were found to be increased during trials requiring a deceptive as compared to a truthful response. Additionally, we replicated earlier findings that target processing involves enhanced motivated attention toward words requiring a deceptive response (LPC). Moreover, a signature of integration effort and semantic inhibition (N400) was observed to be larger for words to which responses have to be intentionally false as compared to those to which responses must be truthful. Our findings support the view of the involvement of a series of basic cognitive processes (especially attention and cognitive control) when responses are deliberately wrong instead of right. Moreover, preceding cues signaling the subsequent need for lying already elicit attentional and preparatory mechanisms facilitating the cognitive operations necessary for later successful lying.

Misleading the Auditor with Fractional Truths

ABSTRACT This descriptive study examines the nature and rationalization of deception by client management when communicating with the external auditor. We placed experienced financial reporting professionals in the role of a CFO responding to an auditor inquiry. Participants chose one of four responses: the complete truth, clear mistruth, or one of two “fractional truths” (i.e., a response that is technically true but omits or is vague about relevant information). More than half of the participants chose a deceptive response, with the most common type of deceptive response chosen being a fractional truth. Many participants rationalized their deceptive responses as strictly responding to the question asked and not speculating about the unknown. Most participants who responded deceptively preferred email for communication, whereas those who responded truthfully preferred in-person communication. We discuss the implications of client deception for audit firms and offer suggestions for future research. Data Availability: Data are available from the authors upon request. JEL Classifications: M4.

Comparison of Cluster Analysis and Latent Class Analysis for the Detection of Fake Responses on Personality Tests

This study compared the effectiveness of cluster analysis and latent class analysis in detecting fake responses in personality tests. A post-test control group design was employed involving 543 11th-grade students from eight different high schools in Şanlıurfa province during the 2021–2022 academic year. The experimental group was instructed to portray a positive personality profile on the test and provide deceptive responses, as their admission to a university program was contingent on this. Conversely, the control group was asked to represent themselves truthfully and provide honest responses. In this study, the initial focus was on assessing the validity and reliability of the scores obtained from the personality test. Subsequently, a comparison was made between the scores of the participants in the experimental and control groups for each sub-dimension of the personality test to determine if there was a significant difference. The findings revealed a significant difference in mean scores between the two groups, favoring the experimental group. Moreover, the results obtained from Cluster Analysis and Latent Class Analysis demonstrated that Latent Class Analysis outperformed Cluster Analysis in detecting fake respondents, exhibiting a lower error rate.

Deciphering Deception: How Different Rhetoric of AI Language Impacts Users’ Sense of Truth in LLMs

Users are increasingly exposed to AI-generated language, presenting potential deception and communication risks. This study delved into the rhetorical aspect of AI-generated language influencing users’ truth discernment. We conducted a user study comparing three levels of rhetorical presence and four persuasive rhetorical elements, using interviews to understand users’ truth-detection methods. Results showed that outputs with fewer rhetorical elements posed challenges for users in distinguishing truth from false, while those with more rhetoric often misled users into false truths. Users’ AI expectations influenced truth judgments, with responses meeting expectations perceived as more truthful. Casual, human-like responses were often deemed false, while technical, precise AI responses were preferred. This research emphasizes that rhetorical elements of AI language can significantly bias individuals regardless of a statement’s actual truth. For enhanced transparency in human-AI communication, it is advisable for AI designs to thoughtfully integrate rhetorical elements and establish guiding principles aimed at minimizing the potential for deceptive responses.

Organizational Justice and Work Motivation: The Perspective of Civil Servant Groups in Banten and Central Java Provinces

The purpose of this study was to uncover the effect of organizational justice (procedural justice, distributive justice, and interactional justice) on the work motivation of BAPENDA employees in Banten and Central Java Provinces. The data were collected using a survey with a purposive sampling technique. The sample size of the study was 587 persons, which involved 200 civil servants at Central Java Province BAPENDA and 387 civil servants at Banten Province BAPENDA. The data were analyzed using multigroup Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). The results of the study showed that organizational justice (distributive, procedural, and interactional justices) can explain and predict the work motivation in the cultural group background of Banten and Central Java. The involvement of the two different cultural groups in this study indicated that the analysis supports the high model fit. In other words, the psychometric properties of the model measurements was not disturbed by the group presence, aka disturbed by the deceptive response.

