He Said What - Deception Detection Part 2

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ow often have you heard
the phrase, “Look me in the
eye and say that.”? It is deeply
rooted in our collective
psychology that the best way to tell
whether someone is telling the truth is
to look them in the eyes while they are
speaking. Suppose I were to tell you
that you'd be better off closing your
eyes while that person was talking to
you? Well, that advice is among
surprising lessons learned from
research on deception detection,
conducted by psychologists,
sociologists and neuroscientists over
the past few decades.
Here are a number of
commonly relied upon indicators of
deceptive behavior:
 Avoidance of eye contact
 Stuttering
 Perspiration
 Fidgeting
 Hesitation
 Blinking
 Shifting position
 Nervous laughter.
Whether a person can articulate
exactly what he is looking for when
trying to determine whether he is being
lied to, he likely makes note of these
various visual and auditory cues in
conducting his evaluation. The
problem is that we, as human beings,
tend to focus on the wrong things and
also make the wrong inferences from
what we observe. The “tells” on the list
above have been shown experimentally
to be very poor indicators of lying.1
The major reason that they serve so
poorly as proxies for deception is that
speakers who want to be believed
regularly exhibit such behaviors even
when they are telling the truth,
especially in high stress situations.
Consider the HR professional who
takes the stand in an employment
discrimination lawsuit. Her own
handling of the underlying workplace
situation might be in question. She is
often speaking as the company's
representative, a role with a lot of
responsibility and pressure. Her
testimony might be central to the jury's
evaluation of the case—or she might
just believe that it is. She is an
unfamiliar environment, being
questioned by a hostile stranger, while
a stern judge in a black robe stares at
her from on high. In short, this is an
extremely stressful environment. The
witness is highly motivated to be
believed by the jury. Would anyone
blame her if she fidgets, or stammers,
or perspires or occasionally loses
focus? Of course not; but jurors are
likely to interpret these symptoms of
stress as red flags for deceitfulness.
This article (second in a two-part
series)2 is devoted to reviewing what we
know about strategies people use to
evaluate whether a speaker is being
truthful or deceptive, the actual
effectiveness of those strategies, and
what has been learned over the years
about how to help people improve
their performance in terms of
deception detection. This discussion
follows upon what was covered in the
first article and so a brief review is in
order.
First and foremost, human beings
are supremely bad at differentiating
true statements from lies. Over
hundreds of studies, conducted in a
variety of settings over decades of
H
“He Said What?”: Deception Detection and
Employment Litigation – Part II: The Fallible Juror

2
research, the primary, and remarkably
robust, result is that we, as a species, do
little better than flipping a coin when it
comes to detecting deception. The
average success rate at telling truth
from fiction is about 54%.3
In the first article, I reviewed
several variants of this basic result.
“Professional” lie detectors, such as
law enforcement agents, judges and
mental health professionals, do not
perform significantly better than the
rest of us at discerning truth from
fiction. We are all generally more
suspicious of messages from men, and
yet they are more effective than women
at duping us with their lies. From a
gender perspective, the most accurate
kind of evaluation is women correctly
discerning when another woman is
being truthful. This result needs to be
interpreted with a grain of salt,
however, due to something known as
the “truth bias.” Humans, in general,
and women to some extent more than
men, tend to believe they are being told
the truth more often than they are. In
studies where participants are exposed
to equal ratios of lies and truths, they
still identify almost two-thirds of
statements as true. As such, just by
sampling, participants will correctly
identify a higher percentage of truths
than lies.
An interesting thing can happen,
however, when the statements being
evaluated are “denials” instead of
“assertions.” Researchers have
detected a “lie bias” with respect to
denials, which calls into question our
collective commitment to the idea of
“innocent until proven guilty.” Forcing
someone to deny something on the
stand—even truthfully—can cause
jurors to increase their internal
estimates of the likelihood that the
person is a liar.
