#10 Nonverbal cues & Deception Detection
Literature Review: Nonverbal Cues & Deception Detection
Lukas Otteson
University of Maryland Global Campus
Introduction
People lie. Men lie. Women lie. Children lie. Anyone can lie. So, how is anyone supposed to know when someone is telling the truth? Trust is a beautiful idealistic dream, but hoping for the best should always mediated by preparation for the worst. When people lie, they are not truthful with their verbal communication. That is given when discussing deception and lies. However, nonverbal communication is not so easily manipulated. That is why researchers look to nonverbal communication to help solve the problem of knowing when someone is lying. Some research indicates that nonverbal cues may be able be used to detect deception. Other research has resulted in findings that indicate that nonverbal cues are not a source of reliable measurement of deception/truthfulness. Between the polarization in the body of literature concerning deception detection, there is room for improvement in terms of detecting deception, at least.
Vrij et al. said “judgments of deception and truth can literally be a matter of life and death,” (2019). It can be that important. From determining if a politician is truly representing their convictions & values to ascertaining intel from a government saboteur, it is critical to not be fooled by lies. From a child lying about what they did after school or why they misbehaved to whether or not a clinical psychologist’s patient is not be truthful when discussing what they’re going through, lying is important to be able to recognize. It could even be as simple as being not wanting to be manipulated and taken advantage of. That means that finding the best way to detect deception is a fundamental human issue. This paper will explore what has been learned thus far and where future research should go from here.
Nonverbal Cues Help Signal Deception
Some researchers think that there is value in using to nonverbal cues to detect deception. The National Research Council reported, “Although the problem of inferring specific psychological states from specific observed behaviors is quite complex, there is little doubt about the existence of linkages between internal states and external behaviors,” (1991). There are believed to be at least cues of leakage that may signal deception. Some research has indicated that unique behavioral patterns may exist for specific personalities. Some researchers have found reason to believe that cues might exist amongst other behaviors that are hard to ignore and easy to mix up. Some researchers have taken the available body of literature at face value and accounted for numerous nonverbal cues of deception. There are certainly those out there that have believed there to be value in using nonverbal cues to detect deception upon completion of their research.
Leakage is a phenomenon that could be described as the information that that someone has unsuccessfully attempted to hide (National Research Council, 1991). Depaulo et al. (as cited in National Research Council, 1991) found that deceivers were more successful when using words and facial expression than they were when using body movements and/or tone of voice cues. Gordon et al. also reported that their study showed a decrease in deception detection accuracy when their participants were asked to focus on facial information (2001). It can then be said that body movements and tone of voice cues may be able to reveal deception; although, they don’t necessary reveal what information is being hidden. Pozzato reported that the neocortex is the part of the brain responsible for lying, while the limbic system is the part of the brain that causes nonverbal cues (2010). Navarro (as cited in Pozzato, 2010) specifies “In short, while the neocortex may lie, the body cannot.” Thus, it can be concluded that nonverbal cues may leak the presence of deception (with the jury still out on whether or not one can surmise what information is actually being hidden by the deceiver).
The ability to detect deception may have more approaches. Marono et al. found that people from different personality clusters exhibited unique patterns of behavior (2017). This may be useful for deception detecting. For research purposes, if people can be clustered into a personality type, then then their specific modes of deception might be more easily detected. Perhaps this type of approach could be used to more accurately speculate at what information a given deceiver is attempting to conceal.
Gordon et al. supported the notion of nonverbal cues being valuable in detecting deception as well, having said their participants were aware of which channels to monitor leakage, but not knowing what information to ignore (2001). Gordon et al.’s participants expected that rapid speech, speech errors, speech hesitations, object-fidgeting, self-fidgeting, arm crossing, & rocking movements to correlate more with deception than honesty (2001). They also expected leg movements, object-fidgeting, rapid speech, and speech hesitations to occur more with evasion than with honesty (Gordon et al., 2001). Eye contact was expected to occur more often with honesty than deception or evasion and a greater number of facial expressions was associated with greater deception (Gordon et al., 2001). These findings were in general agreement with the research available at the time of the study (Gordon et al., 2001). However, the study merely confirms was already believed to be the case and doesn’t answer the question of whether or not these expectations were actually correct or not. With that said, Gordon et al. offered a glimpse at many possible nonverbal cues of deception. If the majority of people believe these behaviors reveal information that is consistent (eye contact is associated with honesty, for example), then there is at least to conduct further investigation into the matter. This study provided a snapshot at what the assumptions about deception detection were and gave an avenue for other researchers to follow-up on their findings.
