One conclusion that has been steadfastly supported in research on decep- tion is that most people fare poorly when attempting to detect it. Accuracy rates reported in research typically range from 55% to 60%—only slightly better than chance (DePaulo & Pfeifer, 1986; deTurck, Harszlak, Bodhorn, & Texter, 1990; Vrij, 1994). However, these estimates are typically aggregates of two separate forms of detection accuracy: the ability to detect lies, and the ability to detect truths. The issue in the former case is one’s accuracy in labeling lies as deceptive (i.e., lie accuracy); in the latter case, it is one’s ac- curacy in labeling truths as truthful (i.e., truth accuracy). A number of in- vestigations have confirmed that people’s truth accuracy far exceeds their lie accuracy (e.g., Buller, Strzyzewski, & Hunsaker, 1991; deTurck, Feeley, & Roman, 1997; Feeley & deTurck, 1995, 1997; Millar & Millar, 1997; for review, see Feeley & Young, 1998). Feeley and deTurck (1997), for instance, re- ported truth accuracy at 83% and lie accuracy at 19%; similarly, Levine, Park, and McCornack (1999) found that truth accuracy scores ranged from approximately 70% to 80%, whereas lie accuracy was in the range of 35% to 40%. Levine et al. (1999) labeled this disparity the veracity effect.
What accounts for humans’ anemic overall detection ability and for their relative deficiency in detecting lies? One primary cause is that, in the ab-
TABLE 7.1
Nonverbal Behaviors Reliably Associated With Deception
Facial Behaviors
Smiling:
Deceivers use more fake smiles than truthtellers; no difference in overall amount of smiling Eye behaviors:
Deceivers blink more and have more pupil dilation; no difference with respect to eye contact
Vocalic Behaviors
Pitch:
Deceivers have higher pitch than truthtellers Vocal stress:
Vocal stress and nervousness are elevated during deception Speech errors:
Deceivers commit more speech errors than do truthtellers
Kinesic Behaviors
Deceivers engage in fewer hand/finger movements, fewer foot/leg movements, and fewer il- lustrator gestures than do truthtellers
sence of evidence to the contrary, people presume that information pro- vided by others is true. This presumption has been dubbed the truth bias7
and it appears to be the result of people’s deeply engrained expectations that others will be pleasant, decent, and honest (Buller & Hunsaker, 1995; Buller, Strzyzewski, & Hunsaker, 1991; Grice, 1989; Kalbfleisch, 1992; Keller- man, 1984; Levine & McCornack, 1992; O’Sullivan, Ekman, & Friesen, 1988; Riggio, Tucker, & Throckmorton, 1987; Zuckerman, Fischer, Osmun, Wink- ler, & Wolfson, 1987). As Buller and Burgoon (1996) opined, relational trust, which is the “foundation on which enduring relationships are built,” re- quires the fundamental belief that one’s relational partner is communicat- ing honestly (p. 209).
Why do communicators adopt a truth bias? Gilbert (1991) contended that it is because labeling information as false requires more cognitive en- ergy than labeling it as true. Specifically, he reiterated Spinoza’s (1677/1982) original assertion that mental processing patterns default on a truthful as- sessment of incoming information, and that additional analysis (requiring additional cognitive energy) is required to relabel information as false. As Swann and Giuliano (1987) phrased it, “simply entertaining a belief elevates the perceived informativeness of evidence that may confirm the belief” (p. 522). Gilbert and his colleagues (Gilbert, Krull, & Malone, 1990) designed an ingenious series of experiments to test this proposition. Participants in the first experiment were presented with nonsensical terms and their pur- ported English equivalents (e.g., “A twyrin is a doctor”) and were told, fol- lowing the presentation of each phrase, whether the phrase was true or false. They then took part in an identification test in which they had to re- spond affirmatively or negatively to questions (e.g., “Is a twyrin a doctor?”) that drew on their knowledge from the prior task. One-third of the time, the questions were followed almost immediately by a 500-Hz tone; participants had been instructed that, if they heard this tone, they were to answer the question immediately. Of interest to the researchers was whether the cogni- tive interruption created by the tone would influence the correct identifica- tion of true statements as true and of false statements as false. Gilbert and colleagues proposed that, if the Spinozan hypothesis were valid, identifica- tion of false statements as false would suffer but identification of true state- ments as true would not.
