Lying and Deception: June 2012

Your Lying Eyes

Oculesics - Eye Behavior

Movement
Visual Access Theory holds that eye movement can betray whether the disclosure was retrieved from memory or created.

Blinking
Blink rates can indicate escalated anxiety or controlled contempt and a range of emotions in between. Normal blink rates range from two to ten times a minute depending on relative humidity and eye center. Blink rates decrease when the eye is engaged in reading or watching a screen, down to 3 to 4 times a minute.

A blink rate baseline can be derived by counting blinks per minute at resting or unescalated levels. More accurate blinks rates are determined over a period of time, averaging blink rates from at least a half dozen samples.

Increased blink rates in a subject can be a result of escalated anxiety, emotion, or result from excessive eye movement. Decreased rates stem more from the alpha-make stare, the inherent decoy from being detected in a lie.

Groups

For Thursday, June 21, Group A will meet at the conference room in the Jennings Building at 11:00a, and Group B will meet at noon.

If you missed class on Wednesday, shame, shame.

You're in the desert...

Assisted Detection

Polygraphs
Current polygraph testing begs false positives and alternative detection technology is expensive, invasive and cumbersome. The FBI’s Webster Commission recognizes the polygraph as flawed due to its false positive potential. Polygraphs measure primarily for physiological responses and are an indirect indicator of anxiety that may relate to heightened conditions brought on by lying, providing the subject isn’t savvy to countermeasures that render polygraphs useless.

Polygraph reliability is questionable since multiple testing contexts with low variability rarely produce the same outcomes. Accuracy wanes depending on the situation; polygraphs tend to be more accurate in criminal investigations than in screening future employees.

Since the polygraph measures physiological tells and these tells relate to the subjects' psychological arousal, the validity of polygraph testing is threatened simply due to the varied nature of subject responses under certain stimulus conditions. Heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rates and sweating have no correlative baseline, and when subjects are already heightened due to anxiety of not being found truthful when in actuality they are, polygraphs record data that lead operators to false positives.

As well, polygraphs are ineffective in detecting major security threats and are useless in determining deception in subjects engaged in countermeasures against detection.

Polygraphs are invasive causing latent anxiety secondary to proofs searched for in the process. They depend on psychophysiological indicators including respiration, heart rate, blood pressure, eccrine secretions that change electrical conductivity; autonomic and somatic activity that until now are not detectable without invasive telemetry. These anxiety indicators can mask primary tells of lying.

Positron Emission Tomography

Other detection technologies include positron emission tomography (PET) where brain activity can be measured, and functional magnetic resonating imaging (fMRI), in recording event-related characteristics of brain activity following discrete stimuli.

These technologies depend on cumbersome equipment tied to a central location costing millions to acquire and maintain along with additional personnel to operate, and yet the data they provide are shallow.

Thermography

Thermography has been used in experimentation with the Department of Defense Polygraph Institute (DoDPI) to detect changes in radiant energy from study participants' faces. This non-invasive technique is effective in detecting temperature changes in the face, a flush consistent with emotional escalation, though like PET and fMRI, thermography is expensive, requires a technician to operate and provides shallow data.

Eye Tracking

Human Observation
Human observation is used along with these technologies to detect and confirm deception. Nonverbal indicators including occulesics (eye behavior), kinetics (body movement), paralinguistics (verbal emphases, semantic aphasia, and non-semantic tells), kinesics (specific non-verbal gesticulation), haptics (touch, self-touch), and proxemics (territory, spatial relationships, and artifacts). Human observation has proven extraordinarily effective in lie detection due to its vast data of indications, but relies heavily on trained and experienced human detectors.

At issue in global contexts where the truth is increasingly difficult to discern, current lie-detection technologies lack accuracy, validity and reliability. Inter-agency studies conclude the polygraph marginal in its efficacy of determining whether a subject is lying.

The Tell-tale Heart

Physical Indicators of Escalation

The carotid artery, the main blood vessel that course through the neck, can display a heavy and escalated heart rate. As anxiety ncreases, so does blood pressure and and heart beat rate and often this can manifest in the neck through careful observation.

