Sometimes it is easier to identify signs that a story is true rather than look for elusive lying tells. German psychologists have developed the popular Statement Validity Assessment to be used in cases of alleged sexual offences to children, to determine the credibility of the child’s testimony. At the heart of the SVA is a nineteen-point list which forms the criteria-based content analysis phase of the assessment. Here we see a number of signs which point to a credible testimony which are of use to us here. If someone is telling you a story which you believe may not be true, it is worth being aware of some of these points. Aldert Vrij discusses the system in his book Detecting Lies and Deceit, which is where I first came across it. Since then I have found myself using it as a checklist when listening to people’s stories. The list also represents a lovely insight into the sorts of patterns we all fall into when relating events. Here are the most valuable criteria from the system:
1. Unstructured production. Truthful stories, unless they have been told many times, tend to involve all sorts of jumping forwards and backwards across the timeline of the narrative. A person will get so far into a story and commonly have to backtrack to give background information on something which he realizes is about to come up. While we tend to feel we’ve ruined a story by doing this, it is in fact an extremely common pattern. Equally, a person may well tell the story not from the start but rather by explaining the essential point they want to communicate first before then filling in the background and providing the narrative. The chronology will most likely be all over the place, especially if the story is emotive and relatively fresh.
2 . Quantity of details. The richer the details, the more likely the story is to be true. As we have already discussed, a typical liar will not elaborate on details when questioned about the specifics of an event. He’ll just tend to repeat himself. An openness to providing additional information is a good sign of truthfulness.
3. Contextual embedding. This occurs when the person places events within the context of his daily life rather than as isolated events which sound like they could have occurred in a vacuum. For example, ‘I was just sitting outside in the garden to relax a bit after cleaning the kitchen – the sun had just come out and I didn’t fancy watching Countdown which I normally would, so I thought I’d sit on the patio for a bit.’ These contextual references tend not to appear when the story is a fake.
4 . Descriptions of interactions. Truthful stories are more likely to involve details about how the person interacted with other key characters. For example, ‘I asked him what he was doing there, and he laughed weirdly – so I felt a bit threatened and backed off a bit.’
5. Reproduction of speech. Few liars will reproduce parts of a dialogue in their stories, preferring instead to report what was said rather than say it in the story. For example, ‘I said, “Don’t do that you’ll mess it up,”’ is more likely to point to a true story than ‘I told him not to do it or he’d mess it up.’
6 . Unexpected complications during the incident. If the story contains neither interruptions nor unexpected events that interfere with its flow, it’s less likely to be true.
7. Unusual details. These are details offered along the way that stand out. For example, the fact that a person in the story had a gold tooth. Details may be superfluous to the main flow of the story.
8. Accurately reported details misunderstood. Classically, this would involve a child too young to understand sexual activity talking about a perpetrator’s sexual actions in naïve terms. But it can happen in other contexts; an event might be referred to where its meaning was lost on the person relating the story, but is understood by the interviewer.
feeling at different times in the story, or what thoughts were going through her head.
10. Attribution of the perpetrator’s mental state . Here, the person describes how another character in the story seemed to be feeling. For example, ‘He was clearly annoyed because he took his glasses off and raised his voice.’
1 1 . Spontaneous corrections. Little corrections or dropped-in additions make a story more convincing. Here are both: ‘He was using his laptop to write – he had one of those little Sony Vaios – and sat there for hours and only ever ordered a coffee. Well, no, he did get a muffin at one point, but he was there for ages.’
12. Admitting lack of memory. A truth-teller has no need to worry about spontaneously admitting lapses of memory or details he cannot remember whilst telling the story. It would be quite normal for him to say something like, ‘Can’t remember why we were there but we were all staying at this hotel.’ However, this criterion is not fulfilled by giving an answer such as ‘I don’t know’ to a direct question.
13. Raising doubts about one’s own testimony . The truthful person might admit that certain parts of the story might be wrong or misremembered.
14. Self-deprecation. Here the person refers to details which might incriminate himself or make himself look foolish. E.g., ‘That was my own fault, I knew I shouldn’t have left him alone.’ Sometimes this may extend to pardoning the guilty party in the story altogether.
There are of course still reasons why these criteria may be present when a lie is told, or be absent in a truthful report. Therefore, in a criminal context, these criteria must be cross-referred with a second ‘validity check-list’ that looks at the characteristics of the interviewees, the pressures upon them and the style of questioning in the interviews themselves before being seen as at all conclusive. So again, take care before jumping to conclusions. Spotting lies is a fascinating but extraordinarily tricky skill.