Social Indicators of Deception

1. Social Indicators of Deception Presented by: Tripp Driskell

2. Deception at a Glance • “a successful or unsuccessful deliberate attempt, without forewarning, to create in another a belief which the communicator considers to be untrue” (Vrij, 2008, p. 15) • Decades of research examining individuals… • Statistically reliable cues, moderated by motivation and transgression(DePaulo et al., 2003)…but • “the looks and sounds of deceit are faint” (p. 104) • “mainly attributable to weaknesses in behavioral cues to deception” (Hartwig & Bond, 2011, p. 643) • Recent call for methods to • Enhance individual cues • Develop innovative approaches

3. Current Research • Many crimes are often committed by groups (Vrij & Granhag, 2012) • Are there indicators of deception that are observable at the social level that may occur when questioning two or more persons concurrently? • In real-world settings, there are numerous opportunities to gather human source intelligence at the social level. London 2005 subway bombing

4. Current Paradigm Focus on deception solely at the individual level: Potential Scenarios Security Checkpoint Airports Walking a Beat Current Paradigm

5. TransactiveMemory • Approach to understanding group behavior through an understanding of how group members encode, store, and recall information regarding past events (Wegner, 1987). • Within a dyad, one person can serve as an external memory storage “facility” for the other person (shared experiences = shared knowledge) • Shared experiences are stored transactively: • Those who participate in a shared • activity jointly reconstruct the event • at the time of recall.

6. Distinction: Truthtelling vs. Deceptive Dyads • When two people do something together, they store memories of who did what: • I got the drinks, you got the sandwiches, we both selected a table. • When they recall this event, they rely on these stored memories that both of them have. “You got…the drinks.., and then I bought…” • Recall is very interactive, as information is recalled from a transactive memory system: • Exhibit more mutual gaze • Elaborate or follow-up each other’s speech • Seem more “in sync” or coordinate back-and-forth behaviors

7. Hypotheses • Greater evidence of synchrony of behavior within truthtelling dyads • higher correlation between partners in social behaviors (e.g. mutual gaze, speech transitions, and word usage) • Mean differences in the display of certain social behaviors between truthtelling dyads and deceptive dyads • interactive behaviors (e.g., mutual gaze, speech transitions, “we”)

8. Method Participants 52 police/firefighters (50 male/2 female) randomly assigned in pairs to truthor deceptionconditions. Experience levels ranged from 1 year to 26 years. Conditions “Truth”- describe an event or call that they had been on in the recent past. “Deception”- fabricate a story on the spot that did not take place, but make the story as realistic and believable as possible. Procedure Interview asking each dyad to describe an event, their actions, their partner’s role, actions taken to resolve the problem, and other questions.

9. Measures Mutual gaze- the number of times that each interactant looked at the other Speech transition- event in which one person’s speech immediately follows the other person’s speech within the flow of conversation, a back-and- forth verbal exchange. Word Usage (LIWC)- first person plural pronouns (i.e., we, us, our), social processes, tentativeness (i.e., maybe, perhaps), certainty (i.e., always, never), negations (i.e., no, not) and inhibition (i.e., stop, refrain, wait)

10. Example Interviews

11. Results • Synchrony - we found considerably less evidence of synchrony in communication in the deceptive dyads

12. Results (con’t) • Social Cues - we found considerably less evidence of social behaviors in the deceptive dyads

13. Discussion • New Paradigm - Collective interviewing of suspects (Vrij et al., 2012) • Less interactivity among deceptive dyads • How often does the opportunity exist to interview persons concurrently? • When would this method be practical? • Although deceptive dyads exhibit or “give off” observable cues, can observers encode these cues? • Untrained- 42% Trained- 78% (Driskell, Driskell, & Salas, under review)

14. Conclusion • Unlike traditional deception research (i.e., individual: emotions or cognitive complexity), cues to deception that arise out of the interaction between two people conspiring to lieis based on a transactional memory theoretical approach. • Strong evidence for synchrony of behavior and communication in truthtelling dyads as well as support for the claim that synchrony is diminished in deceptive dyads • Strong evidence for differences in the display of certain social behaviors between truthtelling dyads and deceptive dyads

15. Questions? DePaulo, B. M., Lindsay, J. J., Malone, B. E., Muhlenbruck, L., Charlton, K., & Cooper, H. (2003). Cues to deception. Psychological Bulletin, 129(1), 74-118. Driskell, J. E., Driskell, T., & Salas, E. (under review). Detecting social deception. Hartwig, M., & Bond, C. F., Jr. ( 2011). Why do lie-catchers fail? A lens model meta-analysis of human lie judgments. Psychological Bulletin, 137(4), 643-659. Vrij, A. (2008). Detecting lies and deceit: Pitfalls and opportunities (second edi.). Cambridge: John Wiley & Sons. Vrij, A., Jundi, S., Hope, L., Hillman, J., Gahr, E., Leal, S., Warmelink, L., et al. (2012). Collective interviewing of suspects. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 1(1), 41-44. Vrij, A., & Granhag, P. A. (2012). Eliciting cues to deception and truth: What matters are the questions asked. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. doi:10.1016/j.jarmac.2012.02.004 Wegner, D. M. (1987). Transactive memory: A contemporary analysis of the group mind. In B. Mullen & G. R. Goethals (Eds.), Theories of group behavior (pp. 185-208). New York: Springer-Verlag.