Expecting honesty and getting lies—when are you most able to tell it’s a lie?

Originally published by Rita Handrich.

We write often about lying and deception and none of us like to discover we’ve been lied to by either a stranger or by someone whom we know [or thought we knew] well. Despite how often we encounter dishonesty, there is a tendency to presume honesty in what we hear from others. So is it better to be wary of others and presume dishonesty until proven otherwise? Today’s researchers wanted to figure that out.

They asked 190 undergraduates (average age 19.3 years and 67.6% female) to participate and assigned them to random pairs (some were same-sex pairings and others were not). Two participants arrived at the experiment location at a time and were told they would be participating in a mock job interview—with one playing the role of the interviewer and the other playing the role of the job candidate. The participants were sent to separate rooms to prepare for the interviews and the candidates were given instructions to convince the interviewer they were the best person for the job (and told that “convincing” may involve them telling lies or exaggerating their credentials). Only some of the interviewers were told the candidates might lie or exaggerate their qualifications (the researchers label these two conditions naïve versus informed).

Following preparation, the pair was reunited in a room where they engaged in a 5 to 8 minute interview which was recorded. After the interview concluded the researchers had participants review the videos.

First, the candidates reviewed the video and indicated points at which s/he had thoughts or feelings during the interview. After reviewing the video and marking points where they’d had feelings or thoughts, the candidates then reviewed the video again and were asked at each point they’d marked as one where they had thoughts or feelings—how honest were you being as you expressed that thought or feeling on the videotape.

Then, the interviewer reviewed the video and as it was paused at each point the candidate reported thoughts or feelings—and the interviewer would attempt to identify the thoughts or feelings the candidate was having and then rated how honest they thought the candidate was being with them.

So—in this study both the interviewer and the candidate each rated candidate honesty. That is, the candidates rated how honest they were about thoughts and feelings at various points on the videotape and the interviewers rated how honest they [the interviewer] thought the candidate was being at the same points in time.

The researchers were interested in two main things: empathic accuracy (how closely the interviewers were able to identify the feelings of the candidates) and deception detection (how well they could tell that the interviewee was lying to them).

They measured empathic accuracy as the level at which the candidate’s report of thoughts and feelings matched the interviewer’s assessment of what they believed the candidate was feeling. Higher levels of agreement between the candidate and interviewer, demonstrates higher levels of empathic accuracy on the part of the interviewer.

Deception detection was measured in the same way. If the candidate reported they’d been dishonest and the interviewer assessed them as being dishonest, then the interviewer had correctly detected deception.

According to the researchers, these two “processes used to infer the thoughts and feelings of another person” had never been studied together before. They report the level of empathic accuracy attained by the interviewers was similar to that found in earlier studies of empathic accuracy alone. However, it did make a difference whether the interviewer was in the “naïve” group or the “informed” group. And this is an odd finding:

“regardless of the actual honesty of the thoughts [expressed by the candidate], naïve interviewer/perceivers were more empathically accurate than were informed perceivers”.

In other words, if you trust the person you are talking with, you are able to identify their feelings more accurately. Intuitively, it seems to us that if you are not struggling with trust issues (e.g., “is she lying to me?”) you are more likely to attend to the emotions of the person you are focused on.

From a litigation advocacy standpoint, what this tells us is that verbal content is still the best way to assess if someone is telling you the truth or not. What this research leaves out is the reality that in pairs of people who believe they know each other well, there is likely more room for errors in deception detection since the listener/target of the lie would have no reason to believe they were being deceived.

Nonetheless, it does remind us of just how complex detecting deception is and how wrong many people are when they believe someone is not being truthful. It doesn’t matter if they are wrong when it comes to your witness or party though—if they believe the witness is lying, things are unlikely to turn out well for your case.

DesJardins, N., & Hodges, S. (2015). Reading Between the Lies: Empathic Accuracy and Deception Detection Social Psychological and Personality Science, 6 (7), 781-787 DOI: 10.1177/1948550615585829

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Related posts:

1. Does Face-to-Face Interaction Promote Honesty?
2. Another look at who lies…
3. “You know who else lies?” she screeches. “LAWYERS lie!”

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