Online dating through lies: the effects of lie fabrication for personal semantic information on predicted and actual memory performance*

ABSTRACT Research shows that people lie on online dating sites often but might fail to remember this information subsequently. This study investigated participants’ predicted and actual memory performance for personal semantic information after telling the truth versus a lie in two experiments in a setup similar to online dating sites. In Experiment 1, participants responded to open-ended questions either truthfully or fabricated lies in a within-subjects design, followed by predictions for remembering their responses. Subsequently, they recalled their responses through free-recall. Using the same design, Experiment 2 also manipulated the type of retrieval task by using a free- or cued-recall test. The results showed that participants consistently had higher memory predictions for truthful than deceptive responses. However, the actual memory performance did not always produce similar results to their predictions. The results suggest that the difficulties during lie fabrication, measured through response latencies, partially mediated the relationship between lying and memory predictions. The study has important applied implications for lying about personal semantic information in online dating contexts.

Neural processes underlying faking and concealing a personal identity: An electroencephalogram study

The detection of lies told about one's identity challenges traditional methods considering characteristics of the lie. This study explored the neural activities underlying identity deception by using electroencephalogram recordings to promote the development of a detection tool. The participants (N = 18) were required to tell a lie or the truth about true and false identity information with the differentiation of deception paradigm. The results showed deceptive (vs. honest) responses to true identity information were associated with a prolonged reaction time and enhanced upper alpha oscillations as well as the attenuated P300 and theta activities, which indicates identity concealment engaged portent honest response control and reduced processing of self-relevant information. By contrast, deceptive (vs. honest) responses to false identity information were associated with absent reaction time cost and decreased alpha activities, which suggests identity faking involved low cognitive conflict but required some degree of behavioral regulation.

Juveniles and adults differ in their beliefs about cues to deception and strategies during a hypothetical police interview

AbstractPolice officers are often trained to use the Behavior Analysis Interview (BAI) to detect deceit, but it is based on faulty indicators of lying that may be especially problematic for juveniles due to developmental immaturities. Juveniles, young adults, and adults were assigned to guilt or innocence conditions, read a criminal scenario, and self‐reported their likelihood of providing truthful and deceitful responses during a hypothetical BAI. All participants indicated they would give more truthful than deceptive responses. Guilty participants reported more use of strategies to appear innocent, while innocent participants said they would behave naturally. Juveniles were more likely to choose deceitful responses and say they would use strategies to appear innocent during a police interview but endorsed fewer stereotypical cues of deception compared to adults. Juveniles may not recognize how certain behaviors could be seen as cues to deception, which could put them at risk of being misidentified as guilty.

The role of conflict processing mechanism in deception responses

A considerable number of studies have described the potential neural mechanism of deception, but most deception studies have relied upon deception from experimental supervisor instruction. Experimental control (participants follow instructions to deceive without any risk) means that the deception occurs in a way that does not come close to the real deception. In the current study, a neural imaging experiment on deception closer to the real deception was conducted. Event-related potential (ERP) and event-related spectral perturbation (ERSP) techniques were used to explore the neural mechanism of deception. The results showed that deceptive response evoked larger medial-frontal negativity (MFN) and smaller response-locked positivity (RLP) than truthful response. We interpret these findings to indicate that conflict detection and emotional processing are associated with deception. In addition, magnitudes of alpha and beta oscillations after the deceptive response were significantly smaller than those after the truthful response, demonstrating that deception is associated with neural oscillations reflecting conflict adjustment. The results comprehensively characterized the physiological properties of the brain oscillations elicited by a deceptive response and provided a theoretical foundation for detection in practical applications.

