Detecting Lies and Deception

Deception and lies are parts of our everyday lives: whether we’re the ones contributing to them or not, or whether we realize we are or not. It’s inevitable in being human and can’t be helped. But even though we’re exposed to lies and deception in all their forms nearly every day of our lives, we still only recognize them 54% of the time, which is a little more than purely guessing. This is due to the many different kinds of deception: mainly lies (falsifications), equivocations (evasions), concealments (omissions), exaggerations (overstatements), and minimizations (understatements). However, there is research conducted in order to distinguish the different cues that indicate when a person is lying or not.

When most people think of cues of lying, they think of nonverbal cues such as eye contact, nervous tics, and “micro-expressions”. And although they can sometimes be indicators for lying, they are not reliable and more often than not ambiguous. A lot of nonverbal cues are highly dependent on the context in which they are in: in one situation they might be a result of some other underlying reason while in another case they may actually be lying.

People may also look for verbal cues while people are talking in order to determine if they are lying or not. Some examples include a change in pitch (higher or lower) when lying, structuring sentences to distance themselves from their stories and the responsibility of their behavior, and more negativity to name a few. Of course these cues, just like nonverbal cues, on their own are not indicative of lying, but when paired up with each other in the right situation can help detect deception. The following video illustrates this very well:

A lot of attention on deception is focused towards the lies in face-to-face communication, which is hard enough to detect, but we can’t forget about deception that occurs through other mediums like online and digital deception. It’s even harder to detect deception online even though there are only two types: identity based and message based. These kinds of deception are unique to online communication because of the lack of face-to-face communication; you can conceal your identity, which is something that is impossible or extremely difficult when talking to someone face-to-face. Message based deception is similar to face-to-face communication deception, except that it is harder to detect because there is a lack of nonverbal cues and to some extent a lack of verbal cues as well. The ability to detect lies online drops significantly compared to those during face-to-face interactions.

Deception is obviously something that is not that is condoned but is still present in our lives. It clearly has negative effects, but sometimes they can have positive effects through altruistic motives and you believe it will help them through “white lies”. But through paying attention to the nonverbal and verbal cues in the right context, we can determine if and when people are lying to us.