Deceptive Statements Research Articles

Use of the model statement in determining the veracity of opinions

AbstractWe examined the efficacy of a Model Statement to detect opinion lies. A total of 93 participants discussed their opinion about the recent strikes on two occasions, 1 week apart. In one interview they told the truth and in the other interview they lied. Each interview consisted of two phases. In Phase 1 they discussed their alleged opinion (truth or lie as appropriate). They then either listened to a Model Statement (a detailed account of someone discussing an opinion about a topic unrelated to strike actions) and expressed their opinion again in Phase 2 (Model Statement present condition) or they discussed their opinion again without listening to a Model Statement (Model Statement absent condition). The verbal cues examined were pro‐opinion arguments, anti‐opinion arguments, plausibility, immediacy, directness, clarity, and predictability. The truthful statements sounded more plausible in Phases 1 and 2 than the deceptive statements, providing further evidence that plausibility is a strong veracity indicator. The truthful statements included more pro‐arguments and sounded more immediate and direct than the deceptive statements, but only in Phase 2. The Model Statement had no effect. Reasons for the Model Statement null‐effect are discussed.

Discriminating Deceptive From Truthful Statements Using the Verifiability Approach

When considering suspect statements, truthful statements contain more verifiable details compared to deceptive statements, supporting a core prediction of the Verifiability Approach (VA) to lie detection. However, this difference of verifiable details between truthful and deceptive statements is not always found. For example, the difference emerges for alibi statements, but not for other types of statements, such as statements related to insurance claims. While the VA appears to be a useful tool for detecting lying in laboratory-based studies, the effectiveness of the VA in real-world policing contexts remains unknown.

Lies Have Short Legs: Brazilian Media Exposes Bolsonaro's Deceptive Claims Amidst Misinformation Surge

In an era marked by widespread misinformation and declining trust in institutions and journalism, the deceptive statements made by former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro have gained significant attention. However, it was only in the second year of his term, during the COVID-19 pandemic, that news outlets actively began to expose and denounce his false and misleading claims. This article presents a content analysis comparing press coverage of the following four pivotal moments in the Bolsonaro administration during the pandemic: his speech at the UN General Assembly in 2020, his national radio and TV address in March 2021, his speech to ambassadors in July 2022, and his interview with Jornal Nacional, the most-watched news program in Brazil, in August 2022. By examining articles and headlines from the country's three most prominent newspapers, including two leading fact-checking agencies, this study reveals a shift in media discourse with the term 'lie' being increasingly used. Our hypothesis is that journalism is striving to reclaim its role as a trustworthy institution.

Interviewing to Detect Lies About Opinions: The Devil’s Advocate Approach

The verbal cues lie tellers spontaneously report during interviews are weak and unreliable (DePaulo et al., 20023; Vrij, Hartwig, & Granhag, 2019). Researchers therefore asked for interview protocols to be developed that would elicit such verbal cues (Vrij & Granhag, 2012). Ten years later several interview protocols have emerged (Vrij, Granhag et al., 2022), including Cognitive Credibility Assessment (Vrij, Fisher, & Blank, 2017; Vrij, Mann et al., 2021), Reality Interviewing (Bogaard et el., 2019; Colwell et al., 2007), the Strategic Use of Evidence (Granhag & Harwig, 2015; Hartwig et al., 2014) and the Verifiability Approach (Nahari, 2019; Palena et al., 2021). All these interview protocols focus on distinguishing between truthful and deceptive statements about alleged activities. However, practitioners are also interested in detecting lies when people discuss their opinions. The Devil’s Advocate Approach is the only interview protocol we are aware of aimed to distinguish between truthful and deceptive opinions. In this article we present the (scarce) Devil’s Advocate Approach research conducted to date.

