Peter Budnick reviews recent research directed at helping security screeners recognize human verbal and non-verbal behavior that indicates deception. Specifically, the researchers conducted experiments in which participants were grouped into pairs of truth-tellers and liars. The interviewers were blinded from knowing which groups were telling a true story and which were being deceptive. Subsequent video analysis of behavioral metrics suggested behavioral cues that real-world security screeners might be able to recognize when interacting with two or more conspirators, including language/word use characteristics and visual cues like eye gaze patterns. The research demonstrates the breadth of ergonomics/human factors profession, as well as its diverse value to society.
In this study, researchers Driskell, Salas, and Driskell attempt to identify social cues that may indicate deception. That is, can we tell, especially in a field situation such as airport security, if two individuals are being deceptive? This research is quite different than many of the studies we review in The Ergonomics Report, yet it is a great example of the cognitive side of ergonomics (often referred to as human factors). We tend to cover topics that fall under the physical or organizational ergonomics domains, but today, we’ll discuss an example of the equally important cognitive ergonomics domain.
In their introduction, the authors note that there’s a long and sometimes “colorful” history to deception detection. They point to the polygraph testing (“lie detectors”), through which analysts attempt to measure and interpret physiological changes that cannot be detected by human observers, as one line of research. The other line of research, which is the path they use in this study, focuses on verbal and non-verbal behavioral indicators of deception that can be detected by trained human observers. The goal of this research study is practical: is there a way that human observers, such as military or transportation security personnel, can recognize the difference between truth and deception when two or more individuals are concurrently interviewed in a social setting, like a roadside checkpoint or airport security station. Previous research in this area tends to focus on a one-on-one interview situation, not a multiple person scenario.
Reviewing past research, the authors describe verbal behaviors of liars as:
Liars tended to exhibit non-verbal behavior such as:
Although the evidence suggests that these types of individual cues can be predictive of deception, the associations are generally weak, and they cite researchers DePaulo et al. as concluding, “the looks and sounds of deceit are faint”.
The previous one-on-one deception research tends to be laboratory based, under tightly controlled experimental protocols, whereas this research is field based, and includes a social interaction component. This appears to be the first research “that examines indicators of deception among pairs of persons who conspire to deceive and are interviewed at the same time.” The authors also describe law enforcement techniques as strongly favoring the immediate separation of suspects for individual interrogation, where the purpose is to extract a confession. The context of this research is field intelligence gathering, and those that might apply these outcomes would not be seeking a confession, but rather seeking to identify deceptive behavior. They describe application scenarios such as a military checkpoint at which a car with two or more people are briefly interviewed, and travel companions that might be briefly interviewed in the social context of an airport security station.
The authors describe the theory of transactive memory systems and the concept of synchrony or congruence as central to their study. Interested readers are directed to the complete article, cited below, for a detailed description of this research and its underlying theory. In short, transactive memory systems theory refers to the way a group stores and retrieves memories, and synchrony refers to how synchronous the group members recall and present those memories (they describe this as “co-occurance of behavior” between the members of the group). In a transactive memory situation, individual group members tend to remember or recall certain things about an event, while others recall other things about that same event.
Methods
Fifty-two police and firefighters (50 males; 2 females; between 1 and 26 years of experience) were recruited and randomly assigned in pairs to either “truth” or “deception” experimental conditions. Each pair were partners in their real-world jobs. For the truth experimental condition, the pairs were asked to describe a In the truth condition, they were asked to simply describe an actual situation that they had jointly participated in during the recent past. In the deception condition, they were asked to fabricate a story, as realistically and believable as possible, on the spot, that did not take place. The pairs were given some time to prepare, then stood side-by-side to be interviewed by the experimenter, who was blind to which condition, truth or deception, the pair represented. the interactions were videotaped for future review by two independent analysts, and the pairs were thanked and dismissed.
The experimenters sought to measure synchrony using three variables:
Reference
James E. Driskell, Eduardo Salas and Tripp Driskell, Social Indicators of Deception, Human Factors, published online 11 May 2012, available to Human Factors subscribers at http://hfs.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/05/11/0018720812446338.full.pdf
This article originally appeared in The Ergonomics Report™ on 2012-05-15.