There are a lot of myths about how to detect deception, but how many of these are actually valid?
Because of our background in training human lie detection, Humintell was pretty excited to read a new study in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology that sought to conceptualize what most people believe is a tell-tale sign of deception. Importantly, this effort tried to go beyond traditionally Western conceptions and included respondents from 58 different countries in an effort.
One of the goals of this cross-cultural analysis was to see to what extent Western stereotypes had traveled around the world and to see if there were any universal indicators or misconceptions about deception. For instance, previous research already found that most cultures associate deception with fear and shame.
But maybe deception is just attributed to deviations from any cultural norms, and the fear and shame are just indicators of such cultural deviation.
In order to assess these questions, Dr. Adrian Atoum and the Global Deception Research Team fielded an open ended survey asking how someone would go about assessing a potential liar. Overall, this brought in about 40 people for each of the 58 nations, ranging as far afield as Argentina, Iran, and South Africa. Each response was translated by a member of the working team, and they developed a 103 item scoring scheme to categorize similar responses.
Several trends did emerge, namely that the most common response focused on the averted gaze, or the lack of eye contact. This was followed by nervousness, incoherence, body movements, and a suspicious facial expression. Statistical analyses on these responses found that there were considerable overlaps between cultures, though some indicators like averted gaze varied drastically.
This is particularly interesting because, as we have noted in past blogs, the idea that a lack of eye contact signifies deception is a common misconception. While this does vary in significance, it still remains a significant response in 51 of the surveyed countries.
While these results are interesting, they counted on respondents to think up each indicator on their own. To remedy possible bias, an additional survey was administered. This time, respondents were asked whether they saw a series of indicators as demonstrating deception, repurposing the coding schema from the first survey.
The results again indicated that most respondents saw eye contact as being important, followed by a shifting posture, excessive self-grooming, and long story length.
Both of these studies indicate that there are pan-cultural similarities in how people believe they can detect deception, but it is quite striking that the number one indicator in both studies is really a myth.
What this helps confirm is that, left to their own devices, most people are very bad at determining whether they are being lied to. This reinforces the need to have aspiring human lie detectors receive formal training, or at least check out some more information about common misconceptions!
