How to detect lies with a storytelling technique
anecdote.com
anecdote.com
The example given is an employee who is consistently late for work. If you ask them to recount why they are late one day, a liar will tell you the story linearly: "I woke up, ate breakfast, hopped in the car, was on my way, minding my own business, then someone hit my car. I got out to trade insurance ... [etc]".
A truth teller jumps around, usually starting with the climax "Someone hit my car on the way in. I then realized my insurance was expired. I had just been going through my bills the previous night ...".
This is easily ascribed to the fact that the liar is either making the story up as they go or are repeating a rehearsed lie. A truthful person can jump around easily because they are recounting distinct memories.
Alternatively, the liar's experienced, good at his craft, and more capable of jumping around.
There will be truth-tellers who fail this test, but you find nothing conviction worthy. They'll be fine.
There will be liars who pass this test. Hopefully you catch them later by other means, just as you would have otherwise.
And of course, there will be those who pass who are never caught. This tool does not make that any worse.
If the false positive rate is too high and the prior probability a given person being interviewed actually lied, then the test is actively harmful.
I.e., if a positive result is more likely a false positive, then you end up wasting investigation resources. In this case you'd have been better off just flipping a coin to decide if someone warranted more investigation.
>There will be truth-tellers who fail this test, but you find nothing conviction worthy. They'll be fine.
Tell that to all the people who lost jobs, or spent months of their life under investigation because of failed polygraph tests.
I should of course mention that not everyone uses these tools correctly. I suppose that could be harmful. But then again, if an investigator is simply looking for a reason to find someone guilty, then the accused is eff'ed either way.
"unless coerced/brutalized by police/DAs" is not really exceptional, once in a decade, type case, sadly it is rather routine.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/nov/20/why-inn...
(EDIT: And this one) http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/magazine/the-bail-trap.htm...
"Bags are subject to search" means "We will search your bags". "A shooting involving Tacoma County Police left two suspects dead" means "Tacoma County Police shot two suspects."
1. I've seen the "bags are subject to search" phrase many times, including the public library. I cannot remember the last time my bag was searched, even at the airport when the search is differentiated from the usual scan. So that phrase is definitely not a cover-up for "We will"
2. Again, not a lie. And I don't mean in the "not technically a lie". There are many cases where there is a shootout involving police and the cause of the suspect's death is ultimately determined as suicide. So the "A shooting involving..." phrase is perfectly acceptable in a breaking news update when no determination has yet been made.
That said, I don't think the exonerated voice is a particularly skillful one. A careful listener can easily pick up on that.
Clippy says: "Hey, it looks like you're trying to start a semantic argument! Can I help with that?"
> I've seen the "bags are subject to search" phrase many times, including the public library. I cannot remember the last time my bag was searched, even at the airport when the search is differentiated from the usual scan. So that phrase is definitely not a cover-up for "We will"
Congratulations on being middle class and white.
> There are many cases where there is a shootout involving police and the cause of the suspect's death is ultimately determined as suicide. So the "A shooting involving..." phrase is perfectly acceptable in a breaking news update when no determination has yet been made.
There are many cases where this isn't the case, too.
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/liespotting-pamela-meyer/110...
http://www.amazon.com/Liespotting-Proven-Techniques-Detect-D...
I won't oversell it and tell you that the book turns you into a human polygraph. It simply surveys what is known about deception and human behavior and how you can apply that to your interactions with others.
He was totally non-plussed by the answer and said, "No, how did you get _here_?"... I was actually confused by the way he said it and he added, "What did you do this morning to get _HERE_?". I said I got up, packed, got on the train, transferred to the airport bus, and got here. He just paused and moved on to a few innocuous questions. It was kind of comical. I was waiting to be led to some back room for further interrogation, but in the end he just said 'enjoy your trip". :)
Imagine you were trying to remember the details of a false passport and an alibi for what you'd be doing - you get a weird question and your brain is then suddenly blank when you try to present your false identity.
Seems plausible?
They tell bad jokes to see how much you laugh, suddenly put on annoyed or aggressive personas to see how you react to those, etc.
But your point about interrupting a liars narrative makes a lot of sense as well.
