He thinks it is particularly important that they conducted the experiment in real airports. “It’s really impressive,” says Levine, who was not involved in this study. Officers trained in Ormerod and Dando’s interviewing technique were more than 20 times more likely to detect these fake passengers than people using the suspicious signs, finding them 70% of the time. They were given a week to prepare their story, and were then asked to line up with other, genuine passengers at airports across Europe. The team prepared a handful of fake passengers, with realistic tickets and travel documents. “A friend said that you are trying to patent the art of conversation,” he says. Ormerod openly admits his strategy might sound like common sense. If a passenger says they are at the University of Oxford, ask them to tell you about their journey to work. Investigators should try to increase the liar’s “cognitive load” – such as by asking them unanticipated questions that might be slightly confusing, or asking them to report an event backwards in time – techniques that make it harder for them to maintain their façade. This forces the liar to expand on their tale until they become entrapped in their own web of deceit.Įmploy the element of surprise.
PATHOLOGICAL LIAR SIGNS SERIES
Ormerod and his colleague Coral Dando at the University of Wolverhampton identified a series of conversational principles that should increase your chances of uncovering deceit: But given some of the dismal results from the lab, what should it be? Ormerod’s answer was disarmingly simple: shift the focus away from the subtle mannerisms to the words people are actually saying, gently probing the right pressure points to make the liar’s front crumble. “The current method actually prevents deception detection,” he says.Ĭlearly, a new method is needed. The existing protocols are also prone to bias, he says – officers were more likely to find suspicious signs in certain ethnic groups, for instance. “It doesn’t give a chance to listen to what they say, and think about credibility, observe behaviour change – they are the critical aspects of deception detection,” he says. Typically, he says, officers will use a “yes/no” questionnaire about the flyer’s intentions, and they are trained to observe “suspicious signs” (such as nervous body language) that might betray deception. Consider the screening some passengers might face before a long-haul flight – a process Ormerod was asked to investigate in the run up to the 2012 Olympics. And although you may hear that our subconscious can spot these signs even if they seem to escape our awareness, this too seems to have been disproved.ĭespite these damning results, our safety often still hinges on the existence of these mythical cues. “I giggle nervously, others become more serious, some make eye contact, some avoid it.” Levine agrees: “The evidence is pretty clear that there aren’t any reliable cues that distinguish truth and lies,” he says.
“There are no consistent signs that always arise alongside deception,” says Ormerod, who is based at the University of Sussex. With familiarity, you might be able to spot someone’s tics whenever they are telling the truth, but others will probably act very differently there is no universal dictionary of body language. The problem is the huge variety of human behaviour.
Yet the more psychologists looked, the more elusive any reliable cues appeared to be.
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