What have we learned about cues to deception? A survey of expert opinions

ABSTRACT Researchers have accumulated a substantial body of empirical work studying observable behaviors that might distinguish truth tellers from liars – that is, cues to deception. We report a survey of N = 50 deception cue experts – active researchers on deception – who provided their opinions on three issues: (1) What cues distinguish between truthful and deceptive statements? (2) What moderators influence the magnitude and direction of cues to deception? (3) What explanatory mechanisms of deception cues are best supported by research? The experts displayed agreement on few issues. Expert opinion on cues to deception, potential moderators, and explanatory mechanisms is mixed and often conflicting. The single issue on which more than 80% of experts agreed was that gaze aversion is not generally diagnostic of deception. This lack of consensus suggests that substantial work remains to be done before broad agreement can be established. It follows that any practical recommendation advocating the use of a specific deception cue cannot be widely representative of expert opinion.

Examining the role of speaker familiarity and statement practice on deception detection

Detecting deception is a ubiquitous, but difficult component of daily interactions. While prior work has shown that people are poor lie detectors, research has also shown that increased familiarity with the statement sender impacts accuracy. The current study examined how increased familiarity with a statement sender, as well as the type of statement provided, influenced detection accuracy. Participants judged truthful and deceptive statements from different speakers that varied in how familiar they were to the participant (pre-experimental familiarity, experimental familiarity, no familiarity). The statements that were evaluated varied in veracity, statement type (descriptions or denials), and whether the statements had been practiced. Participants believed they were more accurate in their veracity assessments for the pre-experimentally familiar speakers compared to the other speaker types. While participants were more accurate for pre-experimentally familiar speakers compared to strangers, there was no difference in accuracy between judgments for the pre- and experimentally familiar speakers. Participants were also more likely to believe statements that had been practiced, regardless of the statements’ actual veracity or their degree of familiarity with the speaker.

Speech With Pauses Sounds Deceptive to Listeners With and Without Hearing Impairment.

Communication is as much persuasion as it is the transfer of information. This creates a tension between the interests of the speaker and those of the listener, as dishonest speakers naturally attempt to hide deceptive speech and listeners are faced with the challenge of sorting truths from lies. Listeners with hearing impairment in particular may have differing levels of access to the acoustical cues that give away deceptive speech. A greater tendency toward speech pauses has been hypothesized to result from the cognitive demands of lying convincingly. Higher vocal pitch has also been hypothesized to mark the increased anxiety of a dishonest speaker. Listeners with or without hearing impairments heard short utterances from natural conversations, some of which had been digitally manipulated to contain either increased pausing or raised vocal pitch. Listeners were asked to guess whether each statement was a lie in a two-alternative forced-choice task. Participants were also asked explicitly which cues they believed had influenced their decisions. Statements were more likely to be perceived as a lie when they contained pauses, but not when vocal pitch was raised. This pattern held regardless of hearing ability. In contrast, both groups of listeners self-reported using vocal pitch cues to identify deceptive statements, though at lower rates than pauses. Listeners may have only partial awareness of the cues that influence their impression of dishonesty. Listeners with hearing impairment may place greater weight on acoustical cues according to the differing degrees of access provided by hearing aids. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.24052446.

Web Phishing Classification using Combined Machine Learning Methods

Phishing is a crime that uses social engineering techniques, both in deceptive statements and technically, to steal consumers' personal identification data and financial account credentials. With the new Phishing machine learning approach, websites can be recognized in real-time. K-Nearest Neighbor(KNN) and Naïve Bayes (NB) are popular machine learning approaches. KNN and NB have their own strengths and weaknesses. By combining the two, deficiencies can be covered. So this study proposes to combine K-Nearest Neighbor with Naïve Bayes to classify phishing websites. Based on the results of the accuracy test of the combination of KNN with k=8 and Naïve Bayes, a maximum accuracy of 93.44% is produced. This result is 6.25% superior compared to using only one classifier.