Other researchers have been more willing to say that nonverbal cues do help detect deception. Pozzato talked about how humans’ “most effective way to burn off potentially damaging stress hormones” is to move the body (2010). That is where the leakage becomes an unescapable reality. Pozzato said, “An accidental expression of the stress response that originates in the limbic system, but is not actively suppressed by the neocortex, is referred to as leakage,” (2010). Microexpression is another term used to describe the same phenomenon. According to the Paul Ekman Group, microexpressions are a leakage of emotions that someone is trying to conceal that typically happen at 1/25th of a second and often happen unconsciously (2017). The idea that someone’s nonverbal behavior can give away what their tongue tries not to is nothing new. According to Pozzato, there are a number of nonverbal cues worth thinking about: more eye contact than normal due to a belief that breaking eye contact will cause the other person to suspect they are lying, dilated pupils in contrast to an established baseline for an interviewee, significant decrease in smiling, rubbing the nose or the neck to relieve a tingling caused by the stress response, women often place their fingers at or near the base of their throat when asked questions that cause stress, a non-committal shoulder-shrug indicates a lack of conviction in what someone is saying, signal blunters like clasping hands in the lap or crossing arms are nearly universal signs that someone is closing themselves off, gesturing to emphasize verbal communication tends to decrease when people lie, moving a hand to the face might be a subtle reflection of the desire to cover the mouth and keep a lie hidden, crossed legs indicate resistance or a barrier to communication, and where someone’s feet are pointing reveals whether they wish they were somewhere else (escapism) or not (2010). Pozzato said that the secret to reading body language is reading the emotional state of someone due to recognizing the habits or cues that they tend to use or just recognizing (on a subconscious level) that something is wrong and that there is a deviation from the norm (2010).
Nonverbal Cues Do Not Signal Deception
Other researchers have taken harder stances against the idea that someone can tell someone is lying based on their nonverbal behavior. There have been a host of researchers that concluded that nonverbal cues can only detect deception at the success rate of chance. Many researchers also concluded that nonverbal cues were inaccurate variables to use to measure deception. Some research has indicated that there is no way to prove a lie by looking at nonverbal cues.
Pozzato reported that trained professionals like polygraph examiners, police officers, experienced interrogators, and anyone who gets lied to regularly only detect deception slightly better than chance, at about 60% (2010). Hicks & Ulvestad’s study had participants listen to a recording and video separately to test whether they were better at recognizing truth from lie one way or another and the findings were that the participants “did no better than if they were guessing” (at chance rate) (2011). The idea that nonverbal cues can be used to detect deception may have been founded based on the successes that came with a chance rate, but how many people had to be accused of deception with this assumption running amok? Should people have to be charged with perjury based on chance rate? This is the importance of this issue. These are the questions that this research raises.
Different researchers have come to similar, but more specific conclusions. Vrij et al. said that facial microexpressions were found in only 2% of the video fragments included in a study conducted by Porter & ten Brinke (as cited in Vrij et al.) (and almost half of those were microexpressions displayed by truth-tellers rather than liars), that neurolinguistic programming was not able to demonstrate a link between specific eye movements and lying, and that the baseline approach is inherently flawed due to its disregard of the reality that people behave differently when engaged in small talk versus an investigative part of an interview (2019). That is to say, there are many ways that researchers have demonstrated that nonverbal cues have not reliably predicted deception. Levine reported that “cue findings seem to be informative only about the specific instances of communication under study and are not predictive or generalizable” and that “cue utility is idiosyncratic to a specific message by an individual communicator at a specific time in a certain situation,” (2018). Nonverbal cues may not be the generalizable answer to identifying deception that people have been hoping for. Nonetheless, it is important not to resist the findings in favor of an easier and more comfortable answer. Vrij et al. said, “misjudging deception can have severe and costly consequences,” (2019). Thus, it is important to find a better way ahead than ruminating in the false daydream that is easily being able to recognize when someone is lying.
Improving Deception Detection
What is to be done in the hopes of becoming able to detect deception with the current body of literature, then? Well, taking stock of the present situation is the starting point. Taking advantage of what psychological research can reveal about people’s behavior may also be an important thing to take into account in order to improve deception detection skills. Understanding the differences between negative and positive emotional expression from a deceiver may be significant as well. In order to better identify when something is out of the norm and further investigation is necessary, a focus on content consistency may prove vital as well. What strategies can potentially enable a better ability to detect deception (or at least signal a reason to suspect it)?
Therapists, police officers, managers, and students have been found to hold the same false beliefs about nonverbal cues and deception according to Bogaard et al. (2016). Bogaard et al. found that gaze aversion, nervousness, movements, and sweating were cues to deception, supporting the “mistakenly held assumption that liars are more anxious/nervous than truth tellers,” (2016). In order to move forward in improving deception detection, it is going to be important to admit where the collective conscience is when it comes to it. Bogaard et al. provided a counterargument to the common assumption, “truth tellers can also be nervous for other reasons than deceptiveness, such as an accusatory interviewing style, the fear of not being believed, or the mere fact of being accused of a criminal act may result in nervous behavior,” (2016). For that reason, that assumption needs to moved beyond in order to better detect deception.
Psychology may provide a glimmer of hope when it comes to telling when certain people appear to be lying. For a long time, people have thought that nonverbal cues were signals of what was going on in people’s internal worlds, but the current body of literature indicates that this does not appear to be an accurate approach the problem of detecting deception. However, understanding how certain types of people act when being deceptive (if demonstrated consistently enough) may give researchers the edge to cracking the code that is human truthfulness. Klaver et al. demonstrated in their study that the more psychopathic their prisoner participants were, the faster they spoke and the more frequently they displayed blinking and head movements while lying (2006). This research gives reason to further investigate how personality factors may impact nonverbal cues of deception.