Characterizing the shared signals of face familiarity: Long-term acquaintance, voluntary control, and concealed knowledge

In a recent study using cross-experiment multivariate classification of EEG patterns, we found evidence for a shared familiarity signal for faces, patterns of neural activity that successfully separate trials for familiar and unfamiliar faces across participants and modes of familiarization. Here, our aim was to expand upon this research to further characterize the spatio-temporal properties of this signal. By utilizing the information content present for incidental exposure to personally familiar and unfamiliar faces, we tested how the information content in the neural signal unfolds over time under different task demands – giving truthful or deceptive responses to photographs of genuinely familiar and unfamiliar individuals. For this goal, we re-analyzed data from two previously published experiments using within-experiment leave-one-subject-out and cross-experiment classification of face familiarity. We observed that the general face familiarity signal, consistent with its previously described spatio-temporal properties, is present for long-term personally familiar faces under passive viewing, as well as for acknowledged and concealed familiarity responses. Also, central-posterior regions contain information related to deception. We propose that signals in the 200–400 ms window are modulated by top-down task-related anticipation, while the patterns in the 400–600 ms window are influenced by conscious effort to deceive. To our knowledge, this is the first report describing the representational dynamics of concealed knowledge for faces, using time-resolved multivariate classification.

Looking guilty: Handcuffing suspects influences judgements of deception

AbstractVeracity judgements are important in legal and investigative contexts. However, people are poor judges of deception, often relying on incorrect behavioural cues when these may reflect the situation more than the sender's internal state. We investigated one such situational factor relevant to forensic contexts: handcuffing suspects. Judges—police officers (n = 23) and laypersons (n = 83)—assessed recordings of suspects, providing truthful and deceptive responses in an interrogation setting where half were handcuffed. Handcuffing was predicted to undermine efforts to judge veracity by constraining suspects' gesticulation and by priming stereotypes of criminality. It was found that both laypersons and police officers were worse at detecting deception when judging handcuffed suspects compared to non‐handcuffed suspects, while not affecting their judgement bias; police officers were also overconfident in their judgements. The findings suggest that handcuffing can negatively impact veracity judgements, highlighting the need for research on situational factors to better inform forensic practice.

Effects of Online Single Pulse Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation on Prefrontal and Parietal Cortices in Deceptive Processing: A Preliminary Study.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was used to test the functional role of parietal and prefrontal cortical regions activated during a playing card Guilty Knowledge Task (GKT). Single-pulse TMS was applied to 15 healthy volunteers at each of three target sites: left and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and midline parietal cortex. TMS pulses were applied at each of five latencies (from 0 to 480 ms) after the onset of a card stimulus. TMS applied to the parietal cortex exerted a latency-specific increase in inverse efficiency score and in reaction time when subjects were instructed to lie relative to when asked to respond with the truth, and this effect was specific to when TMS was applied at 240 ms after stimulus onset. No effects of TMS were detected at left or right DLPFC sites. This manipulation with TMS of performance in a deception task appears to support a critical role for the parietal cortex in intentional false responding, particularly in stimulus selection processes needed to execute a deceptive response in the context of a GKT. However, this interpretation is only preliminary, as further experiments are needed to compare performance within and outside of a deceptive context to clarify the effects of deceptive intent.

Detecting spontaneous deception in the brain.

Deception detection can be of great value during the juristic investigation. Although the neural signatures of deception have been widely documented, most prior studies were biased by difficulty levels. That is, deceptive behavior typically required more effort, making deception detection possibly effort detection. Furthermore, no study has examined the generalizability across instructed and spontaneous responses and across participants. To explore these issues, we used a dual‐task paradigm, where the difficulty level was balanced between truth‐telling and lying, and the instructed and spontaneous truth‐telling and lying were collected independently. Using Multivoxel pattern analysis, we were able to decode truth‐telling versus lying with a balanced difficulty level. Results showed that the angular gyrus (AG), inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), and postcentral gyrus could differentiate lying from truth‐telling. Critically, linear classifiers trained to distinguish instructed truthful and deceptive responses could correctly differentiate spontaneous truthful and deceptive responses in AG and IFG with above‐chance accuracy. In addition, with a leave‐one‐participant‐out analysis, multivoxel neural patterns from AG could classify if the left‐out participant was lying or not in a trial. These results indicate the commonality of neural responses subserved instructed and spontaneous deceptive behavior as well as the feasibility of cross‐participant deception validation.

