An exploration into deception and identifying it

This paper describes a two part experiment exploring the relationship between Feeling of Another’s Knowing and deception detection. In Experiment 1, eight subjects were filmed answering the same set of questions twice, for first set they were asked to answer truthfully, and for the second set they were asked to lie. Participants were also interviewed recounting a holiday story from memory and fabricating a story from a set list of foreign destinations. These filmed interviews were analysed and coded, focusing on ten indicators of deception. Though most of the literature suggests that speech rate slows when a person is lying, our results indicated that the majority of our subjects speech rate actually increased when they were lying. In addition, participants looked at the interviewer more, and decreased the amount they smiled when they were being untruthful. For Experiment 2, 24 participants were shown clips from the first experiment. For part one of Experiment 2, audio-only and video-only clips from the holiday story portion of the filmed interviews were shown to participants. They were asked to rate each clip, on a 7-point scale, on how certain they believed the individual was. The results showed that when presented with a video-only clip, participants were better at spotting the deceptive clips than identifying certainty or the clips containing the honest stories. The second part of the experiment had participants watching the interviewees’ responses (truthful and untruthful) to the two rounds of questions in Experiment 1 in their original format. They were asked to determine which of the two clips showed the individual being deceptive. The participants scored higher than what would be expected by chance in determining which clips contained false answers