Deception detection is one of those things that requires a lot of practice. Not surprisingly, there is a lot of misinformation floating around the web. Perhaps the classic is “eye accessing cues” which supposedly tell you if someone is lying by the direction they are looking. (note: this isn’t true) The reality is that there is no single “way” to tell if someone is being deceptive or not.
If you’re interested in what deception detection is like in the real world, the June edition of the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin has an excellent article on “Evaluating Truthfulness and Detecting Deception“. If this stuff interests you at all, it’s definitely worth a read.
Here are just a few of the insights:
- The role that facial expressions and microexpressions play in detecting deception
- What to do if you are interviewing someone and observe microexpressions that are inconsistent with what they are saying
- What facial expression might suggest that you need to spend more time building rapport with an informant (and importantly: when)
- Which emotion is a liar more likely to fake when being accused of something
I’ve got a lot of respect for the authors of the article, and they do a good job at not falling into the “one size fits all trap”. They reinforce the idea that to understand various communication signals, you need to understand the context in which the communication takes place. The following paragraph sums it up nicely:
Above all, its important to remember that theres no silver bullet to detectingdeception. Detecting microexpressions or inconsistent facial expressions of emotion, andidentifying areas of interest in a verbal statement via statement analysis should never beconsidered signs of lying by themselves. Instead, they are tools that investigators can useto guide them through an interview or interrogation 1
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