“You can't kid a kidder”: association between production and detection of deception in an interactive deception task

Abstract

Both the ability to deceive others, and the ability to detect deception, has long been proposed to confer an evolutionary advantage. Deception detection has been studied extensively, and the finding that typical individuals fare little better than chance in detecting deception is one of the more robust in the behavioral sciences. Surprisingly, little research has examined individual differences in lie production ability. As a consequence, as far as we are aware, no previous study has investigated whether there exists an association between the ability to lie successfully and the ability to detect lies. Furthermore, only a minority of studies have examined deception as it naturally occurs; in a social, interactive setting. The present study, therefore, explored the relationship between these two facets of deceptive behavior by employing a novel competitive interactive deception task (DeceIT). For the first time, signal detection theory (SDT) was used to measure performance in both the detection and production of deception. A significant relationship was found between the deception-related abilities; those who could accurately detect a lie were able to produce statements that others found difficult to classify as deceptive or truthful. Furthermore, neither ability was related to measures of intelligence or emotional ability. We, therefore, suggest the existence of an underlying deception-general ability that varies across individuals.

Examining Sender and Judge Variability in Honesty Assessments and Deception Detection Accuracy: Evidence for a Transparent Liar but No Evidence of Deception-General Ability

“…The final noteworthy finding was that the current experiment failed to replicate the correlation between ability and transparency reported by Wright et al (2012Wright et al ( , 2013 in support of the deception-general ability hypothesis. From the perspective of the current author, this failure to replicate is not surprising since, as argued previously, the deception-general ability claim is implausible for several good reasons.…”

“…Consequently, good (defined as nontransparent) liars may be good (high-ability) lie detectors. They propose a deception-general ability and report a correlation of r = −.35 between judge accuracy (ability) and transparency (Wright et al, 2012(Wright et al, , 2013; both articles report the same data from the same N = 51 participants). In a replication (N = 75), the correlation between sender transparency and judge ability was r = −.47 (Wright, Berry, Catmur, & Bird, 2015).…”

Culture moderates changes in linguistic self-presentation and detail provision when deceiving others

“…Our findings are therefore likely to be an overgeneralization of actual differences in behaviour, and future research may reveal variations and other individual differences that modify and even contradict the simple contrasts found here [29,69]. As the specificity of the samples increase, so we should expect to be able to find stronger effects (i.e.…”

Kinesic Patterning in Deceptive and Truthful Interactions

“…Arousal is a sense of excitement (positive or negative), and is generated when people are faced with an unusual or threatening experience, such as a situation in which the person needs to lie (Caso et al 2005;Sporer and Schwandt 2007;Wright et al 2012). Futhermore, people who believe they will get away with lying have an even greater increase in arousal (Gonza et al 2001).…”