Most people lie occasionally. The lies are often insignificant and essentially insignificant – like pretending to find a tasteless gift. But in other contexts, deception is more serious and can have harmful consequences for criminal law. From a social perspective, such lying is better detected than ignored and tolerated.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to accurately detect lies. Lie detectors, such as polygraphs, that work by measuring the level of fear in a subject while answering questions are considered “theoretically weak” and of questionable reliability. This is because, as any traveler questioned by customs knows, it is possible to feel anxious without being guilty.
We have developed a new approach to mock liars based on interview technique and psychological manipulation, with results just published in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition.
Our technique is part of a new generation of cognitive-based lie detection methods that are increasingly being researched and developed. These approaches assume that the mental and strategic processes that the truth-tellers use during interviews are significantly different from those of liars. By using specific techniques these differences can be amplified and detected.
One such approach is the Asymmetric Information Management (AIM) technique. At its core, it aims to provide suspects with a clear means of demonstrating their innocence or guilt to investigators by providing detailed information. Small details are the lifeblood of forensics and can provide investigators with facts to check and witnesses to question them. Importantly, longer, more detailed statements usually contain more evidence of fraud than short statements.
Essentially, the AIM method involves informing suspects of these facts. In particular, interviewers make it clear to interviewees that if they make longer, more detailed statements about the event of interest, the investigator will be better able to detect whether they are telling the truth or lying. This is good news for truth tellers. This is less good news for liars.
Indeed, research shows that when suspects are given these instructions, they behave differently depending on whether they are telling the truth or not. Truth-tellers usually try to prove their innocence and usually provide more detailed information in response to such instructions.
Liars, on the other hand, want to hide their guilt. This means they are more likely to withhold information strategically in response to AIM instructions. Their (perfectly correct) assumption here is that providing more information will make it easier for the investigator to discover their lie, so they provide less information instead.
This asymmetry in the responses of liars and truth-tellers – from which the AIM technique takes its name – suggests two conclusions. If, using the AIM instructions, the investigator is presented with a potential suspect who provides a lot of detailed information, chances are he is telling the truth. Conversely, if the potential suspect is lying, the investigator will usually see shorter statements.
The experiment
But how effective is this approach? Preliminary research into the AIM technique is promising. For our study, we recruited 104 people who were sent to different locations in a university on one of two secret missions to retrieve and / or deposit intelligence material.
All interviewees were then informed that there had been a data breach during their absence. They were therefore suspects and faced an interview with an independent analyst. Half were told to tell the truth about their mission to convince the interviewer of their innocence. The other half was told that they could not reveal any information about their mission and that they would have to come up with a cover story about where they had been at the time and place of the breakup to convince the analyst of their innocence.
They were then interviewed and the AIM technique was used in half of the cases. We found that when the AIM technique was used, it was easier for the interviewer to spot liars. In fact, lie detection accuracy has increased from 48% (no AIM) to 81%, with truth tellers providing more information.
Research is also exploring methods of improving the AIM technique using clues that can support truth tellers to provide even more information. Recalling information can be difficult, and truth-tellers often struggle to remember it.
Memory tools known as “mnemonics” can potentially improve this process. For example, if a witness to a robbery has made an initial statement and cannot recall additional information, investigators can use a mnemonic: asking the witness to think about the events from someone else’s perspective (‘what would a police officer have? seen if they were there ”). This can retrieve new – not previously reported – information from memory.
If so, our new technique can become even more accurate to detect verbal differences between truth-tellers and liars.
Either way, our method is an ethical, non-accusatory, and information-gathering approach to interviewing. AIM’s instructions are simple to understand, easy to implement, and look promising. Although initially tested for use in police questioning of suspects, such instructions could be implemented in a variety of settings, such as insurance claims institutions.
This article by Cody Porter, Senior Teaching Fellow in Psychology and Offending Behavior, University of Portsmouth, has been republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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