Other indications of elevated blood pressure can be found in the temples. The discerning observer will look beyond upper manifestations to find a pulse rhythm in the dangling foot of a leg crossed over the other at the knee, a good point to get a pulse baseline without being intrusive.

Escalated respiratory rates can result in Hypoventilation, not being able to blow off accumulated carbon dioxide. This may result in pursed lip breathing, heavy sighing, yawning.

Face touching, scratching, behind the ear and the back of neck can indicate an adrenal dump, escalation in anxiety resulting in a flight or fight response. A side effect of this is itching about the face and neck causing the target to unwittingly scratch as adaptor.

More prevelant in women than men is the rupturing of tiny capillaries, starting in the skin of the chest and working its way up to and through the neck, the result of a pounding heart.

The Reid Technique

Nine Steps of Interrogation

STEP 1 The Positive Confrontation

By accusing the suspect at the outset, the interrogator immediately establishes an atmosphere of confidence, and is also able to observe and evaluate the suspect’s reaction to being accused. As part of the same step, the interrogator neutralizes the suspect’s reaction by moving from a dominating and accusatory position to one of understanding.

STEP 2 Theme Development

Obtaining an admission of guilt from the suspect is easier if the suspect is given the opportunity to couple that admission with a reason or excuse that helps to preserve some of his or her self-respect. Most suspects have either minimized their actions (“The company has plenty of money... this small amount will never be missed.”) or justified them (“My family really needs this.”). For this reason, a successful interrogator develops “themes” or reasons that allow the suspect to salvage self-respect while confessing.

STEP 3 Handling Denials

Before a suspect can become attentive to theme development and confess guilt, they must be stopped from continuing to deny involvement. Recognition and forestalling of denial is covered in this step, as is handling of situations where denials cannot be stopped.

STEP 4 Overcoming Objections

There's a difference between denials and objections (excuses) and it's important to recognize and overcome objections.

STEP 5 Procuring and Retaining the Suspect’s Attention

Any suspect who is going to confess moves from using offensive tactics (denials and objections) to a defensive mode where they become quiet and begin to listen. It is at this point where physical closeness and verbal techniques used by the interviewer are methods for acquiring and maintaining a suspect’s attention.

STEP 6 Handling the Suspect’s Passive Mood

Recognizing that the suspect has “given up” and is ready to confess is critical. At this point focus the general theme onto one or two essential elements that will stimulate the confession.

STEP 7 Presenting an Alternative Question

To obtain the first admission of guilt from the suspect, a question with only two possible answers (either of which is incriminating) is asked.

STEP 8 Detailing the Offense

Corroboration of an admission of guilt is obtained through details of the offense supplied by the suspect. Encourage revelation of such details along with methods of correcting discrepancies in the suspect’s story.

STEP 9 Elements of Oral and Written Statements

Proper handling of the suspect’s oral statements and the reductions of such statements to a written, typed or recorded confession is imperative.

Unassisted Detection

Third Party - Whistle Blowers
Physical Evidence
Confession - Confrontational, Unsolicited, Inadvertently
Behavioral Observation

the wizards

Intense attention to non-verbal indications
Mixed messages, distancing language and semantic aphasia
Looked beyond the standard cues and tells
Erred in determining truth as well as falsehoods, indicating little truth or lie bias
Culturally and socially engrained
Intense, emotional frames of reference
Motivated and focused
Introverted, high-self monitors

Split or Steal?

Assessment One

Respond to the items below using short answers. Email your responses to comm3150@gmail.com no later than 11:00a, June 14th.

1. How does lying and deception serve as part of our social system?

2. Describe the Knapp's inclination to the four ways we determine what's true. What's your take on this?

3. What's problematic with observation as a method of discerning what is true?

4. Discuss the difference between certainty and the probability of what is interpreted as truth.

5. From your liary, describe how you may have justified lying for the right reason.

6. Describe the purpose, strategy and means of the natural deceiver pictured below:

7. What's the best way for parents to teach children about honesty?

8. How can we be fooling ourselves?

9. Describe and give an example of the blood relatives to lying.

10. Identify five characteristics of Dr. Robert Hale's PCL-R scale and show how at least two of these relate to the female contestant's behavior in the scene below:

Imposters

Ferdinand Waldo Demara, Jr.