Sequencing statements: using behaviour sequence analysis with statement analysis to indicate deception

PurposeUnderstanding when an individual is being deceptive is an important part of police and criminal investigations. While investigators have developed multiple methods, the research literature has yet to fully explore some of the newer applied techniques. This study aims to investigate statement analysis, a recent approach in forensic linguistic analysis that has been applied to criminal investigations.Design/methodology/approachReal-world statements of individuals exposed as deceptive or truthful were used in the analyses. A behaviour sequence analysis approach is used to provide a timeline analysis of the individuals’ statements.FindingsResults indicate that sequential patterns are different in deceptive statements compared to truthful statements. For example, deceptive statements were more likely to include vague words and temporal lacunas, to convince investigators into believing that the suspect was not present when the crime occurred. The sample in this research did not use one deceptive indicator, instead, electing to frequently change the order of deceptive indicators. Gaps in deception were also noted, and there was common repetition found in both the deceptive and truthful statements. While gaps are predicted to occur in truthful statements to reflect an absence of deception, gaps occurring in the deceptive statements are likely due to cognitive load.Originality/valueThe current research provides more support for using statement analysis in real-world criminal cases.

The effect of individual differences in episodic future thought on perceived credibility

ABSTRACT In this paper, we describe four studies that explore how individual differences in Episodic Future Thought (EFT) affect the ability to be perceived as credible, both when telling the truth and when lying. In Study 1a, we measured participants EFT ability and asked them to give a truthful and deceptive statement about their intentions. It was found that statements provided by individuals with higher EFT ability showed several characteristics associated with credibility (including length and level of detail) than statements provided by individuals with lower EFT ability. Study 1b showed that when lying, but not when telling the truth, high EFT individuals were perceived as more credible than low EFT individuals by other participants. In Study 2a, we replicated Study 1a in written format: higher (versus lower) EFT individuals provided longer and more detailed truthful and deceptive statements. Study 2b showed that truthful and deceptive statements written by high EFT individuals were perceived as more credible than those written by low EFT individuals. Overall, the results show that EFT ability predicts the ability to credibly tell the truth and lie about intentions.

Masking the truth: the impact of face masks on deception detection

ABSTRACT Because of the pandemic, face masks have become ubiquitous in social interactions, but it remains unclear how face masks influence the ability to discriminate between truthful and deceptive statements. The current study manipulated the presence of face masks, statement veracity, statement valence (positive or negative), and whether the statements had been practiced or not. Despite participants’ expectations, face masks generally did not impair detection accuracy. However, participants were more accurate when judging negatively valenced statements when the speaker was not wearing a face mask. Participants were also more likely to believe positively rather than negatively valenced statements.

Finding the missing: using statement analysis to assist in missing persons cases

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to address the complexity of missing persons cases and highlight the linguistic differences that arise in this type of crime. Missing persons cases are typically very complex investigations. Without a body, crime scene forensics is not possible, and police are often left only with witness and suspect statements. Forensic linguistics methods may help investigators to prioritise or remove suspects. There are many competing approaches in forensic linguistic analysis; however, there is limited empirical research available on emerging methods.Design/methodology/approachThis research investigates Statement Analysis, a recent development in linguistic analysis that has practical applications in criminal investigations. Real-world statements of individuals convicted of or found to be not guilty of their involvement in missing persons cases were used in the analyses. In addition, Behaviour Sequence Analysis was used to map the progressions of language in the suspects' statements.FindingsResults indicated differences between the guilty and innocent individuals based on their language choices, for example, guilty suspects in missing [alive] cases were found more likely to use passive language and vague words because of high levels of cognitive load associated with the several types of guilty knowledge suspects in missing persons cases possess. Of particular interest is the use of untruthful words in the innocent suspects’ statements in missing [murdered] cases. While typically seen in deceptive statements, untruthful words in innocent statements may result because of false acquittals.Originality/valueThis research provides some support for Statement Analysis as a suitable approach to analysing linguistic statements in missing persons cases.

