Summary

Much research has examined people’s ability to correctly distinguish between honest and deceptive communication. The ability to detect deception is useful, but many misconceptions about effective lie detection have been documented. Research on deception is especially informative because the findings of research often contradict common sense. For example, both folk wisdom and several social scientific theories hold that lies can be detected through the careful observation of nonverbal behaviors. Yet research shows that most of the nonverbal behaviors that are stereotypically linked with deception have less diagnostic value than presumed. The widely accepted conclusion from decades of research is that while people are statistically better than chance at detecting lies, people are poor lie detectors in an absolute sense, averaging just 54 percent accuracy. Poor accuracy findings hold across the biological sex of the sender and judge, adult age and occupation, various types of media, spontaneous and planned lies, and more and less potent motivations for lying. Research also finds that people are usually truth-biased—that is, people tend to believe other people more often than not. As a consequence of truth-bias, accuracy for honest communication is typically higher than accuracy for lies, a finding known as the veracity effect. Subsequent research has yielded promising findings suggesting various ways deception detection accuracy can be improved. Focusing on communication content, especially when understood in context, understanding the motives for deception, using evidence, and persuading senders to be honest all have been shown to improve lie detection accuracy in recent experiments.