Despite all the advice about lie detection going around, study after study has found that it is very difficult to spot when someone is lying.
Previous tests involving watching videos of suspects typically find that both experts and non-experts come in at around 50/50: in other words you might as well flip a coin.
Now, though, a new study published in Human Communication Research, has found that a process of active questioning yielded almost perfect results, with 97.8% of liars successfully detected (Levine et al., 2014).
The process of lie detection has nothing to do with supposed 'tells' like avoiding eye-contact or sweating, and everything to do with the way the suspect is questioned.
In the series of studies, participants played a trivia game in which they were secretly offered a chance to cheat.
In one experiment 12% cheated and in another 44.9% chose to cheat.
Participants were then interviewed using a variety of active questioning techniques.
One group were interrogated using the Reid Technique, which is employed by many law enforcement professionals in North America.
It involves tactics like presuming the suspect is guilty, shifting the blame away from the suspect and asking loaded questions like "Did you plan this or did it just happen?"
This technique was 100% effective with all 33 guilty participants owning up to their 'crime'.
A second group were interviewed by US federal agents with substantial experience of interrogation.
They were able to detect 97.8% of people that cheated โ in reality all but two of 89 people.
Bear two things in mind, though:
- The Reid Techniques' detractors say that it can lead to false confessions.
- Participants in this study did not have that much to lose by admitting their guilt. It wasn't as if they'd murdered their spouses.
Across the different types of interrogation, though, the important factor was that the questioning was active and of the kind used in real interrogations.
Professor Timothy Levine of Michigan State University, who led the study, said:
Professor Levine believes lies are partly so difficult to detect because in normal, everyday life we have a presumption of honesty."This research suggests that effective questioning is critical to deception detection."
Asking bad questions can actually make people worse than chance at lie detection, and you can make honest people appear guilty.
But, fairly minor changes in the questions can really improve accuracy, even in brief interviews.
This has huge implications for intelligence and law enforcement."
"The presumption of honesty is highly adaptive. It enables efficient communication, and this presumption of honesty makes sense because most communication is honest most of the time. However, the presumption of honesty makes humans vulnerable to occasional deceit."The key, then, to detecting lies may be to assume someone is lying and then question them on that basis.
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In Aussieland
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People are happier when raised by parents who do this one thing
Want your kids to be happier kids? More important, want your children to grow up to be happier and more satisfied for the rest of their lives? A study from University College London found that...Right ON!
Life is an obstacle course and challenges are well thought out and tailored-made for each individual depending on his/her own degree of personal (trust issues) evolution.
blood sweat n tears (and thankfully some gracious soft spots here n there). Its obvious, walking the extra mile is not for the miserable the mediocre the meak. But its the only walk to/of a peaceful and thriving heart.
Discipline, Focus mein Schatz (my dad's)
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Can you imagine if everyone did this?
That would be a wonderful society. They'd be so much trust and goodwill going around.
Think about this: what is the cost of assuming and treating someone like they are guilty when they aren't or turn out not to be.... I bet this person will end up holding you in the highest of regards. Multiply this to tens of thousands of people, or even millions or billions... the amount of goodwill that you'll be building will be astronomical.
'Oh here comes that guy that thinks I'm a liar, he's my best friend, I can for sure trust him to have my back'
Don't be silly... there's a reason the presumption of honesty is highly adaptive... the cost of the opposite will sooner or later make you someone without any meaningful relationships in addition to having some really really bad ones... the really really bad ones might prove way to costly e.g. you are in burning building, trapped... there's 2 of you trapped... a guy rashes in... he can only get one before the place collapses. He knows both of you. One treats him like a decent innocent human being, the other one has always treated him like he's guilty (just not caught yet)... who do you think he'll save first?
You presume everyone is guilty you get stung by a whole bunch of people of who are innocent...
That is unless you think there are way more guilty than innocent people
For the FBI or CIA maybe they can adopt a strategy of guilty until proven innocent (hence why we live in an orwellian world with surveillance even through your toaster). They can do this because it's their job. They don't care whether you like them or not. It's a corporation - faceless and psychopathic.
You personally adopt the same strategy in your personal life... well... think about it.
want to reveal?