The second key finding from the
experimental research is that we all
think we are much better at
discriminating honesty from lies than
we really are.4 Therefore, jurors will
often rely heavily on their evaluations
of a witness's credibility,
notwithstanding the fact that those
evaluations are likely to be faulty. A key
corollary to this result is that there is
virtually no statistical relationship
between a person's confidence in his
ability to tell whether someone is lying
and his actual ability to do so. The juror
who proclaims in the jury room that a
particular witness was clearly lying is no
more likely to have correctly assessed
the witness's veracity than anyone else
on the jury. This result has profound
implications for litigators in the
courtroom, in that it is a very
dangerous strategy to rely on a jury's
ability to identify which witnesses are
being truthful in order to win a case.
People are terrible at figuring out
when they are being told the truth and
when they are being told lies. These
same people are convinced that they
are actually quite competent at
discerning truth from lies; and there is
no reason for the self-professed lie
detectors to exhibit such confidence.
This begs the question, “What are we
doing wrong?” The answer, and the
focus of this article, is that people
regularly look to exactly the wrong
indices of deception, such as those
enumerated above.
With respect to the “look me in the
eye” test, it turns out that liars typically
do a pretty good job of controlling their
facial expressions while truth-tellers
pay less attention to the emotional
expressions associated with their
speech.5 As such, focus on a speaker's
face during message transmission
actually reduces a listener's ability to tell
whether she is being told the truth or
lied to.6 Consider a typical witness
stand—a low chair behind a tall screen,
so that little more than the witness's
face is visible. This is a terrible recipe
for accurate deception detection by
jurors. There are strategies, however,
that can be used to increase the
likelihood that jurors will recognize the
veracity of an honest witness, and
others that can improve the detection
of deceptive testimony. These
strategies comprise the bulk of the
discussion below.
I. TRANSPARENCY AND
TRUTH DETECTION
Over the years, psychologists and
sociologists have conducted hundreds
of studies aimed at exploring the ability
of humans to distinguish honest
messages from deceptive ones. It is
important at this point to emphasize
that, for our purposes here, a deceptive
message is one that the bearer of the
message (be it a job applicant,
significant other, business associate or
witness) believes to be false, but is
delivered in a way intended to convince
the recipient of the message that it is
true. A truthful message, by contrast, is
believed to be true by the speaker, who
similarly attempts to convince the
recipient that it is true. As such, this
review does not cover mistakes,
misremembrances, uncertainty on the
speaker's part, exaggerations or
expressions of overconfidence. All of
these other forms of “falsehoods” are,
of course, very important, both in
everyday business dealings and
litigation; they are, however, beyond
the scope of this article.
Each message importantly
involves two people: the sender and the
receiver. The well-known philosophical
question asks if a tree falls in the forest,
and no one is around to hear it, does it
make a sound?7 The philosophical
question can be restated, for our
purposes, in terms of whether a
sound—or a message—that does not
reach any listener can still have
meaning. A great majority of the early
studies of deception detection focused
on the ability of the listener to discern
truth from fiction. While there was
some focus on the nature of the
message—its subject matter , length,
syntax, etc.—and how such things
could affect deception detection
performance, relatively little attention
was paid to the role played by the
speaker.
A. Demeanor vs. Transparency
Relatively recently, researchers
began to ask whether it might be the
case that certain speakers are just easier
to read than others.8 Might it be the

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ability of the sender to convey
trustworthiness, rather than any innate
ability of the listener, that contributed
to effective deception detection? This
line of inquiry required further
elaboration of what could be meant by
terms like “credible” and
“trustworthy.” Surely, a speaker who
always came across as honest, even
when she was lying, would not improve
listener accuracy. Listeners would
correctly identify her true statements
but would always be fooled by her lies.
By the same token, a speaker who
seems to everyone to be “the lying
sort” would have his deceptions
detected (a good outcome), but would
have a great deal of difficulty getting
anyone to believe his honest statements
(a bad outcome).