Police Interviewing in Spain: A Self-Report Survey of Police Practices and Beliefs

Over the past decades, the psychological science has accumulated a large corpus of empirical knowledge about police interviews, deception detection, and suspects’ confessions. However, it is unclear whether European police forces’ practices and beliefs are consistent with recommendations derived from this empirical literature. The study described in this report is part of a larger research project examining European police investigators’ practices and beliefs. An online survey was administered to Guardia Civil (n = 89) and Policía Nacional investigators (n = 126). The survey inquired about the length, frequency and electronic recording of interviews, the suspects’ use of their right to remain silent, investigators’ self-reported skills in distinguishing between truthful and deceptive statements, their estimates of the frequency of (false) confessions, and their use of specific interview tactics. The outcomes provide insights into investigators’ knowledge and practices, highlight specific needs, and allow for a comparison between European and North American police forces.

No evidence that instructions to ignore nonverbal cues improve deception detection accuracy

AbstractResearch has consistently shown people predominantly rely on undiagnostic nonverbal cues when detecting deceit, whereas verbal cues are more accurate. In three experiments, we investigated whether the simple instruction not to focus on nonverbal cues would make people focus more on diagnostic verbal cues and hence more accurate in detecting lies. Participants judged the veracity of true and deceptive statements and either received (1) no instruction, (2) the instruction to ignore nonverbal cues, or (3) to ignore nonverbal cues and focus on verbal cues instead. In the second and third experiments, condition 3 was changed to an audio condition in which visual cues were inaccessible. Results showed no effect of instruction on lie detection performance. Overall, we found no evidence that the simple instruction not to focus on nonverbal cues while judging veracity is an effective strategy to make people focus more on verbal cues or to improve lie detection.

The language of high‐stakes truths and lies: Linguistic analysis of true and deceptive statements made during sexual homicide interrogations

AbstractPurposeFew studies have assessed deception during real‐life, high‐stakes encounters. This study is one of the largest and most geographically diverse to investigate how criminal suspects lie during investigative interviews. It is also one of the most specific; focusing solely on those who committed sexually motivated homicides.MethodsSections of transcripts from 52 sexually motivated homicide offender interrogations were analysed using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software. Truthful (n = 27) and deceptive (n = 25) statements, corroborated through physical evidence, were then compared using the reality monitoring (RM) model of deception.ResultsSupport for the RM model was mixed. Truthful statements contained more motion and spatial details. There were no significant differences between true and deceptive statements when comparing perceptual, affective, and cognitive process details.ConclusionsThe results support the notion that there are verbal cues to deception detectable in high‐stakes, real‐life situations. It also provides a starting point to assess these cues in special forensic populations.

A Personal Model of Trumpery: Linguistic Deception Detection in a Real-World High-Stakes Setting

Language use differs between truthful and deceptive statements, but not all differences are consistent across people and contexts, complicating the identification of deceit in individuals. By relying on fact-checked tweets, we showed in three studies (Study 1: 469 tweets; Study 2: 484 tweets; Study 3: 24 models) how well personalized linguistic deception detection performs by developing the first deception model tailored to an individual: the 45th U.S. president. First, we found substantial linguistic differences between factually correct and factually incorrect tweets. We developed a quantitative model and achieved 73% overall accuracy. Second, we tested out-of-sample prediction and achieved 74% overall accuracy. Third, we compared our personalized model with linguistic models previously reported in the literature. Our model outperformed existing models by 5 percentage points, demonstrating the added value of personalized linguistic analysis in real-world settings. Our results indicate that factually incorrect tweets by the U.S. president are not random mistakes of the sender.

Lying Without Saying Something False? A Cross-Cultural Investigation of the Folk Concept of Lying in Russian and English Speakers

AbstractThe present study examines cross-cultural differences in people’s concept of lying with regard to the question of whether lying requires an agent tosaysomething they believe to be false. While prominent philosophical views maintain that lying entails that a person explicitly expresses a believed-false claim, recent research suggests that people’s concept of lying might also include certain kinds of deception that are communicated more indirectly. An important drawback of previous empirical work on this topic is that only few studies have investigated people’s concept of lying in non-Western samples. In the present study, we compare people’s intuitions about lying with indirect deceptions (i.e., presuppositions, conversational implicatures, and non-verbal actions) in a sample ofN = 255 participants from Russia andN = 300 participants from the United Kingdom. Our findings show a strong degree of similarity between lie ratings of participants from Russia and the United Kingdom, with both samples holding it possible for agents to lie with deceptive statements and actions that do not involve the agentsayingsomething they believe to be false.

