5. Detecting Deception Effectively

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About this Lecture

Lecture

In this lecture, we think about how best to detect deception, focusing in particular on: (i) Vrij and Granhag’s 2012 study, which proposed the creation of new techniques to encourage interviewees to share more information, in order to better differentiate truth from deception; (ii) typical findings that individuals underestimate how much they lie and overestimate their ability to detect lies; (iii) the ‘ostrich effect’, which proposes that individuals generally don’t really want to find out that someone is lying to them; (iv) the truth bias, which leads individuals to believe that others are telling the truth more often than they actually are; (v) the illusion of transparency and the belief in a just world which can lead truth tellers to not impression manage, which can result in them seeming suspicious; (vi) differentiating between attitudes and to-be-remembered events as forms of lies; (vii) the devil’s advocate approach as a lie detection aid; (viii) the stability bias, which states that liars don’t take memory decay into account when recalling fake memories.

Course

In this course, Dr Cody Porter (University of the West of England) explores investigative interviewing and lie detection. In the first lecture, we think about methods of investigative interviewing, including the two main types and four dimensions of each. In the second lecture, we think about historical approaches to lie detection, from ancient practices to the modern polygraph. In the third lecture, we think about how body language can be used to detect deception. Next, we think about the cognitive approach to lie detection. In the fifth lecture, we think about how best to approach detecting deception. In the sixth and final lecture, we review the ‘investigator’s toolkit’ of strategies to detect deception.

Lecturer

Dr Cody Porter is a senior lecturer in social psychology in the department of Health and Social Sciences at the University of the West of England. Dr Porter’s research interests are in information elicitation, lie detection and offending behaviour. Some of Dr Porter’s recent publications include ‘Implementing converged security risk management: Drivers, barriers, and facilitators’ (in press) and ‘Applying the asymmetric information management technique to insurance claims’ (2022).