Searching for Treasure and Spotting Liars
How can you tell if someone is lying? Turns out, it’s harder than you’d think.
By Joshlin Sheridan, Marketing —
Do you have a knack for knowing when people are lying to you? Perhaps you are keen to pick up on shifty eye movement, changes in voice fluctuation, or fidgeting. These are some ways people have traditionally thought to determine if someone’s being dishonest. However, a new study published in the Journal of Cognition suggests that spotting liars by observing body language and voice alone may not be so simple…or accurate.
Lying While Searching For Treasure
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh created a two-person game that participants would play on the computer. During this game, one partner viewed pairs of images with locations of buried treasure. They would describe the location of the treasure and were free to lie about its true location. The other partner had to find the treasure and assess if the other person was being truthful.
The researchers then coded over 1100 of the voice clips made by these participants and paired these with 19 potential cues associated with lying such as eyebrow movements and pausing while speaking. They wanted to find out if participants knew the typical cues of lying, and if they could spot the lies.
While many participants knew typical signs of lying, there was a surprising disconnect between how accurate they actually were at picking up on lies. The cues that people often associate with lying are actually sometimes used when we’re telling the truth!
Technology Can Catch Liars
Body language can be misleading and liars might be able to suppress cues that we commonly connect to lying. A new lie detector, EyeDetect® offers more accuracy. This computerized test can know if someone is lying by measuring subtle changes in pupil diameter, eye movement, reading behavior, blinks, fixations, etc. and comparing these to algorithms. This makes lie detection a much more systematic and accurate method than human body language reading alone. In fact, it has an average accuracy rate of 86% and takes only 30 minutes to administer. EyeDetect can be used to screen job applicants, employees, parolees and immigrants, law enforcement personnel, and more. Learn about EyeDetect here. Learn more about EyeDetect here.