This was precisely the pattern that emerged in the first experiment. Accu- rate identification of true statements was almost equally likely in tone- interrupted (58%) and uninterrupted (55%) trials; however, accurate identifi- cation of false statements was significantly compromised in tone-interrupted
7 7The truth bias was originally called the truthfulness bias (Zuckerman, DePaulo, & Rosenthal,
trials (35%), as compared to uninterrupted trials (55%). In the subsequent experiments, participants were instructed either to distinguish genuine from posed facial expressions of joy or to recall facts learned about a ficti- tious animal. In both experiments, interruptions introduced during the test- ing phase significantly decreased the accuracy of identifying false state- ments but had no effect on the accuracy of identifying true statements. These experiments, which employed both verbal and nonverbal stimuli, are supportive of Spinoza’s assertion that received information is initially ac- cepted as true and is only later tagged as false if additional cognitive proc- esses (which are compromised by interruption) are engaged. This can explain why aggregate accuracy scores are considerably higher for the de- tection of truth than for the detection of deceit.
Moreover, identifying information as false does not necessarily imply that the information is deceptive. As we noted above, most definitions of deceit assume a deceptive intention on the part of the sender, such that false information that was inadvertently conveyed as truthful would not qualify as deceit if the sender did not intend to foster a false belief in the re- cipient (see Miller & Stiff, 1993). In light of Spinoza’s hypothesis, this may further compromise one’s lie detection accuracy, since cognitive effort is required not only to identify the information as false but, further, to deter- mine whether an intention on the part of the sender to deceive should be inferred.
If baseline detection ability is modest for most people, then what vari- ables are influential in the success or failure of individual deception at- tempts? Although research has identified a number of such influences, we will focus our attention in this section on some of those that have received the greatest amount of attention, including familiarity, expressiveness and social skill, sex, motivation, suspicion, and interactivity.
Relational Familiarity
The question of whether familiarity advantages or disadvantages deceivers can be addressed with two conflicting lines of thought. On the one hand, one might surmise that deceivers are advantaged when dealing with famil- iar others because of the level of trust that accompanies an established re- lationship. Indeed, in positive relationships, familiarity strengthens the truth bias: people have a stronger truth bias for familiar others, such as friends or family members, than for strangers (Buller & Aune, 1987; Buller, Strzyzewski, & Comstock, 1991; Burgoon, Buller, Ebesu, & Rockwell, 1994; McCornack & Parks, 1986). Buller and Hunsaker (1995) also demonstrated that conversational participants who received truthful and deceptive state- ments from others had a stronger truth bias than did people who merely
observed the conversation. This latter finding appears to reflect a higher level of investment in a conversation that accompanies participating in it rather than simply observing it. This is true, at least, when the relationships are positively valenced. Research indicates that partners in negatively val- enced relationships have attenuated truth biases, or may even have lie bi- ases (see McCornack & Levine, 1990).
Investigations of other communication phenomena have shown that peo- ple are often more lenient in the way they think about and evaluate conver- sational partners, as opposed to people they are merely observing (see, e.g., Manusov, Floyd, & Kerssen-Griep, 1997), which may help explain why the truth bias is stronger for participants than for observers. In addition, Burgoon (e.g., Burgoon & Newton, 1991) has offered that, compared to con- versational participants, observers tend to orient toward others as objects rather than as people, which further explains the tendency for participants to have a stronger truth bias than observers.
