Apr 04, 2023 23:00:00

What is an easy way to spot a lie with high accuracy?

Criminal investigations and trials, where you have to spot a clever lie, often gather as many clues as possible. For example, after

the 9/11 attacks , US airport security guards were instructed to look out for 92 behavioral cues that indicate a person is lying. However, new research has shown that it is important to look only at the 'details of the other party's story' and ignore the rest to detect lies.

The use-the-best heuristic facilitates deception detection | Nature Human Behavior
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01556-2

This One Strategy Will Reveal if Someone's Lying With 80% Accuracy, Study Finds : ScienceAlert

https://www.sciencealert.com/this-one-strategy-will-reveal-if-someones-lying-with-80-accuracy-study-finds

A polygraph , which is generally used as a lie detector, records various physiological responses such as blood pressure, heart rate, and respiratory rate, and the user makes a comprehensive judgment based on those data. However, with this method, even well-trained experts cannot see through lies with accuracy that exceeds coincidence.

The reason for the low accuracy of judgment by polygraph is that it is very difficult to instantly integrate multiple contradictory data and separate the results into 'whether you are lying or not.' In addition, stereotypes about whether the subject is innocent or guilty also keep the truth away.

A research team such as Bruno Vercheer, a forensic psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, who thought that ``the truth is in the simplicity,'' said, ``In order to detect lies, rather than increasing clues, Rather, it is better to reduce it.' In order to verify the hypothesis, we conducted nine experiments.

This series of experiments involved 1,445 subjects and challenged them to detect lies in students based on written documents, video recordings, interviews, or face-to-face interviews about their activities on campus. bottom. Student lies included, for example, testimonies about whether or not they stole items from their lockers, and videos of students walking around campus telling the truth or making nonsense about their activities.

In this experiment, the performance of subjects who were instructed to rely on their own intuition to spot lies, and subjects who were instructed to make judgments based on many factors, was no different from chance. However, subjects who were instructed to ``focus only on the detail of the testimony'' succeeded in seeing the truth and lies with an accuracy of 59-79%.

The degree of detail in the testimony is determined by ``to what extent the message includes people, places, actions, objects, events, and the date and time of the event'' and ``whether the message is complete, specific, impressive, and detailed. Is it abundant?”

Subjects knew that the ``use-the-best and ignore-the-rest'' strategy used in this experiment was aimed at spotting lies. was valid regardless of whether This suggests that the method of judging by level of detail is not subject to stereotypes.

However, the research team points out that this strategy is not effective in all cases. For example, if there is a great deal of interest involved, the liar is more likely to come up with a detailed explanation of the lie to increase credibility. However, it is worth noting the finding that collecting more cues and using big data and machine learning does not necessarily improve deception accuracy.

The research team said about the experimental results, ``Our data showed that relying on one good clue is more beneficial than using many cues.''