According to a new study, the richness of detail in a story is key to detecting liars. If a person is able to describe in detail who, what, when, how and why, he is more likely to be telling the truth. On the other hand, if the person does not provide these details, it is more likely that they are lying.
according to a research at the University of Amsterdam, a simple test can be used to separate the truth from the lie with almost 80% accuracy. In an attempt to identify liars, we usually look for a variety of telltale signs, such as nervous movements and suspicious behavior.
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After the September 11 attacks, security at US airports USA was trained to look for 92 behavioral cues of lying. Lie detectors, such as the polygraph, use different physiological signals, such as blood pressure, heart rate and respiratory rate, to identify possible lies.
Despite training, professionals have little success trying to discern truth from lies, according to research. The sheer amount of conflicting data in real time makes it difficult to turn it into a binary decision about veracity.
"It's an impossible task," said Bruno Verschuere, a forensic psychologist and lead author of the study.
Furthermore, stereotypes about the appearance of innocent and guilty people are not predictive of telling the truth or lying. To overcome this, the Amsterdam researchers tried a “radical alternative”: instructing participants of the study to focus on just one clue – the level of detail in a person's story – and ignore the rest.
New research indicates that truth can be found in simplicity. The researchers propose discarding cues when trying to detect lies. 1,445 people were asked to guess whether handwritten statements, video transcripts, video interviews or live interviews about a student's activities on campus were true or false.
Participants who used lots of factors or intuition to make decisions performed no better than chance. Those who focused on the level of detail in the reports were able to accurately separate the truth from the lie with 59% to 79% accuracy.
Study participants were instructed to evaluate the message based on the degree of detail, including descriptions of people, places, actions, objects, events and time of events.
"Our data show that relying on one good cue can be more beneficial than using too many cues," say the researchers.
The researchers' rule of thumb to "use the best (and ignore the rest)" was a superior detection tool. lies, regardless of whether or not the participants knew that the activity was intended to detect lies. This suggests that pre-existing stereotypes about guilt and innocence did not interfere with the use of level of detail as a lie detection tool.
In high-risk situations, people may enrich lies with details to increase their credibility, so it's possible that lie detection rules of thumb are context-dependent, say the researchers. researchers.
In a recent study, researchers argue that using more cues, big data, and machine learning won't necessarily increase lie detection accuracy.
In a previous study, when using 11 different criteria, people correctly rated the level of detail, but other unhelpful information clouded their overall judgment.
“Sometimes less is more,” say the researchers, adding that ignoring most of the available information is a counterintuitive way to deal with information overload.
