Lie Detection Training

What Lies Beneath

Deception Matters provides training in behavioural analysis and interviewing skills for professional information-gathering and deception detection capabilities.

Most of what we intuit about deception and lie detection turns out to be not only wrong but counter-productive, directing our attention on the wrong indicators entirely. Body language and gaze aversion “cues” for example, are commonly thought to indicate deception despite decades of evidence suggesting otherwise.

The evidence tells us that viewing deception as strategic, motivated and adaptive is the necessary basis for deconstructing those very strategies in order to detect them. If deception requires information distortion then it follows that detecting deception failure requires strategic clarification. Understanding how and why deception succeeds in the first place can provide us an ability to see through the information mirage to distinguish illusory from actual truths.

We live in the age of information-management, where professional communication is scripted to order and rehearsed by talented actors. Conversations are often contextualised and framed according to narrow self-serving aims and problematic information carefully manipulated or avoided entirely.

Noticing how an interviewee is managing, manipulating or processing problematic information is the first step to understanding what to do about it if you want to gather important details or assess the veracity and credibility of what you are observing.

Given that successful deception relies on exploiting our natural “truth-default” naive expectations (see Levine, 2020) it’s essential to understand why and how we are so easily fooled by contrived honest demeanours, social confidence and verbal fluency, and, relatedly, why beliefs and self-deception is so often more important to us than awkward reality.

Ultimately, in most cases information avoidance precedes its subsequent management and manipulation. When and where omission tactics fail, the commission of explicit lies can emerge as a strategy of last resort. So developing an “information currency” is the vital ingredient to productive interactions, where ego, noise and redundancy give way to clarity and precision. The best lie detectors are like gold detectors - mindful, patient and strategic about when and where to dig. Where a metal detector might beep and trained interviewer might detect an “orange flag” from discordant information and start digging with focus and care.

We show you some of the principles and practices to increase your detection-detection ability almost immediately by simple information-gathering strategies and noticing “what information is missing?” From there we adopt increasingly specialised cognitive skills that make deception all but impossible.

We illustrate and demonstrate learning points using video, audio and slides for your observation and analysis. We enjoy a fun, conversational approach with high participation and impromptu role-plays as requested.

Information-gathering and deception-detection skills differ only by degree - the skills taught begin with the generic and straightforward information-gathering before moving to the more sophisticated and specialised. The more generic themes (e.g. use of open questions) will be broadly applicable for all your work, whereas more targeted cognitive approaches are only required for those more challenging circumstances you suspect deception may be present.

Observational skills will help you notice what to look for and applied skills will help you address what you need to, in interview situations where information quality might be conspicuously lacking.

We provide simple case studies with verbal prompts to give you a clear sense of what these principles and skills might mean for your work practice. We recommend you adapt these to suit your workplace.

We provide you conversational experience and applied learning complemented and consolidated by more detailed written content. For the most part we use Powerpoint and other AV media to help you to observe, understand and address evasive or deceptive tactics.

We often analyse topical events from a deception detection perspective - demonstrating the principles and processes we teach from contemporaneous examples in the media. These sometimes include links to interviews, transcripts or other sources of relevant interest.

We encourage you to bring any cases of interest for us to include.

We offer bespoke training packages adapted to your workplace and training budget.

We can provide a one-off presentation of deception detection research and its implications for your workplace needs.

Alternatively, we can provide skills training over 3 sessions covering 6 topics:

Module 1: Context & Conversation

Module 2: Cooperation & Content

Module 3: Confirmation & Challenge

But we also accommodate specific learning targets you might want us to focus on.

Past clients have suggested topics such as:

  • Minimise the number of unproductive meetings

  • Optimise the chance of eliciting useful information

  • Create a shared understanding and dialogue in your workplace for you to continue to teach each other

  • Build confidence in staff re-grouping / recovering from troublesome interactions

  • Where relevant, facilitate behavioural change in interviewees

The course content is structured in a way to provide you an accessible and applied framework.

We provide you summaries of all core learning points, with sections outlining “what to look for” and “what to do” as well some verbal prompts to give you a clear sense of what these principles look like in practice.

Deception and lie detection research is complex, controversial, and even deceptive! The vagaries of the scientific discourse can make evidence-based practice implications difficult to elicit let alone then teach with precision or clarity. However, we are confident we have achieved this, in large part, by viewing the evidence of “cues” through an information management perspective.

For anyone wanting to look further into the research and theory, we recommend looking further into the work of researchers listed below - many of whom can be found presenting YouTube or TedTalk presentations or in written media.

We are particularly impressed by the work Timothy R. Levine whose book “Duped: Truth-Default Theory and The Social Science of Lying and Deception” strongly aligns with the cognitive and information-processing approaches we have developed since 2017 - largely based on our practical experience and analysis. Similarly, “Information Management Theory 2” by Steve McCornack is recommended reading for the other research nerds out there.

We also recommend the work of Aldert Vrij and Pär-Anders Granhag, on cognitive load theory and strategic disclosure respectively.

“Lie Detection Guide: Theory and Practice for Investment Professionals” (CFA institute) by Maria Hartwig and Jason Voss is an excellent theoretical resource.

For anyone interested in our operationalisation of academic findings, we provide theoretical explanations in the members section.

Researchers: Aldert Vrij, Charles Bond, Timothy Levine, Pär-Anders Granhag, Bella de Paulo, Steve McCornack, Robert Trivers (self-deception), William Miller (Motivational Interviewing), Maria Hartwig