If we think of deception as false information disguised as true, it follows that methods of information disguise are usually the first “orange-flags” to suspend our “truth-default” assumptions (Levine, 2020) that people are telling the truth. In other words, early information anomalies are often the “trigger events” that suspend our belief and arouse our deeper curiosity. And once our natural assumptions of truth and cooperation are suspended, deception detection results from further analysis and corroboration. To the extent deception is strategically disguised information that exploits our normal social expectations, we have to understand our own believability biases and why we assume cooperation and veracity so often and readily.
Information management is a part of all our lives
We all understand and accept our professional, legal and ethical disclosure boundaries in personal and professional contexts; where information is managed for valid reasons. Conversely, we also understand how information can be manipulated for purely transactional or self-serving reasons. But if you think about the last time you were managing problematic information that challenged these constraints, you may recall wanting to avoid or reduce unwanted conversations or, if compelled to have the difficult conversation, avoid problematic topics. Perhaps you were directly asked to address problematic issues, and you manipulated, filtered or “bent the truth” with careful phrasing?
In situations where you haven’t been able to avoid the conversation or avoid discussion of a problem once in one, and your evasive answers have not been accepted; you may have experienced having to think on your feet under cognitive pressure to improvise an acceptable answer - to the extent of having to commit to a lie.
These strategic layers of information management are familiar enough to all of us once it’s pointed out. Most of us can recall a time when effortful impression-management required that we adopt an honest and believable demeanour; sound plausible and present as motivated by moral principles while strategically managing problematic information.
Adaptive strategies to hide or disguise problematic information aim to reduce exposure or disclosure risks beneath social and cognitive camouflage. However, such strategies work in some contexts, and for some audiences, better than others. Avoiding, managing or manipulating information becomes more difficult the more informed the recipient is - the more able they are to detect information anomalies. This is where your domain expertise matters greatly.
Detecting deception requires understanding why it succeeds in the first place and, more specifically, what deceptive communication strategies typically fool our default expectations of cooperation and honesty. In essence, we need to stop succumbing to intuitive assumptions of “deception cues” (such as micro-expressions, demeanour and body language) and start focussing on strategic information management cues.
To achieve this we need to understand how information is: 1) managed in context and conversation, 2) strategically manipulated and 3) processed by deceptive interviewees in real time.
We divide these three categories into six sub-categories addressing layers of strategic information management. Each 6C layer (see below) of analysis examines what demarcates truthful from avoidant/deceptive communication, with increasing precision.
While the benefit of this layered approach is that it is flexible to your needs (you can skip contextual or conversation sections where you already have good conversational engagement) it is vital to first understand how and why some professional conversations never get off the ground to begin with - without this understanding, all subsequent efforts will be a waste of your time and energy.
Understanding that deception is adaptive, motivated, strategic and normative, helps us imagine the task of a deceptive interviewee and how they might need to strategise information disclosure. This perspective-taking (imagining from an interviewee’s perspective) approach is central to cognitive deception detection, and in some cases, detecting self-deception - as it provides interviewers a cognitive and tactical advantage in what can become a polite and respectful information management contest.
We can all relate to avoiding contexts where an unwanted conversation might occur; avoiding topics we don’t want to discuss; distorting information to make it more socially acceptable; or remaining non-committal to avoid unwanted conflict. We have all improvised our way out of awkward social interactions (see any Seinfeld episode) while maintaining a believable demeanour. The normative basis of deception means you already know more than you realise!
To a significant extent, our course deconstructs and reverse-engineers the task of those trying to deceive us in order to out-fox the fox.
