Written by Timothy R. Levine on University of Alabama Press, 2020
Hardcore academic, but not the kind who makes words up to confuse you instead of just doing a better job of explaining things. He never believes his own results; instead he changes the variables and does another study. He's the opposite of the self-stimulating hermit who writes not to communicate to others but to hear himself talk. He's a real model of what a researcher should be. He's got healthy but persistent suspicion of everything, he's really intent on setting the record straight, on being absolutely certain before you say something, and he's not discrediting or disparaging anyone else in the process. And finally, in a way you never see in a science book like this, it does come with a climax at the end, and makes it feel like the whole thing was a story, constructed on purpose, with a beginning, middle, and end. You wish every researcher was like this. He even mentions how he gets upset that taxpayer funds go to wack theories.
Also, the amount of time he spends and the effort in making it crystal clear who was the brains behind the "veracity effect" at the beginning of Chapter 12 is not only reaffirming to hear such respect but also another opportunity to see into the academic machine in ways that are often ignored. Sometimes I wonder if it's out of a kind of elitism where authors think "regular readers" wouldn't understand or don't care about these details. Not true, and I feel more respected as a reader.
- Most people are honest most of the time.
- Most lies are told by a few prolific liars.
- (Taken from Turner) Honesty as complete disclosure may be inaccurate, and may be better described as fidelity to maintaining a relationship by selectively controlling information.
- (Levine) Deception may not be a moral choice, but a practical one, and need not be conscious, but does serve a purpose.
- The younger you are, the more you lie.
- In deception studies, your chances of guessing correctly whether someone's lying is 54%.
- Most people, when they do lie, are pretty good liars.
- People who appear confident, friendly, composed, and engaged tend to be believed.
- Some people have honest demeanors and some don't, and that's it.
- Liars do the same "telltale" behaviors as non-liars, leading to much misclassification.
- Non-verbal cues for deception detection came from folk wisdom, but also the coincidence that many of the researchers came from non-verbal communication studies.
- Most people think lack of eye contact is the #1 sign of deception, but also shifting posture, response latency, fast talking, speech errors, more pauses and hesitation, less plausible content, contradict themselves, less conversationally involved, uncertainty in voice, less friendly and cooperative, and more nervous.
- High pitch and pupil dilation correlate, but it's small.
- Theories that don't work: Ekman's leakage theory that we unconsciously "leak" the truth via gestures etc. while lying , but only for emotionally potent, high stakes lies. He sums up all the other theories of deception in a meta-theory called Cue Theory: deception is a psychological state that manifests behavioral cues which can be detected. He also references a man named Kraut 1980s who says all deception theory is biased on the assumption that observable behavior represents internal states.
- He has concerns about deception research in the legal and criminal psychology areas - they seem cliquish and provincial; they co-author and review one another's work.
- "Deception becomes probable when the truth makes honest communication difficult or inefficient."
- "Deception - or more precisely, the possession of problematic information ..."
- Deception becomes probable when people judge truthful information as so problematic it can't be disclosed (McCornack).
- Deception is purposive, i.e., people lie for a reason: "The basic functions of communication include being informative and sharing information and influencing the affect, cognition and behaviors of others; entertainment; and building, maintaining or ending social, personal, and professional relationships." p154
Deception Motives:
- Personal Transgression - cover up a misdeed
- Economic Advantage - money as always
- Personal Advantage - promotion at work, avoid a disliked task
- Social or Politeness - saying a stupid gift is really nice
- Altruism - to protect another; father lying to daughter about being sick
- Self-Impression Management - status? (cant this be #3?)
- Malicious - cause harm to others
- Humor - like a prank
- Pathological - delusional, disregard for consequences
- Avoidance - sorry can't make it tonight, my fish tank just exploded
Variable Affecting Truth Bias:
- Experimentally primed suspicion - when you are told to be suspicious
- Closeness of relationship - closer you are, the more you're biased to believing them
- Face-to-face interaction
- Mere questioning aka The Probing Effect - watching a person be questioned, no matter how they answer, makes them look more honest to you (now that's an interesting one)
- Sender demeanor believability - this is the strongest variable
Truth Default Deactivation Triggers:
- Projected motive for deception - you think they have a reason to lie
- Dishonest demeanor - they "look like" they're lying
- Incoherent message content - doesn't make sense
- Lack of correspondence between content and reality - also doesn't make sense
- Warning from a third party
On Scientific Revolutions and Paradigm Shifting:
This only applies to deception research, but it's the common phenomenon you see all the time preceding a drastic shift in thinking within a field of study. For decades, you had a 56% chance of detecting deception, based on the deception research. But those experiments were just not generalizable, or in other words, they were too "artificial" to be compared to real life. It's an example of how easily we are hypnotized by our own time.
The Behavior Quotient aka The Demeanor Index:
Alas, this is the reason I bought the book; people appear so apt to believe me when I talk, and I find that so weird because I would be super-suspicious of myself if I heard myself talking, and I wonder what it is that makes people like this. He says this list is worth "vastly more than what you paid for this book." It started because in one of his experiments there were a few "senders" who everyone got wrong, and a few who everyone got right, so they looked at those people, and this is what they found:
Sincere (Honest) Demeanor Cues:
- Confidence and composure
- Pleasant and friendly interaction style
- Engaged and involved interaction style
- Gives plausible explanations
Insincere (Dishonest) Demeanor Cues:
- Avoids eye contact
- Appears hesitant and slow in providing answers
- Vocal uncertainty (in tone of voice)
- Excessive fidgeting
- Appears tense, nervous, anxious
- Portrays an inconsistent demeanor over course of interaction
- Verbal uncertainty (bad vocabulary?)
- I call all these things basic public speaking skills?
Finally, and providing climax in a science book, something which never happens, or which isn't necessarily supposed to happen, they reveal that in fact it's possible to break the 56% accuracy ceiling. Expertise is possible but it's context-dependent and involves knowing how to prompt diagnostically useful information rather than passive observation of behavioral cues. The experts scored 100%, not 56%.
Note that up until now, deception researchers used scripted questions, which undercuts the experts' expertise; the whole point of them being experts is them knowing which questions to ask.
How did they do it? Start conversationally, get to know the person. Then, ask critical information about th eissue, like facts that can be corroborated. Then ask about their integrity and views on cheating (the experiment was a simulated cheating scenario). Then they circle back and ask the same questions again ina different way, but remembering the first answers. They also tried to convince them to confess, stressing the importance of honesty.
Five Keys to Improving Lie Detection:
- Correspondence of communication in evidence - what you said vs known facts
- Content in context - situational familiarity, knowing whether this is a joke or has double meaning
- Assessment of deception motives
- Diagnostic questioning
- Persuading honesty