Brain Fingerprinting and Lie Detection: A Study of Dynamic Functional Connectivity Patterns of Deception Using EEG Phase Synchrony Analysis.

This study investigated the brain functional connectivity (FC) patterns related to lie detection (LD) tasks with the purpose of analyzing the underlying cognitive processes and mechanisms in deception. Using the guilty knowledge test protocol, 30 subjects were divided randomly into guilty and innocent groups, and their electroencephalogram (EEG) signals were recorded on 32 electrodes. Phase synchrony of EEG was analyzed between different brain regions. A few-trials-based relative phase synchrony (FTRPS) measure was proposed to avoid the false synchronization that occurs due to volume conduction. FTRPS values with a significantly statistical difference between two groups were employed to construct FC patterns of deception, and the FTRPS values from the FC networks were extracted as the features for the training and testing of the support vector machine. Finally, four more intuitive brain fingerprinting graphs (BFG) on delta, theta, alpha and beta bands were respectively proposed. The experimental results reveal that deceptive responses elicited greater oscillatory synchronization than truthful responses between different brain regions, which plays an important role in executing lying tasks. The functional connectivity in the BFG is mainly implicated in the visuo-spatial imagery, bottom-top attention and memory systems, work memory and episodic encoding, and top-down attention and inhibition processing. These may, in part, underlie the mechanism of communication between different brain cortices during lying. High classification accuracy demonstrates the validation of BFG to identify deception behavior, and suggests that the proposed FTRPS could be a sensitive measure for LD in the real application.

Who did I lie to that day? Deception impairs memory in daily life.

Research has demonstrated that deceptive responses can undermine item and source memories. However, previous studies have often randomly assigned participants to an honest or deception group and asked them to respond in specific ways in an interview, rather than providing them a choice of what response to give. Moreover, little attention has been given to destination memory in previous research. Using a daily life paradigm, we investigated the effects of deception on memory. After completing a mock shopping task, participants were told that someone would ask them questions about their shopping lists. The participants voluntarily chose to tell the truth or lie in the interview and were encouraged to respond as they would in their daily lives. An item memory test, source memory test and destination memory test were given 48h after the interview. Source and destination memories but not item memories were impaired for participants who chose to lie. Specifically, liars forgot the things about which they lied and mistakenly believed that they lied about many things that they did not, and they also did not remember to whom they lied. We conclude that deception can disrupt memory in daily life.

The Effect of Task-Irrelevant Emotional Valence on Limited Attentional Resources During Deception: An ERPs Study.

Deception is a complex and cognitively draining dyadic process that simultaneously involves cognitive and emotional processes, both of which demand/capture attentional resources. However, few studies have investigated the allocation of attentional resources between cognitive and emotional processes during deception. The current study presented facial expressions of different valences to 36 participants. While an electroencephalogram was recording, they were asked to make either truthful or deceptive gender judgments according to preceding cues. The results showed that deceptive responses induced smaller P300 amplitudes than did truthful responses. Task-irrelevant negative emotional information (TiN) elicited larger P300 amplitudes than did task-irrelevant positive emotional information (TiP). Furthermore, the results showed that TiN elicited larger LPP amplitudes than did TiP in deceptive responses, but not in truthful ones. The results suggested that attentional resources were directed away to deception-related cognitive processes and TiN, but not TiP, was consistently able to compete for and obtain attentional resources during deception. The results indicated that TiN could disrupt with deception and may facilitate deception detection.

Concealing Untrustworthiness: The Role of Conflict Monitoring in a Social Deception Task.