On the other hand, one might predict that deceivers are disadvantaged by relational familiarity because friends and family members have what Buller and Burgoon (1996) referred to as informational and behavioral knowledge.8
Informational knowledge is background knowledge about the deceiver that can be compared to the information a deceiver is communicating. For in- stance, passing off false information about oneself to a long-time friend may be more difficult than to a stranger, since the friend can compare the false in- formation to his or her own knowledge about the deceiver.
Behavioral knowledge is information about a person’s typical behavioral patterns. Those who frequently interact with a person ought to be better able than strangers to ascertain departures from his or her normal behav- ioral routines, which may accompany deceptive efforts (see Brandt, Miller, & Hocking, 1980a, 1980b, 1982). Behavioral knowledge is important because deviations from normative behavioral patterns (including moderately high immediacy, positive affect, vocal fluency, and moderate arousal) tend to arouse suspicion and attributions about deception (Burgoon, Buller, Dill- man, & Walther, 1995). Both Ekman and Friesen (1974) and Brandt et al. (1980b) reported that observers who saw a sample of a deceiver’s behavior were more successful at detecting deception on subsequent trials than were those who had no familiarity with the deceiver’s behavior. Moreover, Bond, Omar, Pitre, Lashley, Skaggs, and Kirk (1992) reported that when peo- ple engage in unusual or fishy looking behaviors, observers tend to con- clude that they are being deceptive.
8 8Buller and Burgoon (1996) actually used the terms behavioral familiarity and informational fa-
miliarity. We substitute the term knowledge here, to distinguish these variables from overall rela-
In sum, it is possible to predict either that familiarity helps a deceiver’s efforts (because of the increased truth bias) or that it impedes them (be- cause of informational and behavioral knowledge; see Miller, Mongeau, & Sleight, 1986, p. 502). Few investigations have supported either prediction, however. In an interactive experiment, for example, Burgoon and Floyd (2000) found that communicators were more successful at deceiving friends than strangers. That is, relational familiarity acted to reduce detection ac- curacy. In two earlier experiments, Millar and Millar (1995) reported the same result—that people were better at deceiving familiar others than unfa- miliar others—but only when recipients had access to all information chan- nels. When either visual cues (Experiment 1) or auditory cues (Experiment 2) were withheld, deceptive acts became more successful with unfamiliar others (i.e., strangers) than with familiar others (e.g., friends). By contrast, other studies have found no effect of familiarity on deception success or de- tection accuracy (see, e.g., Comadena, 1982; McCornack & Parks, 1986; Stiff, Kim, & Ramesh, 1992). These results would seem to suggest that the advan- tages and disadvantages of familiarity may cancel each other out.
Some research has suggested a third possibility, however, which is that the relationship between familiarity and deception success is nonlinear. Bauchner (1980), for instance, reported that friends of a deceiver were more accurate at detecting his or her deception than were strangers—and, they were also more accurate than spouses. Presumably, spouses would have greater informational and behavioral familiarity, and a stronger truth bias, than would friends (who, in turn, would exceed strangers on these character- istics). To the extent that the effects of behavioral/information knowledge and truth bias counteract each other, it is perhaps logical to predict that a moderate level of familiarity advantages receivers’ detection abilities relative to either high or low levels of familiarity. The Brandt et al. (1980a) study of- fers some support for this conjecture. Brandt et al. showed observers a base- line sample of a communicator’s behaviors either once, twice, three times, or six times and ascertained the extent to which this exposure made them better able to detect the communicator’s deception, as compared to observ- ers in the control condition who were given no baseline information. They found that observers’ detection accuracy increased as they were exposed to more baseline information; however, those who got the most baseline infor- mation (in the six-exposure, or high familiarity, condition) did no better at de- tecting deception than those in the control condition.
The true relationship between familiarity and deception success remains somewhat elusive. Of course, it may well depend on factors such as the form of deception being used or the modality through which deceptive messages are conveyed. Consideration of these and other influences will await future empirical attention.