It became necessary, then, to
distinguish between “demeanor” and
“transparency.” Demeanor describes
the level of trustworthiness a speaker
conveys, regardless of the truth of his
message. So, some people just come
across as honest; others seem shifty.
This is a description of demeanor. By
contrast, a person is transparent if he
seems trustworthy when he tells the
truth and deceptive when he lies.9
Transparency can be thought of as a
characteristic of a person, in that he is
generally easy to read, or of a person in
a particular context. For instance, a
person might be very transparent in his
communications with his spouse but
nontransparent at the poker table.
B. Mr. Cellophane—It's all in
your mind
From the perspective of the
listener, we know that people are not
very good at all at reading the cues to
deception. Most people look to
unhelpful cues and ultimately perform
little better than chance when
attempting to differentiate lies from
truths. What's more, we have
completely unrealistic expectations
about our own abilities to perform this
task. What then of the speakers who
are sending the messages? Do they
typically appreciate how convincing
they are? Do witnesses know how
effectively they can lie? Or, how
convincingly they can report the truth?
Recent research has revealed that
we are not appreciably better at
recognizing our own transparency than
recognizing it in others. Gilovich,
Savitsky and Medvec (1998) conducted
a series of experiments aimed at
exploring whether people have a
realistic sense of their own
transparency.10 In one experiment,
students were placed in groups of 5 and
all asked to answer the same question
about their own personal experiences.
In each round, one student was
assigned to be the liar. After all five
students had spoken their answers, the
four truth-tellers were asked to identify
the liar in the group and the liar was
asked to estimate the percentage of
other group members who would
correctly identify him (or her) as the
liar. By pure chance, the accuracy rate
should have been 25% and the
experimental result was 25.6%.
Therefore, we can conclude that, at
least under these conditions, the
student subjects were not very
transparent at all. By contrast, the mean
estimate of transparency (percentage of
my group members would identify me
as the liar) was 48.8%. That is, subjects
thought they were twice as transparent
as they were.
The researchers were concerned
that the overestimate of transparency
might just stem from the general
perception that lies are easier to spot
than they really are. The team then ran
a replication of the study with an
important twist. Each subject was
yoked to an “observer.” The observer
knew whether his partner was a truth-
teller or liar for each round but knew
nothing more about any of the other
players. Once again, participants
overestimated their transparency
(44.3% estimate of being pegged as the
liar); however, the observers did not
overestimate their partners'
transparency (25.3% estimate of being
caught lying). As a further check on this
result, the researchers had each
participant and his observer rate the
“obviousness” of the participant's lie
on a 7-point scale, ranging from “not at
all obvious” (1) to “very obvious” (7).
Participants rated their own lies as a 3.0
on the obviousness scale, on average,
while the average response from an
observer partner was only 2.0.
These results have important
implications for litigators concerned
about witnesses lying on the stand
during trial. While the general inability
of jurors to correctly discern who is
being honest and who is lying to them
is extremely troubling, the concern
would be somewhat mitigated by a
belief that witnesses generally tell the
truth under oath. In addition to deeply
ingrained social norms against lying
and a strong commitment to the
integrity of the judicial system, we can
add another reason to suspect that
witnesses will be loath to lie on the
stand: they think they'll get caught. The
illusion of transparency can act as a
deterrent (albeit a false one) to perjury.
C. In Search of Transparent
Testimony
There might only be a small
portion of the population who are fairly
transparent throughout their lives, in
that their lies are easily distinguishable
from their truths across a wide range of
circumstances. That is not to say,
however, that most of us cannot be
transparent under some circumstances.
The question facing a trial attorney is
how to increase transparency for
witnesses on the stand. Is there some
method of questioning that will
increase the ability of jurors to identify
both truthful witnesses as credible and
dishonest ones as liars?
