Neuroscience
Forget expensive fMRI-based lie detection or iffy polygraph tests, give your suspect a pencil and paper and get them to draw what happened - a new study suggests their artistic efforts will betray whether they are telling the truth or not.
Aldert Vrij's new study involved 31 police and military participants going on a mock mission to pick up a package from another agent before delivering it somewhere else. Afterwards the participants answered questions about the mission. Crucially, they were also asked to draw the scene of the package pick-up. Half the participants acted as truth-tellers, the others played the part of liars.
Vrij's team reasoned that clever liars would visualise a location they'd been to, other than where the exchange took place, and draw that. They further reasoned that this would mean the liars would forget to include the agent who participated in the exchange. This thinking proved shrewd: liars indeed tended not to draw the agent, whereas truth-tellers did. In fact, 80 per cent of truth tellers and 87 per cent of liars could be correctly classified on the basis of this factor alone.
'These are high accuracy rates and will be difficult to exceed by any traditional verbal, nonverbal or physiological lie detection tool,' Vrij's team said. 'In fact, we would certainly expect such tools to fare worse.'
Another distinguishing factor was the perspective of the drawing. Fifty-three per cent of truth-tellers penned a drawing from their own first-person perspective at the scene; 47 per cent opted for a birds-eye view. By contrast, 81 per cent of liars went for the birds-eye view and just 19 per cent for the first-person perspective.
The researchers said theirs was the first study of its kind and they acknowledged many questions were left unanswered. 'We believe that our findings justify taking drawing seriously as a lie detection tool, and that it will encourage researchers to carry out drawing research.'
_________________________________
Vrij, A., Leal, S., Mann, S., Warmelink, L., Granhag, P., & Fisher, R. (2010). Drawings as an innovative and successful lie detection tool. Applied Cognitive Psychology DOI: 10.1002/acp.1627
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- Deception Detection
An article by AP/Yahoo examines a few of the issues involved in using fMRI for lie detection not often addressed. "What's really scary is if we start implementing this before we know how accurate it really is," Greely said. No Lie MRI Inc. will provide...
- Teenage Offenders Are Highly Adept At Spotting When Their Peers Are Lying
Most people are poor at detecting whether someone is lying, at least partly because most people think mistakenly that things like shifty eye movements and fidgeting hands are reliable signs of deception. However, it's emerged in recent years that...
- Forget Good Cop, Bad Cop - Here's The Real Psychology Of Two-person Interrogation
We're all familiar with the good cop, bad cop interrogation technique so often portrayed in TV and film. In reality, at least in the UK, when two officers perform a joint suspect interview, one of them asks the questions and the other simply takes...
- Shock Result! Asking Children And Teenagers To Promise To Tell The Truth Actually Works
When teenagers are asked to provide testimonies for use in court, how do you increase the likelihood that they'll tell the truth? It may sound twee, but a North American study claims that merely asking them to promise to tell the truth can be surprisingly...
- Truth-telling And The Brain
Can brain-imaging technologies show whether we are being truthful or not? A current study, reported by Reuters (as found on the Houston Chronicle website), takes a look:Brain scans can tell who's lying, who's not Reuters News Service Nov. 29,...
Neuroscience
Drawing out the truth
Forget expensive fMRI-based lie detection or iffy polygraph tests, give your suspect a pencil and paper and get them to draw what happened - a new study suggests their artistic efforts will betray whether they are telling the truth or not. Aldert Vrij's new study involved 31 police and military participants going on a mock mission to pick up a package from another agent before delivering it somewhere else. Afterwards the participants answered questions about the mission. Crucially, they were also asked to draw the scene of the package pick-up. Half the participants acted as truth-tellers, the others played the part of liars.
Vrij's team reasoned that clever liars would visualise a location they'd been to, other than where the exchange took place, and draw that. They further reasoned that this would mean the liars would forget to include the agent who participated in the exchange. This thinking proved shrewd: liars indeed tended not to draw the agent, whereas truth-tellers did. In fact, 80 per cent of truth tellers and 87 per cent of liars could be correctly classified on the basis of this factor alone.
'These are high accuracy rates and will be difficult to exceed by any traditional verbal, nonverbal or physiological lie detection tool,' Vrij's team said. 'In fact, we would certainly expect such tools to fare worse.'
Another distinguishing factor was the perspective of the drawing. Fifty-three per cent of truth-tellers penned a drawing from their own first-person perspective at the scene; 47 per cent opted for a birds-eye view. By contrast, 81 per cent of liars went for the birds-eye view and just 19 per cent for the first-person perspective.
The researchers said theirs was the first study of its kind and they acknowledged many questions were left unanswered. 'We believe that our findings justify taking drawing seriously as a lie detection tool, and that it will encourage researchers to carry out drawing research.'
_________________________________
Vrij, A., Leal, S., Mann, S., Warmelink, L., Granhag, P., & Fisher, R. (2010). Drawings as an innovative and successful lie detection tool. Applied Cognitive Psychology DOI: 10.1002/acp.1627Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- Deception Detection
An article by AP/Yahoo examines a few of the issues involved in using fMRI for lie detection not often addressed. "What's really scary is if we start implementing this before we know how accurate it really is," Greely said. No Lie MRI Inc. will provide...
- Teenage Offenders Are Highly Adept At Spotting When Their Peers Are Lying
Most people are poor at detecting whether someone is lying, at least partly because most people think mistakenly that things like shifty eye movements and fidgeting hands are reliable signs of deception. However, it's emerged in recent years that...
- Forget Good Cop, Bad Cop - Here's The Real Psychology Of Two-person Interrogation
We're all familiar with the good cop, bad cop interrogation technique so often portrayed in TV and film. In reality, at least in the UK, when two officers perform a joint suspect interview, one of them asks the questions and the other simply takes...
- Shock Result! Asking Children And Teenagers To Promise To Tell The Truth Actually Works
When teenagers are asked to provide testimonies for use in court, how do you increase the likelihood that they'll tell the truth? It may sound twee, but a North American study claims that merely asking them to promise to tell the truth can be surprisingly...
- Truth-telling And The Brain
Can brain-imaging technologies show whether we are being truthful or not? A current study, reported by Reuters (as found on the Houston Chronicle website), takes a look:Brain scans can tell who's lying, who's not Reuters News Service Nov. 29,...