Frank Abagnale

Cassie Chadwick

Pamela Meyer

Pants on Fire

...if only it were that easy.

Remove the moral turpitude from lying and one is left with its pragmatic applications, instinctive methods of deception to perpetuate survival. We've been lying as long as we've been communicating.

As a result, lie detection is highly contextual, making it sophisticated and difficult, but possible.

Contextual circumstances include:

Expectations
Consequences
Target
Motives

Avoid punishment
Protect from harm
Obtain reward for self
Protect another
Win admiration
Get out of awkward situations
Save face
Maintain Privacy
Power
Fulfill social expectations
Fun

Types of Lies
Falsifying
Concealing

Low-Stakes Lies

Quotidien conversation
Self-presentation
Dating
Flattery and Ingratiation
Games and Sports
Magic

High-Stakes Lies
Cognitive and Emotional Processes

Blood Relatives of Lying

Equivocation
Contextomy
Spin
Bullshit
Doublespeak:
Euphemisms
Jargon
Bureaucratese
Inflated language

Fooling Ourselves

A Psychological and Social Process

Self-confirming
Groupthink

Why We Do It

Aggrandize our own perceived value
Establish continuity between past and present
Increase projected sincerity in deceiving others
Perpetuate optimism to heal or to have something to look forward to
Increase motivation, even delusion in competitive performance

How We Do It

1. Create a Bias - Favorable Self-Evaluation

Feedback
Comparison - Driving
Trait Identification

2. Maintain the Bias

Reconcile dissonance
Self-persuasion

3. Self-Defense

Denial
Rationalization
Repression
Dissociation
Projection

Personal Baseline Rubric

Description

Establish your personal baseline as an interpreter of verbal and non-verbal signals. This will be reflected in a personal assessment in the following areas:

Your personal biases influenced by value drivers,
Your frame of reference,
Your inherent influences on how you both perceive and manipulate the truth,
And whether you're a high or a low self-monitor, or in some cases, both.

Take stock. Look hard at what drives the conclusions you make and once identified, make an effort to extricate them from your processing signals.

Point Value: 200

Rubric

1. Inventory your value drivers that may influence your perception and discover the link in how you're biased as a result. 100 points

For example, the hierarchy of my drivers stem from my role as a husband and as a father. So, I value love and commitment, devotion and dedication, continuity of character, open and direct communication, security and certainty of family, opportunity for growth, and work for dependability.

All these values drive how I perceive how you might communicate about your significant other or your family or your children, biasing me if we're both in agreement or in disparity. Either way, this bias skews my ability to discern whether you speak the truth as it relates to marriage and family. If we agree in value, or rather, if I perceive we agree in value, I'm more vulnerable to believe your position. If we have no or little agreement, I may be prone to suspicion.

As in the above example, it may be easier to identify your value drivers through your social and cultural contexts, the roles you play and the beliefs you hold. If you're a daughter, an aunt, a student, a baby-sitter, and a girlfriend, the values that drive your perception in each become a baseline through which you identify truth.

This list need not be exhaustive, but should be drawn from contexts where you feel discerning truth is paramount.

So, you've inventoried value drivers based on certain social roles you fulfill, and have identified potential biases that may color your perception or thwart your acuity in discerning veracity.

2. Identify the influences on your frame of reference as they relate to vulnerability and/or skepticism. 50 points

Got a history of being hurt by a lie? Versed with betrayal? Experiences like these impact your baseline in how you discern both verbal and non-verbal content. Over-suspicion or naivete can shade how we accept truths and lies alike.

3. Admit your inherent influences on how you both perceive and manipulate the truth. 30 points

Are you more swayed or more put-off by someone you evaluate as attractive? Is integrity automatically implied if you and your target share the same faith? Is it easier for you to lie to someone masculine or feminine? Older or younger? Thick or thin? How much do you give up when it comes to credibility if you find yourself aligned on most of the value-levels with your target?

4. Arrive at your predisposition of high- or low-self-monitoring. 20 points

This task alone will raise your self-monitoring, but more from a meta-monitoring standpoint: pay attention to how you respond non-verbally in expression and openness. Draw the 'Q' to start.