Detecting deception through facial expressions in a dataset of videotaped interviews: A comparison between human judges and machine learning models

In the last decades, research has claimed facial micro-expressions are a reliable means to detect deception. However, experimental results showed that trained and naïve human judges observing facial micro-expressions can distinguish liars from truth-tellers with an accuracy just slightly above the chance level. More promising results recently came from the field of artificial intelligence, in which machine learning (ML) techniques are used to identify micro-expressions and are trained to distinguish deceptive statements from genuine ones.In this paper, we test the ability of different feature extraction methods (i.e., improved dense trajectories, OpenFace) and ML techniques (i.e., support vector machines vs. deep neural networks) to distinguish liars from truth-tellers based on facial micro-expressions, using a new video data set collected in low-stakes situations. During the interviews, a technique to increase liars’ cognitive load was applied, facilitating cues of lies to emerge.Results highlighted that support vector machines (SVMs) coupled with OpenFace resulted in the best performing method (AUC = 0.72 videos without cognitive load; AUC = 0.78 videos with cognitive load). All the tested classifiers performed better when a cognitive load was imposed on the interviewee, confirming that the technique of increasing cognitive load during an interview facilitates deception recognition. In the same task, human judges obtained an accuracy of 57%.Results are discussed and compared with the previous literature, confirming that artificial intelligence performs better than humans in lie-detection tasks do, even when humans have more information to make a decision.

On bullshit: Lying as institutional work

With only a few exceptions, the institutional literature has yet to reckon with the ways in which deceptive statements can be leveraged to affect the higher order institutional dynamics. Responding to this gap, we theorize lying as a form of discursive institutional work strategically leveraged to variously maintain or disrupt institutional fields. To that end, we suggest that four distinct forms of lying (i.e., maintenance lies, defensive lies, noble lies, and demagogic lies) will be differentially likely to succeed in advancing the liar’s preferred form of institutional work based on salient characteristics of the field the liar is embedded in. That is, we suggest that fields are characterized by differing degrees of truth regime fragmentation, or the fragmentation of various communities’ more-or-less discrepant sets of normative rules for discerning what statements constitute lies and what consequences should apply to liars. Various degrees of truth regime fragmentation are said to differentially facilitate the success of maintenance, defensive, noble, and demagogic lies. In theorizing lying as a form of discursive institutional work, we contribute to both the institutional and social psychology literatures, most notably through attempting to explain one source of a salient contemporary “grand challenge,” that being the degradation of political discourse in Western polities via the resort to deceit as a means of advancing political ideologies.

Mnemonic Techniques and Lie Detection: Accuracy of Truth and Deception Judgments in Repeated Accounts

This study was an examination into whether the use of memory-enhancing techniques (mnemonics) in interviews can be helpful to distinguish truth tellers from liars. In the previous study (Izotovas et al., 2018), it was found that when mnemonic techniques were used in the interview immediately after the event, truth-tellers reported more details than liars in those immediate interviews and again after a delay. Moreover, truth-tellers, but not liars, showed patterns of reporting indicative of genuine memory decay.
 In the current experiment, participants (n = 92) were asked to read the repeated statements reported by participants in the Izotovas et al.’s (2018) study and decide whether the statements they read were truthful or deceptive. One group of participants (informed condition) received information about the findings of the previous study before reading the statement. The other group received no information before reading the statement (uninformed condition). After participants made veracity judgements, they were asked an open-ended question asking what factors influenced their credibility decision. Although truthful statements were judged more accurately in the informed condition (65.2%) than in the uninformed condition (47.8%), this difference was not significant. In both conditions deceptive statements were detected at chance level (52.2%). Participants who relied on the self-reported diagnostic verbal cues to deceit were not more accurate than participants who self-reported unreliable cues. This could happen because only the minority of participants (27.4%) in both conditions based their decisions on diagnostic cues to truth/deceit.