Levine, Shaw and Shulman sought
to explore this very question.11 They
hypothesized that asking subjects
directly whether they were lying could
lead to greater transparency than
simply asking them the questions to
which they might offer lies. It was not
obvious that such an approach would
increase transparency. Asking a liar
about his lying puts him on notice of
his veracity being scrutinized, thereby
increasing his incentive to mask his
insincerity. By contrast, the honest

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person could have a whole host of
emotional responses to being accused
of lying, some of which might be
misinterpreted by listeners as some
indication of dishonesty.
The researchers had subjects
participate in a trivia game with a
partner, ostensibly to explore issues of
teamwork. The partner was a
confederate who would encourage the
subject to cheat on the trivia game.
Following the game, each subject was
interviewed briefly with three varieties
of questions. Only two types of
questions are relevant for our purposes
here. Each subject was first asked
rather innocuous questions about
experience with trivia games and team
exercises. At the end of the interview,
each subject was asked pointedly
whether anyone had cheated at the
game. Each person who denied
cheating was then asked if he was
telling the truth. Finally, he was asked
what his partner from the game would
say about whether any cheating had
gone on. All cheaters who confessed
were excluded from the sample, leaving
22 subjects who cheated and then
completely denied doing so during the
subsequent interview.
The researchers matched these
lying cheaters with 22 demographically
similar subjects who played the game
honestly and subsequently denied
cheating (Happily, there were no false
confessions). These 44 interviews were
then edited into two distinct sets. The
first set included only the background
questions about trivia and teamwork.
The second set included only the direct
and strategic questioning about
cheating and lying. The researchers
then showed the 44 background
interviews to 64 different subjects,
asking each one to identify each
interviewee as either a cheater-liar or an
honest non-cheater. They showed the
44 direct and strategic interviews to a
different group of 64 subjects and
asked them to also identify each
interviewee as either a cheater-liar or
honest non-cheater.
Overall accuracy was 55.9%, very
much in keeping with what has been
discovered in other studies—slightly
better than chance. There was the
expected truth bias, with listeners
identifying 60% of interviewees as
honest (despite only half of them being
so). The key result, however, was the
difference in success rate depending on
interrogation method. The subjects
who only saw background interviews
only correctly distinguished cheaters
from non-cheaters 44% of the time.
On the other hand, the ones who
watched the direct and strategic
interviews had a 68% accuracy rate.
Cross-examination very substantially
increased witness transparency.
The results further supported the
hypothesis that transparency of the
message sender is a greater
contributing factor to successful
deception detection than is the judging
skill of the listener. For those judges
who watched the background
interviews, 85% of them had a success
rate between 30% and 50%. That is,
almost everyone was pretty mediocre.
The group who watched the direct
interviews performed better but had
similarly homogeneous success, with
85% of them correctly distinguishing
cheaters from non-cheaters between
60% and 80% of the time. Some of the
speakers, however, proved to be
extremely transparent while others
were completely confounding. 9% of
the speakers were incorrectly identified
as cheaters or non-cheaters more than
80% of the time when only their
background interviews were observed.
On the other hand, among those whose
background interviews were watched,
9% were so transparent that they were
correctly classified more than 80% of
the time. This variation in transparency
carried over to the direct/ strategic
interviews, as well. One quarter of the
speakers were misclassified more than
half the time even when facing direct
interrogation. On the other hand, more
than a third of the speakers were
correctly identified as cheaters or non-
cheaters by more than 80% of listeners
after watching their direct
interrogations.
These results bring with them two
very important lessons for litigators.
The first is that witnesses vary a great
deal with respect to their inherent
transparency. The best way to ascertain
whether a witness is transparent is to
subject a simulation of their testimony
(or a clip from a deposition) to a focus
group for reaction. In addition to
asking for general ratings of credibility
and honesty, it would be wise to ask
respondents to evaluate the
truthfulness of specific key statements
related to the central themes of the
case. When it really counts, will jurors
believe your witness? For an adverse
witness, will jurors detect false
statements? Will they dismiss even true
ones? Assuming that your trial team
knows which statements are true and
which are false, it will be possible to
differentiate between a witness's
demeanor and her transparency. One
aspect of this is worthy of mention. Just
as we are very poor evaluators of
veracity, but think we are much better
than we are, I would strongly counsel
attorneys not to assume that they can
easily discern themselves whether a
witness will be transparent or not.