Deception studies emphasize the important role of event-related potentials (ERPs) to uncover deceptive behavior based on underlying neuro-cognitive processes. The role of conflict monitoring as indicated by the frontal N2 component during truthful and deceptive responses was investigated in an adapted Concealed Information Test (CIT). Previously memorized pictures of faces should either be indicated as truthfully trustworthy, truthfully untrustworthy or trustworthy while concealing the actual untrustworthiness (untrustworthy-probe). Mean, baseline-to-peak and peak-to-peak amplitudes were calculated to examine the robustness of ERP findings across varying quantification techniques. Data of 30 participants (15 female; age: M = 23.73 years, SD = 4.09) revealed longer response times and lower correct rates for deceptive compared to truthful trustworthy responses. The frontal N2 amplitude was more negative for untrustworthy-probe and truthful untrustworthy compared to truthful trustworthy stimuli when measured as mean or baseline-to-peak amplitude. Results suggest that deception evokes conflict monitoring and ERP quantifications are differentially sensitive to a-priori hypotheses.

Deception and False Memory in Delinquency: An ERP Study

Delinquents are often associated with deception. However, there is another phenomenon which is far more menacing known as false memory. These two phenomena are different but resulting in the same detrimental consequences. Thus, the aim of this study was to examine the difference between normal individuals and delinquents in their performance during false memory and intentional deception tasks. Using DRM paradigm, both groups’ performances were measured by analyzing their reaction time (RT), and percentage of ‘Yes’ responses (accuracy) to the different types of target words. EEG was used to measure P300 Event Related Potential (ERP) for false memory and deception. Findings showed that there was a significant difference between groups in terms of accuracy for false recognition. Non-delinquent participants took longer time in deciding a deceptive response compared to the delinquents, whereas the delinquent participants took more time in responding to false recognition. Finally, P300 event-related potential (ERP) analysis revealed amplitude differences between normal and delinquent participants for deception task; however, there was no significant difference in false memory condition. In conclusion, studies investigating reaction times and neural activities are important for better understanding of the mechanisms underlying false memory and deception.

The Influence of Explicit Emotional Information on the Inhibition Process of Deceptive Response: Evidence from ERP

Deceptive response may be influenced by the individual’s internal emotional experience and external emotional information. Deception can bring nervous, fearful or even emotional experiences to the deceiver. The emotional experience can also affect deceptive behavior. Based on previous studies, this paper used facial expressions as a stimulus material, combined with explicit tasks, to study the impact of emotional information on the inhibition process of deceptive responses. The experiment adopted the emotional Stroop paradigm, used event-related potential to discuss the neural mechanism of the influence of explicit emotional information on deception. In the explicit task, it was found that high intensity triggered greater P300 amplitudes, high-intensity negative emotions triggered greater LPC amplitudes, and deceptive responses triggered greater N200, P300 and LPC amplitudes. These results show that in the explicit tasks, the impact of emotional information on fraudulent responses runs through the three stages of executive function. This is, inhibition stage, conflict and reaction monitoring stage and implementation stage. This study also found that negative emotion information had greater influence on deceptive response in explicit tasks.

Acoustic-Prosodic and Lexical Cues to Deception and Trust: Deciphering How People Detect Lies

Humans rarely perform better than chance at lie detection. To better understand human perception of deception, we created a game framework, LieCatcher, to collect ratings of perceived deception using a large corpus of deceptive and truthful interviews. We analyzed the acoustic-prosodic and linguistic characteristics of language trusted and mistrusted by raters and compared these to characteristics of actual truthful and deceptive language to understand how perception aligns with reality. With this data we built classifiers to automatically distinguish trusted from mistrusted speech, achieving an F1 of 66.1%. We next evaluated whether the strategies raters said they used to discriminate between truthful and deceptive responses were in fact useful. Our results show that, although several prosodic and lexical features were consistently perceived as trustworthy, they were not reliable cues. Also, the strategies that judges reported using in deception detection were not helpful for the task. Our work sheds light on the nature of trusted language and provides insight into the challenging problem of human deception detection.