Originally published by Douglas Keene.
Are children good liars?
Apparently, even kids are good liars. A 2011 experiment showed that 3-6 year old children who lied about parent’s transgressions were able to fool adults—although forensic interviewers were able to identify lies from older children at a higher rate of accuracy than they were with younger children. Evidently, you really can’t trust a pre-schooler.
Need to lie effectively? Drink lots and lots of water
Here’s a strange one. Recent research (cited at the end of this post) shows that if you have to urinate, you are able to lie more effectively. The study is small (22 participants) and it is unwise to generalize from such a small group. Aldert Vrij, a leading researcher in the field of deception detection, questions whether we should even publish research telling people how to be better liars.
How do people behave when they are lying?
During focus group and mock trial deliberations, we often hear mock jurors discussing their ways of “knowing” when someone is lying. Usually this involves eye movements, gaze direction, touching one’s nose, covering one’s mouth, answering too quickly, answering too slowly, and other ‘foolproof strategies’ the individual mock juror has perfected for identifying liars. Unfortunately for the mock jurors, most of these strategies are useless. But the mock jurors think they are windows into the soul of the witness, so we work to remove those sorts of distracting nonverbal behaviors when prepping witnesses for testimony. New research from the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Applied says rather than relying on intuition to identify liars—we would do better to pay attention to specific behaviors such as whether the speaker appears to be thinking really hard while talking.
“We often think of nonverbal behavior when we think of deception. But it would be better to focus on the content of the tale people are selling us, and asking if it is consistent with other facts we know. But even then there is a large amount of room for error.”
In thousands of juror and mock-juror interviews about witness credibility, their judgments on credibility often seem to serve as methods for simplifying the case. If the witness is credible but contradicts another witness who also seems credible, what are they to do? Determining by any method available that one of the witnesses looked shifty when they looked to the side, or they drank water which means they are nervous about telling a lie, their job becomes simpler.
It might be better to let machines catch liars
We know most of us are not very good at identifying liars. Most people are barely above chance in their ability to know who is telling the truth and who is lying. But a new “machine learning algorithm” is purportedly able to identify truth-tellers correctly about 75% of the time. Wow. Here’s the pdf of the article and below is a snippet of information on how the work was done:
“Mihalcea and her colleagues took 121 videos from sources such as the Innocence Project, a non-profit group in Texas dedicated to exonerating people with wrongful convictions. This is superior to simulated conversation because the speakers are more invested in what they are saying.Transcriptions of the videos that included the speaker’s gestures and expressions were fed into a machine learning algorithm, along with the trial’s outcome. To hone it further, the team plans to feed in even more data. Such a system could one day spot liars in real-time in court or at airport customs, says Mihalcea, who will present the work at the International Conference on Multimodal Interaction this month in Seattle, Washington.”
Fenn, E., Blandón-Gitlin, I., Coons, J., Pineda, C., & Echon, R. (2015). The inhibitory spillover effect: Controlling the bladder makes better liars. Consciousness and Cognition, 37, 112-122 DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2015.09.003
Curated by Texas Bar Today. Follow us on Twitter @texasbartoday.
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