If we think of deception as false information disguised as true, it follows that detecting seemingly minor anomalies will usually be the first “orange-flags” to suspend our “truth-default” assumptions (Levine, 2020) that people are being cooperative and truthful. Early information anomalies can be the “trigger events” that suspend our naive expectations and arouse deeper curiosity. And once our natural assumptions of truth and cooperation are suspended, deception detection usually results from further analysis and corroboration - of information. So we must also understand our own information-management and processing biases.
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 professional and ethical 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 you, free of such 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 strategic phrasing(?)
In situations where you haven’t been able to avoid the conversation or avoid discussion of a problem, your evasive answers may have been noticed. You may have experienced having to think on your feet under cognitive pressure in order to improvise an acceptable answer - perhaps you even had to commit to a lie rather than merely omit or talk around problematic information.
These strategic layers of information management are familiar enough to all of us once they are pointed out. Most of us can recall a time when our effortful impression-management required that we adopt an honest and believable demeanour; sound plausible and state moral motivations while strategically avoiding problematic information. While we manage information routinely, in our relationships and workplaces, there are also times our information-managing strategies are tested - and our adaptive strategies to hide or disguise problematic information aim to reduce exposure or disclosure risks, exposed.
Beneath our social and cognitive camouflage, some strategies work in some contexts, and for some audiences, better than others. Accordingly, avoiding, managing or manipulating information becomes more difficult the more informed the audience is - information anomalies are more detectable for the informed. Your domain expertise matters.
We may know individuals well enough to detect when they are communicating atypically, but generally speaking, we need to reduce intuitive assumptions of “deception cues” (such as micro-expressions, demeanour and body language) and start focussing on strategic information management.
Our approach is to demonstrate how strategic information management manifests across contextual, conversational and cognitive domains. Each (6C) layer allows us to demarcate truthful from deceptive communication, with increasing precision.
The benefit of this layered approach is that you can select what factors are most applicable to any given scenario.
We can all relate to having had interactions of little to no value, wishing we hadn’t wasted our time and energy. You may have found an interviewee reducing conversational opportunities or not really engaging - so you need to address those issues first and foremost. In other cases, where you already have good conversational engagement and an “information currency” already established, you can focus on information quality and its processing in real time. Whatever way, the core aim is conversational efficiency - which should not present a challenge to an honest and truthful interviewee.
To a significant extent, by becoming more information-efficient, we can respectfully out-fox the fox.