Don't take a chance that your coin •ip
turned out wrong—go test out reaction
to any key witness to confirm that
jurors will react to testimony as you
expect they will.
The second important lesson is
that direct and strategic interrogation
can increase witness transparency.
Note that this was true even for
subjects who did not cheat and were
honestly denying the accusation of
having done so. Therefore, while a
tough cross-examination will increase
the likelihood that jurors will detect
deceit from an adverse witness (no real
surprise), asking your own witness to
confirm that she is telling the truth can
actually increase the likelihood that
jurors correctly identify her as being
honest. There is an important caveat
here. Because transparency varies
across speakers, direct and strategic
questioning will not uniformly improve
juror judgments of veracity. For some
witnesses, it will be very effective, while

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for others, it might not make much of
a difference.
II. IMPROVING LISTENER
PERFORMANCE
Given the very poor performance
of experimental subjects in deception
detection studies, researchers have
turned their attention to identifying
what it is, if anything, that observers do
wrong that causes them to so poorly
distinguish truth from fiction. If we
understand better the errors we make,
it might be possible to develop
strategies for improving accuracy in
distinguishing truths from lies.
A. The Wrong Cues
As noted above, many common
beliefs about how liars behave
differently from truth tellers turn out to
be counterproductive. That is, they are
misconceptions. Many of these
misconceptions are related to facial
expressions.
A liar will not look the listener in
the eyes. Liars always look up and to
the left. A liar will suffer from dry lips
and mouth, and will therefore lick his
lips more. Liars blink a lot. Someone
who is lying will have a facial tick. All
of these are regularly listed by people as
things to look for when trying to figure
out who is lying.12
A person who is motivated to lie,
however, will do his very best to
control the kinds of behaviors that are
likely to be interpreted by his audience
as signs of dishonesty. In fact, a person
who is trying to deceive might control
such mannerisms much more closely
than someone who knows he has
nothing to hide. As such, focusing on
the face of the speaker might just be
counterproductive for detecting
deception.
Zuckerman, et al. addressed this
concern in a meta-analysis that
reviewed many deception detection
studies, focusing on listener
performance as a function of what the
listener could see and hear.13 The
results were quite intriguing. Being able
to hear the speakers words definitely
improved performance in lie detection
over watching silent footage of the
speaker. The ability to see the speaker's
body was also somewhat helpful. By
contrast, being able to watch the
speaker's face during the delivery of the
message actually reduced the ability of
the listener to discern whether he was
being lied to. The speaker's face proved
to be an unhelpful distraction.
Listeners have a tendency to focus on
the one part of the speaker that liars
control better than truth-tellers.
There are two straightforward
strategies to overcome this failure in
the way people try to distinguish truth
from fiction. The first is to get listeners
to focus on more productive cues. The
second is to disrupt the ability of liars
to control their facial reactions while
testifying.
B. Leakage: Break the Dam
Paul Ekman and his collaborators
pioneered an approach to deception
detection, focused on exploiting the
psychological effort required to control
one's emotions while lying.14 The
underlying theory suggests that it is
more taxing for a person to represent a
statement as true if it is, in fact, a lie,
than if it were actually true. The speaker
has to keep the lie straight and
consistent, control tone and maintain
composure. All of the studies cited to
this point suggest that liars actually
achieve these ends quite easily. Ekman
and his team, however, suggested that
there must be ways to detect the stress
on the speaker created by having to
maintain a lie.
