The Keyboard Detective

BYOD: How to Detect Deception, Part II

In the first part, we covered verbal indicators of deception in which a person lies by distancing himself from or skipping certain parts of a story. Lies that are just plain made up offer their own unique set of clues. These are some things to look for when you are trying to tell reality from fantasy.

Verbal Indicators, cont'd

Thanks to the Deception Blog for pointing the way to this work by British researcher Aldert Vrij. His studies were extremely helpful here.

Criteria-Based Content Analysis is used in Europe to help detect deception and truthfulness in children making allegations of sexual abuse. Although its degree of accuracy has been challenged, it does offer useful hints you can use when trying to determine whether an adult is lying.

Among the things you might look for in a story that you're being told are contextual embedding, reproduction of conversation, and unexpected complications. These can help you decide whether the story is a true account of what happened, or a made up event.

Contextual embedding in a narrative puts incidents in relation to a specific place and time. An employee tells you he was late to work because he had a flat tire, and you ask for details. A made up story will tend to be vague, while something he actually experienced will be be fixed in his mind so that he can tell you where he was and what he was doing when it happened. "I had to pull over on the expressway when I was coming in," versus, "I pulled into the Qwik Mart about the middle of rush hour, and sure enough, the tire was flat."

Reproduction of conversation uses the exact, or at least approximate, words that were spoken during the event, rather than just paraphrasing them. A wife asks her husband why he's had to work late every night that week. He says, "My boss said he wants this project done," versus, "Mr. Johnson said, 'If you don't finish this project this week, you won't meet the month's projections."

Unexpected complications are incidents in the narrative that are unnecessary to accomplish whatever action is being described. In other words, details a liar wouldn't have any reason to include. An employee accuses a co-worker of stealing product from the store room. The expected version of the narrative would be, "He grabbed the box and walked out the door." An unexpected complication would be, "He grabbed the box and started to leave, but the bottom fell out, so he had to pick up all the widgets and stuff them in his pockets."

Taken together, those sorts of details support a narrative that is more truth than lie. However, remember that accomplished liars know to embellish their stories with exactly those kinds of details to help make them more believable.

A Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent I used to know told me that a good way to trip up a liar with a story to tell is to take the story and work backward through it. When someone makes up a tale, or changes the details of a story to hide the truth, he memorizes and rehearses the story in chronological order. He knows, "OK, I say this, then I say this, then this." Starting at the end and working back disrupts the rehearsed version and helps reveals holes in the story.

Another system used to analyze narratives is Reality Monitoring. The idea is that people remember events they actually experienced differently than they do events they imagined, or made up.

Again, the telling factors are the details.

In an actual experience, memory contains sensory perceptions and details about the place, time and duration of the event. The person will remember, and be able to describe to you, the sounds, smells, and physical sensations of the event, as well as specifically where it took place, where the various players were positioned, when it occurred and how long it lasted.

A person telling a fabricated story will describe it in different terms, focusing more on cognitive functions, thinking the story through, rather than recalling, according to Vrij. "He must have got hit, because the next thing I know, he's laying on the floor," versus, "He was standing by the door, and Steve walked up to him and hit him. He was screaming at him as he fell."

One interesting technique I read about several years ago in the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin involves analyzing the balance of a person's story.

According to the article on statement analysis, a truthful narrative spends an equal amount of time and space describing the three parts of the event: Before it happened, during the event, and afterwards.

Spending too much time describing what led up to the event could be a sign of deception, as the person is trying to stall or justify his actions. Too little time on the event itself could be an indicator that he's trying to cover up his involvement. Too little time spent describing the aftermath could mean it had little to no effect on him, even if he claims to be upset about it.

That about covers the basics of verbal deception indicators. I'll continue with non-verbal in another post.