The British Broadcasting Corporation reports on the detection of deception. Excerpt:
Do you know when you’re being lied to? Probably not, since even experienced police interrogators are no more adept at spotting porkies than the rest of us.
Improve your chances (only moderately, to tell you the truth) with BBC News Online’s expert tips.
1) Don’t overestimate yourself
“It’s extremely hard to spot deception,” says Aldert Vrij, author of the research paper Detecting the Liars, just published in The Psychologist.
Mr Vrij points to a study which suggested police officers and lie-detector operators were no better at identifying liars than a control group of students.
It may be that the self-confidence law enforcement professionals had in their abilities to spot a lie actually worked against them – causing them to jump to decisions without properly scrutinising a story or its teller.
Self-styled “forensic psychophysiologists” (the latest buzzword for “polygraphers”) should take note.