These researchers discovered that
people who are trying to remain stoic
and unreadable (non-transparent) tend,
nonetheless, to reveal their true
emotional states through their facial
expressions, but only for microseconds
at a time.15 That is, we tend to leak our
true emotions. The problem from a
deception detection standpoint,
however, is that these leakages, refer
red to as micro-expressions, are so
brief that most people miss them
completely.
Ekman and some of his colleagues
have developed training techniques to
teach people to detect micro-
expressions during interrogations,
interviews and testimony.16 There is
great variation in the effectiveness of
this training, from person to person,
but it can improve micro-expression
detection accuracy quite profoundly for
some people.17
While these results are theoretically
fascinating, they do not provide much
to be used in litigation from a practical
standpoint. Litigators are not permitted
to subject jurors to micro-expression
detection training, even were the lawyer
or his client willing to pay for it. The
Court will not allow counsel to record
testimony and play it back in court in
super-slow mot ion so that each micro-
expression can be pointed out to the
jury. In addition, the researchers who
have pioneered this work are very
careful to point out that emotional
leakage is not a direct indicator of lying.
Such leakage indicates only that there is
a disconnect between the speaker's true
emotional state and his spoken
message. There could be many reasons
other than dishonesty for such an
incongruity, however, such as fear,
nervousness, embarrassment or
uncertainty.
A crafty litigator then needs to find
strategies for converting micro-
expressions into more easily detectable
facial cues. That is, the litigator wants
to increase the emotional transparency
of the witness. This brings us full circle
to the topic covered above. According
to the research of Ekman and others,
the reason that strategic questioning
increases transparency, as reported in
the Levine, et al. article, is that such
direct and accusatory questioning
maximizes the strain on the witness
attempting to keep his true emotions in
check. These tactics increase leakage to
the point where at least some observers
detect the speaker's true emotional
state.
Another method of increasing
emotional leakage is to force the
speaker to multitask. The theory
underlying this tactic is that increasing

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the cognitive load on the speaker will
make it more difficult for him to focus
his attention on maintaining his
composure.18 Vrij and his collaborators
discovered that forcing a speaker to
engage simultaneously in another task
while speaking increased the ability of
listeners to distinguish true statements
from falsehoods. It is also possible to
increase the cognitive load by
interrupting the speaker's message and
forcing him to stop and restart.
This result is encouraging for
litigators who are concerned about
witnesses lying on the stand. In court,
it is wise to make the witness examine
a document or other exhibit during
testimony. Even better, have the
witness come down from the witness
stand to demonstrate something to the
jury. All of these tactics serve to disrupt
the flow of the witness's narrative,
which will make it more difficult to
control emotional leakage.
C. Redirect isn't only for
witnesses
While distracting the witness can
increase his transparency, distraction
can also help improve the
perceptiveness of jurors. When left to
their own devices, jurors naturally
focus on the face of the witness on the
stand, a strategy that we have learned
works to the detriment of deception
detection. How then is an attorney to
get jurors to focus on the elements of
testimony that more reliably reveal the
truth of the matter? One of the results
discussed in the first article related to
the medium used to convey a message.
Research revealed that people more
accurately detected truth in phone calls
than in face-to-face interactions.19 This
is consistent with what we have learned
about the deceptiveness of facial
expressions. The key then for the trial
attorney is to get jurors to listen to
testimony, rather than watch it.20
This provides an opportunity for
the strategic use of demonstrative
exhibits at trial. If a litigator is
concerned that a witness will attempt to
mislead the jury, that litigator should
provide the jurors with something to
look at other than the witness's face.
