Nonverbal Dominance Versus Verbal Accuracy in Lie Detection

With the exclusion of some specific circumstances, police officers typically pay more attention to nonverbal behavior than verbal behavior when they attempt to detect deceit. One of the reasons for this is that they believe that suspects are less able to control their nonverbal than verbal behavior and, consequently, nonverbal cues to deception are more likely to leak through. The author states that this assumption is not necessarily valid; deception research has revealed that many verbal cues are more diagnostic cues to deceit than nonverbal cues. Paying attention to nonverbal cues results in being less accurate in truth/lie discrimination, particularly when only visual nonverbal cues are taken into account. Also, paying attention to visual nonverbal cues leads to a stronger lie bias (i.e., indicating that someone is lying). The author recommends a change in police practice and argues that for lie detection purposes it may be better to listen carefully to what suspects say.

LINGUISTIC STYLES IN DECEPTIVE COMMUNICATION: DUBITATIVE AMBIGUITY AND ELLIPTIC ELUDING IN PACKAGED LIES

This paper was aimed at addressing the topic of communicative styles of deception. University students were asked to describe a picture with varying truth/lie conditions. In accordance with their perception or being deliberately against it, the participant could: tell the truth (T); lie to an acquiescent recipient (L1); or lie to a suspicious recipient (L2). The goal was to investigate whether or not different linguistic styles could be correlated to the cognitive complexity of the task as regards the truth bias or lie bias of the recipient. Specifically, two sets of linguistic aspects – micro and macro structural – were analyzed. In the former, indices were considered as words (arguments number, repetitions and interruptions, fluency and fluency disorder indices), predicates (number, nominal/predicative construction, and personal/impersonal structure), pronouns and adverbial forms. In the latter, the structural variations of the standard phrase, utterances' complexity, spatial organization of utterances, and speech organization were analyzed. Results showed that participants used speech to shield from reality and chose different strategies; in the L1 condition, participants resorted to ambiguity and prolixity (“cuttlefish effect”); on the contrary, in the L2 condition they used concise assertiveness and elliptic eluding strategies (“chameleon effect”).