Detecting deceit, offline and on
With online identity experiments on the rise, people on the Internet are charging their deceit-detector batteries. Psychological research on deception, however, shows that most of us are poor judges of truthfulness, and this applies even to professionals such as police and customs inspectors whose jobs are supposed to include some expertise at lie detection. For example, police officers watched videotaped statements, some truthful and others deceptive, and were told to pay attention to facial expressions, body movements, gestures, and vocal cues such as the pitch and tempo of the voice. Even with training, these officers did little better than chance at guessing the truthfulness of the statements. Ironically, those officers who were most sure of their judgments, most confident they were trapping the liars, were most likely to be wrong.
Despite these unpromising results, there are clearly some people who are rather successful at detecting deceit, though the cues they use to do it are far from clear. Liars do not emit any uniform set of clues to help people detect the lies, but there are a few characteristics that seem to reappear in experimental studies. Some examples are overcontrolled movements, reduced rate of speech, more vocal pauses, and higher voice pitch. It appears we have to concentrate when we lie, and the effort diminishes some of the spontaneity of normal human interaction. Poker players, at least the ones who usually win, learn much about decoding deceit in their playing partners. David Hayano found that the best knew very well that few hard and fast rules apply to the behavior people show when they aren't telling the truth. Instead of relying on deception-detection cookbooks, the poker experts analyzed each of their opponents individually, often keeping lengthy notes about the playing styles and idiosyncrasies of each one. In principle, each player has his or her own set of "tells" that reveal a bluff or a winning hand, perhaps through a cough or an almost imperceptible smile. Of course, poker is an endless cat and mouse game, and players contrive "anti-tells" they hope will mislead their opponents.
Practically all the cues people attempt to use to detect deceit are nonverbal. The pauses, the vocal pitch, the tiny lapse in facial expression, the overcontrolled body movements, are invisible on the Internet, unless you are using interactive video. Even if we were experts at spotting a lie, which we most certainly are not, we would be sorely disadvan-taged online. The fact that it is so easy to lie and get away with it - as long as we can live with our own deceptions and the harm they may cause others - is a significant feature of the Internet.