How can positive and negative emotional expression come into play when discussing nonverbal cues and deception? Stel & van Dijk found that their participants were better at predicting deception when the liars were using negative emotions (2018). This is interesting to consider in conjunction with what Pozzato said about smiling, that a noticeable decrease in smiling can be a sign of being deceptive (2010). Perhaps the positive emotions go against the grain of the stereotypical assumptions about deception. There are two ways to take this information. One could conclude that people need to get better at detecting positive emotional deception. On the other hand, it could be more effective to focus on the extent to which a potential deceiver is telling the truth, rather than by inferring emotions. Stel & van Dijk’s study only demonstrated that effect when observers were inferring emotions instead of judging the extent to which they thought the liar/deceiver was telling the truth. Appealing to emotions might be an effective deception strategy for liars out there and it could be more difficult to try to play their game.
Another possible way to improve deception detection might be to look a little bit deeper into the consistency of the potential deceiver. Bogaard & Meijer found that undergraduates and police officers held wrongful beliefs about nonverbal cues, but those who had more correct beliefs about verbal cues and were more accurate at detecting deception (2017). This may highlight the need to address content consistency. It will be easier to tell if someone is lying if they get their story mixed up. Beyond that, though, the content of their nonverbal communication will allow one to compare the verbal to the nonverbal. Then, if there is inconsistency, there is at least reason to have piqued curiosity and delve deeper.
There are other available strategies for detecting deception. The polygraph is estimated to test whether someone is lying or not 96% of the time (Pozzato, 2010). If a nonverbal cue sparks an alarm in your mind, then you could have the deceptive person tell their story backwards (to get them caught up in their fabrication and possibly expose more nonverbal cues than they would have otherwise exhibited) (Pozzato, 2010). Also, accusing an innocent person typically elicits a quick and direct negative response to the accusation, while a guilty person is more likely to repeat the question, deflect the question, or turn the question around on the person asking (Pozzato, 2010). Hamlin et al. wrote that liars often implement one or more deception strategy when perpetrating lies, but deception detectives tend not to look for cues to those strategies (2018). Learning more about the specific strategies people use would be helpful. Perhaps that psychological element will be able to provide insight into those strategies and how they’re typically deployed. There are a variety of strategies out there that are born from the very assumptions that have been demonstrated to be inaccurate and ineffective. However, recognizing nonverbal cues could at least provide a chance to alert oneself of potential deception and get into the frame of mind where one focuses on evaluating the extent to which one is being truthful versus the potential auto-pilot mode of inferring emotions.
Conclusion
There are not many researchers out there willing to say nonverbal cues definitively prove that someone is being deceptive. The body of literature was not able to demonstrate any strong methods from which one could detect deception (other than a polygraph). This collection of research did say a lot, though. For one thing, this is an important research topic for this much effort to have gone into answering these questions for this long. Thus far, there is a general consensus that nonverbal cues don’t signal deception. The nonverbal cues are too ambiguous to conclusively say someone is telling the truth or not. However, researchers have accepted this and begun working toward finding ways to make sense of these nonverbal cues and deception itself. There are strategies developed and developing with the current state of the literature taken into account. Future research will be focused finding consistent behaviors from certain personality types when they are behaving deceptively and recognizing deception strategies. There may also be some neuroscience involved, with potential fMRIs conducted to determine the underlying mechanisms the drive deceptive behavior and knowing that may enable researchers to determine a way to use the limbic system against itself. Future research will also be conducted to determine the best ways to train those therapists, managers, police officers, judges, teachers, etc. to correct their false beliefs about nonverbal cues & deception detection in order to enable them to be the best they can be at separating the truth from the lies. Frank (as cited in Gambini, 2018) said, “The only way to ever know someone is lying for certain is with unimpeachable, corroborating evidence.” Frank (as cited in Gambini, 2018) also said that nonverbals cause people to “suspect” deception and that this suspicion was the No. 1 factor that triggered the search for hard evidence during his time in the FBI and CIA. Maybe that’s all nonverbal cues will ever be. It isn’t the easy solution many have wanted when asking “How can I tell when people are lying to me?” They are clues that are hard-wired into all non-psychopathic people, though. So, although there may not be an easy way to look at people’s nonverbal cues and determine if they’re lying or not, being given clues is what we might have to work with.
References
Bogaard, G., & Meijer, E. H. (2018). Self‐reported beliefs about verbal cues correlate with deception‐detection performance. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 32(1), 129–137. https://doi-org.ezproxy.umuc.edu/10.1002/acp.3378
Hamlin, I., Wright, G. R. T., Van der Zee, S., & Wilson, S. (2018). The dimensions of deception detection: Self‐reported deception cue use is underpinned by two broad factors. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 32(3), 307–314. https://doi-org.ezproxy.umuc.edu/10.1002/acp.3402
Hicks, Caroline and Ulvestad, Nicole (2011) "Deception detection accuracy using verbal or nonverbal cues," e Journal of Undergraduate Research: Vol. 9, Article 9.
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