Put a chart on the screen and leave it
there while questioning the witness on
the crucial detail about which veracity
is in doubt. Hand out copies of a
document to the jurors while asking the
witness the key question. While the
jurors are busy passing paper and
reading the document title, they will
still be listening to the witness. These
distraction techniques, aimed at the
listener rather than the speaker, have
been shown to improve deception
detection performance.21
III. LESSONS FOR
EMPLOYMENT LITIGATION
The lawyer engaged in an
employment case faces a troubling
starting point. These cases very often
involve conflicting accounts of events
and conversations without much
supporting documentation for either
position. Only very late in the game
does an employee (or former
employee) reflect back on his
experience with a company and decide
that he was treated in a way that he
contends is unlawful. While events
were transpiring, it never occurs to him
to keep records or share his stories with
others. By the same token, his
supervisor hears no complaints and
feels no need to document any
interactions with the employee. It all
feels like business as usual. So, when
things turn sour and litigation is in the
picture, jurors find themselves
confronted with a classic he said/she
said scenario. One party (or both)
might choose to lie during testimony
about certain facts. The litigator would
like to be able to rely on the common
sense of jurors to separate the truth
from the lies. Alas, research has shown
time and again that we humans are
uniformly terrible at evaluating
whether we are being lied to.
Employment cases do not take
place in a vacuum, however. They
often raise emotional issues, increasing
the likelihood that witness testimony
will reflect honest witness attitudes.
Fear of being “found out” is sufficient
to deter most witnesses from lying on
the stand, especially in the presence of
so much supporting documentation
and testimony from other witnesses.
Witnesses are likely to feel substantially
more vulnerable to lie detection than is
warranted, but that is a good thing in
this context. Attorneys also have an
opportunity during voir dire to ferret
out those potential jurors who seem
overly confident in their own evaluative
capabilities.
The research discussed in these
two articles serves two primary
purposes. The first is to tell a
cautionary tale about relying on
deception detection among jurors to
win your case. As a general rule, don't
do it. The second purpose is to share
some of the strategies that have been
uncovered through subsequent
research that can increase the
likelihood that jurors will correctly spot
the liars on the witness stand—and
equally importantly, spot the honest
witnesses.
Through strategic forms of
questioning, well-timed presentation of
exhibits and a focus on message
content, it is possible to increase the
likelihood that a jury's verdict will result
from deliberations over the true facts
of the case.
NOTES:
1 DePaulo, B. M., Lindsay, J. J., Malone, B.
E., Muhlenbruck, L., Chalrton, K., & Cooper,
H. “Cues to deception,” Psychological Bulletin,
129(1), 74-118 (2003).
2 The companion piece, “He Said What?”:
Deception Detection and Employment
Litigation — Part I: The Gullibe Juror,”
appeared in the February/ March 2014 issue of
HR Advisor.
3 Bond, C. F., & DePaulo, B. M. “Accuracy
of deception judgments.” 10 Personality and
Social Psychology Review, 214–234. (2006)
4 See Vrij, A., Granhag, P. A., & Porter, S.
“Pitfalls and Opportunities in Nonverbal and
Verbal Lie Detection.” 11 Psychological Science
in the Public Interest, 89–121. (2010).
(2010).
6 Warren, G, Schertler, E and Bull, P.,
“Detecting Deception from Emotional and
Unemotional Cues,” 33 J Nonverbal Behav 59–
69 (2009).

7
7 George Berkeley, “A Treatise Concerning
the Principles of Human Knowledge,” 1734.
section 23. Berkeley's formulation was slightly
different. The first appearance of the common
phrasing of the riddle appeared in a physics
textbook in the early twentieth century: Mann,
Charles Riborg and George Ransom Twiss.
Physics. Scott, Foresman and Co., 1910, p. 235.
8 See Levine, T.R., “A Few Transparent
Liars,” Communication Yearbook, 34 (2010) for
a review and articulation of the theory that any
performance above simple chance in truth
detection is the function of having a small
number of “easy-to-read” liars in the
population.
9 See Levine, T.R., Shaw, A. and Shulman,
HC, “Increasing Deception Detection Accuracy
with Strategic Questioning,” 36 Human
Communication Research, 216-231 (2010) for
an excellent treatments of the distinction
between demeanor and transparency.