Trust is the bedrock of relationship - but to truly extend it - you have to be an embodiment of it. Trusting in fear, guilt and division is a perverted form of trust that trusts nothing except the mind of conditioned reaction - and defends it against truth because its own judgements are held to determine truth - so anything else is simply threat. or something to steal, feed off and use. If you are not in a state of trusting your own being - your mind will already be a presentation of something less than true AND seeking reinforcement or validation from others - and from your interpretation of your world.
Divide and rule operates as the undermining of trust - of communication and connection.
If the art of being is true - then artifice is false presentation. Techniques can arise from the receptive inspiration - and they can become strategies of mindless application serving mindless outcomes.
In a mind or world based on lies. the truth seems dissonant. But a love of true is not so much looking to detect lies as being vigilant in protection of awareness of true. So while truth is not threatened - our awareness of it can be hijacked or usurped by false beliefs - and the dissonance of this is the alarm or feedback to an 'out-of-true' misalignment. This is either protected against exposure by adding further lies to cover the first - or undone by realigning in true.
The term lie applies to knowingly choosing to deny or distort truth in order to give priority to an illusion accepted or passed of as if true. However, within the mind of such an illusion, there is no self-awareness in which to know what they do. It is all programmed - including the belief one is freely making choices.
A fake life is a hollow shell filled with nonsense - that 'empty vessel filled with noise, signifying nothing'. Of course it seems meaningful in its moment but that is the definition of a lie or fake version of true. It is a seeming.
The lies of others can awaken you to your own - or be used to fuel self-righteous invalidation of others as a sense of bolstered or inflated 'self'. Once you make this investment - you will protect it AS your self - and the guilt of others will prove you 'right' and give you what you take to be the right to deny them. Of course all hell breaks out - and over the course of millennia, hell - or pain of loss in conflicted fear and guilt is normalized and repacked as the human condition - as if fixed or hard wired against exposure to the hell that exposure to truth is now associated with - and so anything and everything is sacrificed to 'survive' against a greatly feared and heavily concealed belief and outcome.
I distrust 'studies' - particularly when they seem to offer validation or endorsement for private agenda.
It takes one to know one - so if you are in a world of liars - then go figure. But if you are in a world where fear distorts the mind and triggers emotional response before the mind has any real perspective of its act - then you are waking from fear to a more integrated, unified and congruent experience of being yourself, within your relations, that are inherent to your wholeness of being, whether you idolize and demonize them - or whether you recognize yourself in them. The liar who fears pain, shame and rejection is banished by one's own refusal to own and release this in oneself. Guilt is thus hidden in others - and can be proved or prised out of them by resort to tricks that are 'validated' by their results.
'My lie' - reminds me of the Vietnam genocide, often operating under the guise of, or reported as, the actions of the enemy.
The cost of the lie is not an abstraction of 'truth' - but terrible experience. Waking up is a result of owning and releasing the false - and not of assigning it or 'outsourcing' it to others. "They made me do it!" this isn't true. The action embodied the belief at the time of who you accepted yourself to be in that moment. After the act - mind-narratives operate the belief of who you accept yourself to be in a new moment. Now - and indeed Now - do you simply operate from such narratives or are you moved to feel and know the true?
But buuuut.....
I have found that there are a few types of lies
- Lying for self protection as telling the truth will make you face a reality you don't otherwise want to face e.g. you'd have your criminal who'd lie about not committing a crime as they don't want to face the consequences or more mundane case of your best friend who may lie to you about something that may otherwise make you angry at them.
- Lying to further your own agenda of control i.e. ptb type lying to maintain and further control or a manipulative spouse mental torment of their partner through gaslighting type tactics etc
- lying just because you can.... some people just lie for the simple reason they can. It can be the most mundane of reasons e.g. ask them what they had for breakfast, they may have had cereal, they may lie and say they had toast. Why? No reason.
- Lying to supposedly protect someone else. Usually in this type, the liar will take the position of being an authority figure who has the ability to determine what the victim should and shouldn't know. Essentially they project themself into someone else's mind and determine what they can and can't handle. Innocent version is a parent not telling their kid the truth about something... more sinister version is when organisations and governments take on this parental role and we are the supposed children that must be protected from the truth.
How do the different types of lies fit into the model you mentioned above?
I challenge everyone to try to tell the truth every single day.
PS A white lie is not a truth. A fib is not a truth.