Another tactic for increasing liars’ cognitive burden is to insist that suspects maintain eye contact with their questioner. When people have to concentrate on telling their story accurately—which liars must, more than truth tellers—they typically look away to some motionless point, rather than directly at the conversation partner. Keeping eye contact is distracting, and it makes narration more difficult. Vrij also tested this strategy in the lab, and again observers spotted lies more easily when the liars were required to look the interrogator in the eye.
Drawing Out the Truth
A third strategy that could be surprisingly effective is to ask suspects to draw a picture. Putting pencil to paper forces people to give spatial information—something that most liars have not prepared for as part of planning their lies and that, therefore, overtaxes their mental resources. When Vrij and his colleagues asked volunteers what their offices looked like, after instructing half to tell the truth about their occupations and half to lie, both truth tellers and liars gave the same amount of detail in their verbal responses. But when Vrij asked them to draw their offices, the liars’ drawings were much less detailed than those of the truth tellers. In another of the experiments, volunteers were questioned about a lunch date that only some subjects had actually attended. The liars’ verbal descriptions of the restaurant did not match up as well with their drawings as did the truth tellers’—and the inconsistencies exposed the lies.
All these tricks may seem like overkill when we think about the fictional detectives we know, including NCIS agent Gibbs, who seem able to ferret out every fib they hear without using any strategies other than their intuition. But in real life, such people are exceedingly rare; psychological scientists call them “wizards” because of their seemingly supernatural lie-detection skills. Researchers have been trying—without a lot of success—to unravel these wizards’ strategies. Until they do, less sophisticated lie catchers may be able to exploit the mind’s cognitive deficits, using tricks such as Vrij’s, to catch the bad guys in their deceptions.
This article was originally published with the title The Burden of Lying.
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14 Comments
Add CommentDetecting all liars is impossible, some people can simply get away with lying.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCertain people, like politicians, have a pathological "need" to lie.
Vril's conclusion that gaze direction correlates with veracity resembles one of the therapeutic models of the discredited pseudo-field of Neuro Linguistic Programming, "eye accessing"; looking in the opposite direction from your dominant hand indicates truthfulness, in the same indicates lying, looking directly at the questioner but with defocused gaze means lying, etc.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHowever, eye accessing was one of the few components of that field that was never falsified outright; it seems to me the "original" correlations should be seen as groping, oversimplified versions of what Vril is quantizing.
Vril's work unquestionably goes hand-in-hand with such verified tools as actual Neurolinguistics, the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), and old-school "body language".
I'd suggest Vril consult some actual "wizards" such as successful professional poker players.
I hope somebody uses his findings to write an app we can use to analyze political interviews and debates...
You mean that one day scientists will develop a real lie detector? Not one of those fake ones that are accepted by no courts in the civilised world?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this(Oops, sorry America).
This is a good idea that has been used by interrogators. It is nice to see that someone is analytically breaking it down and testing methods. The pen to pencil idea is a very good one.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI would wager that this kind of technique would work on most liars.
Now when lis are mixed with truths, it becomes more difficult to use this technique. For instance, you have someone who was actually at the crime seen and you are trying to determine if they were the shooter. Since they were there, they can basically tell "the truth" but leave out some parts or slightly change the story so that they are not the ones with the gun. Or maybe they are just not lieing? This is the same problem in politics. Plus politicians give only a minimal amount of information and alot of fluff, reducuing their chances of "proof of motivation" on various issues. This is why people like quick, direct, to-the-point responses and speaches by politicians (or anyone). They seem more believeable and possibly are more truthful.
I've always had the hunch that that kind of procedures or devices, equally as psychotherapy, work only in normal people, psychopats, sociopaths, borderline and anti-social personalities can tell you lies without noticeable changes in anything, or make you believe they are hiding something that in fact is the lie, while you perceive it as a hidden truth. Police usually wins over delinquents just because they have more means and more experience, criminals are not necesarily less smart than policeman.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCould we require politicians to recite backwards the stories of how they voted on specific issues? I'd bet that they would become very good at doing so.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisVery interesting but eye contact between a woman and a man who is not related to the woman is considered as "not good" in certain cultures.The minds of these women are conditioned in such a way that when they are asked to look into the eyes of a man they are not familiar with, they feel very uncomfortable and their minds go haywire! Then how do you say accurately whether the woman is truly lying or her conditioned mind is playing havoc here? These studies don't take cultural conditioning of minds into account! Then how can they be true for all the people in the world?!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe situation Dr KrishnaKumariChalla depicts can be found in Europe even today, when in a conversation, men are advised not to have eye contact with other men, but looking towards something outside or in a different place in the face, while having eye contact with women is considered more acceptable. May be this social rule comes from the times when looking into the eys had the meaning of some kind of sexual possession, or an attempt to start it, men can't accept this from other men, but women can somehow tolerate it, considering it's some kind of recognition of their beauty that is not going beyond the contemplative side. All this things remain deep in our minds, and are the backbone of how we adjust to living in society, accepting symbols and conventions instead of actual goods, thus improving the society state of peace. Erase this "collective unconscious", "affective hue", or whatever you want calling it, and the world around becomes empty, lacking meaning and unbearable.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe brain’s error detection mechanism registers when something appears wrong. This innate capacity located in the medial frontal cortex detects what neuroscientists call “errors”: the differences between expectation and perceived actuality. This portion of the brain plays a central role in detecting mistakes as well as responding to them.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisConsider the emotional expense of a lie: The surface story is the constructed lie. The subliminal story is the recognition of the lie by the error detection mechanism. Then your brain has to deal with the dissonance. Triple work.
I describe the similar process of lies and debt at http://tinyurl.com/3s2qejb
You can deceive others – even your own mind. But your brain always knows.
David Krueger MD
Executive Mentor Coach
www.MentorPath.com
If we can monitor the brains energy utilization and distribution, we could possibly increase lie detection accuracy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe world desperately needs a reliable lie-detection methodology. Amanda Knox is either 100% guilty or 100% innocent. As was Troy Davis, executed recently in Georgia despite many claiming his innocence. They are not half-way between innocent and guilty in some quantum state. We need a method to get a reliable yes or no answer to a simple question. Maybe this approach offers hope. You could imagine bringing it to a degree where nobody, no matter how well trained in lying, could keep an untrue story straight, or you could imagine our understanding of the brain getting sufficiently accurate that we can figure out when they’re lying and telling the truth by look at a live PET scan – the potential for this would be greatly enhanced by forcing the subject to stress his/her brain to its maximum capacity. What we do know is that having 12 non-experts listen to multiple witnesses with different motivations and try to judge who is telling the truth is NOT a reliable method. Almost anything would be better, with the possible exception of the current lie-detector tests L And also a LOT cheaper, and a lot less painful for everyone involved.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy lie guilty or not, just keep quite. You do not have to talk or answer questions. It is you fifth amendment right, even if you tell the truth they will try to twist it for their purpuses.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy lie, guilty or not just keep quite. It is your fifth amendment right. Even if you are telling the truth they will try to change it to fit their purpuses.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy lie, guilty or not just keep quite. It is your fifth amendment right. Even if you are telling the truth they will try to change it to fit their purpuses.
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