10 Gilovich, T, Savitsky, K, and Medvec,
V.H., “The Illusion of Transparency: Biased
Assessments of Others' Ability to Read One's
Emotional States,” 75 Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 332–346 (1998).
11 Levine, T.R., Shaw, A. and Shulman, HC,
“Increasing Deception Detection Accuracy with
Strategic Questioning,” 36 Human
Communication Research, 216–231 (2010).
12 Vrij, A. (2008). Detecting deceit and lies:
Pitfalls and opportunities. West Sussex: Wiley.
See also Vrij, A., Granhag, P. A., & Porter, S.
(2010) for an excellent treatment of verbal and
non-verbal cues to deception.
13 Zuckerman, M., DePaulo, B. M., &
Rosenthal, R. (1981). Verbal and nonverbal
communication of deception. In L. Berkowitz
(Ed.), Advances in experimental social
psychology. New York: Academic Press.
14 Ekman, P., O'Sulivan, M., & Frank, G.
M. (1999). A few can catch a liar. Psychological
Science, 10, 263– 266.
15 There are seven universal facial
expressions that are easily identified by virtually
all humans, even babies. They are: fear, joy,
anger, surprise, sadness, contempt and disgust.
If we could watch speakers in super-slow
motion, we would all be able to detect their true
emotional states without much problem.
16 David Matsumoto, Ph.D., Hyi Sung
Hwang, Ph.D., Lisa Skinner, J.D., and Mark
Frank, Ph.D., “Evaluating Truthfulness and
Detecting Deception,” in FBI Law
Enforcement Bulletin (June, 2011).
17 On a personal note, I attended a two
hour training program conducted by David
Matsumoto and discovered that I was
remarkably proficient at identifying micro-
expressions by the end of the session. I had no
idea, however, how I was so successful. It felt
very much like I was guessing, despite my 83%
accuracy rate. This factoid is interesting in light
of the result, reported in the last article, that
confidence in deception detection is not at all
correlated with actual acumen at doing so. It
turns out I was talented (at least at this part of
it) but had no confidence in my own ability.
18 Vrij, A, Fisher, R., Mann, S. and Leal, S,
“Detecting deception by manipulating cognitive
load.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10 (4). pp.
141–142 (2006).
19 See generally, Hancock, J., Thom-
Santelli, J., & Ritchie, T. “Deception and design:
The impact of communication technology on
lying behavior,” In E. Dykstra-Erickson, & M.
Tscheligi (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2004
conference on human factors in computing
systems, 129–134. (New York: Association for
Computing Machinery, 2004), as well as,
DePaulo, B. M., Kashy, D. A., Kirkendol, S. E.,
Wyer, M. M., & Epstein, J. A. “Lying in everyday
life,” 70 Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 979–995 (1996).
“Pitfalls and Opportunities in Nonverbal and
Verbal Lie Detection.” 11 Psychological Science
in the Public Interest, 89–121. (2010)
21 It is important, of course, not to distract
the listener so much that he does not hear the
words being spoken by the witness.
Edward P. Schwartz is a
Consultant in DecisionQuest’s Boston
office. Dr. Schwartz provides
quantitative and qualitative analysis of
pretrial jury behavior – from interviews
and focus group studies to mock trials
and large-scale statistical analyses – to
provide clients with feedback on case
themes, strategies, evidence, witnesses,
and presentation style. Further, he
consults on case evaluation, provides
advice on trial strategies, and assists
with jury selection as well as post-
verdict juror surveys and interviews. Dr.
Schwartz is a nationally recognized jury
consultant with excellent analytical
acumen and strong market research
skills who is noted for his ability to
blend the strategic focus of game theory
and decision theory with the real-world
insights of social psychology to gain a
complete picture of how people absorb,
analyze, and process information.
Reproduced with permission: HR Adviser: Legal and Practical
Guidance (Thomson Reuters), Vol. 2 (2), pp. 7-18, March/April 2014

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