Take the issue of national security (in the USA). To get a national security job, you'll have to go through a lie detector test[0], where they'll ask you a ton of questions. Say I'm lying about my name. Do you ask a story about my name? Say you ask about my childhood instead. If I was lying about my childhood, I'd tell stories that were as closely aligned with real life as possible, and change as few details as I needed to. A story about playing in the park in the summer with my parents doesn't change a whole lot if it's in North America or Europe.
Bottom line is, I think this method works, with the caveat that you have to know the event or thing that they would be lying about. Trying to find out if a spouse killed their significant other? Check, you can ask the stories around their alibi. Trying to figure out if James Bond is going to sell national secrets? What story are you going to ask about?
[0] http://federalnewsradio.com/federal-drive/2012/12/what-feder...
You also have to be careful in the other direction. False negatives are a problem but false positives are an even bigger problem because most people will be innocent. And you could be asking someone to recall a time when they were drunk or exhausted or under stress, or the truth is embarrassing or painful to think about, or the day you're asking about was entirely unremarkable, etc.
Edit: I found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10180728. Interesting and related and got lots of attention. But not a duplicate.
In the real world, you don't know if you're being lied to. That's the entire point! You don't have any normalized data that says this is the number of words a person uses when they're telling the truth and when not, so the detection technique will be as inaccurate as this missing calibration info. And since there are wide variances between individuals in both general memory, recall, and "talkativeness" you have to develop a sample corpus per person. Also you need to interview the person on multiple days and randomize when you ask the questions so as not to introduce bias and to protect from ordering.
It's easy to conduct a study like this and proclaim an obvious conclusion, but this means almost nothing for real-world application of the technique.
That's probably half of "in vino veritas": drinking is an excuse to spend a few extra hours with nothing to do but chat.
I assume the true experience is done first to give a basis for comparison, since this is based on the idea that people paint pictures of their memories less reliably when they're fabricating them on the spot.
Having poorer recall actually might bias the results more in favor of a lie, if the interviewer doesn't reject the method as unsuitable or inconclusive first.
It doesn't matter if you're actually innocent, what matters is whether they can cast doubt on your innocence. Do you think you could repeat a simple story that just happened to you recently in multiple different chronological and detail configurations/contexts without introducing some inconsistencies?
Is this technique robust enough to detect implanted false memories (psychologist implants memories of child molestation) or are such recalled "memories" indistinguishable from real ones?
Therefore, you need to consciously validate whatever your brain outputs when you ask for some bullshit to "remember". Maybe this creates a delay or makes people be conservative in what they tell you for fear of accidentally saying something inconsistent.
If you had a false memory, however, your brain could make up details as it goes along and you would just say them aloud, without feeling nervous or consciously thinking about consistency and validity at all.
Knowing the technique is probably half way to defeating it in all honesty, as long as a person has time to prepare (or be prepared).
[1]http://eprints.port.ac.uk/11286/1/filetodownload,62616,en.pd...
[2] https://webfiles.uci.edu/eloftus/BraunPsychMarket02.pdfhttps...
If someone was given a false memory of a traumatic experience, they likely have still experienced something similar to the faked traumatic experience (maybe saw it in a movie) and will have an actual part of a memory to feed greater details as someone dug into the memory.
A false memory of seeing a litter of puppies will still have plenty of real occurrences of seeing puppies to subconsciously draw upon.
Put another way, if a novel is so richly detailed that I feel as though I'm actually in the story, would describing my experience of that novel be interpreted by this system as truth or a lie?
Regarding con-artists, yes I suppose it comes down to whether they can be as quickly imaginative on the spot as most people who are truthfully recalling an experience. That's probably where the inaccurate 15% of results come in.
If you're in the poker world, you know that physical tells _are_ a thing but only to reaffirm your read and should not be the entire basis of whether you bet/call/fold (ala Casino Royale).
Because it's so hard to place your entire reasoning because, "he's covering his mouth, so he's bluffing" and "he's shaking his hands, he must have a good hand" sometimes those are true tells, but sometimes maybe the room is just really cold and the player is trying to warm himself up. Or maybe he's throwing a reverse tell.
I remember Phil Hellmuth shilled a book about physical tells from a former FBI agent, not sure if there was any substance to that book.
I also recall hearing a funny thing on a podcast once about someone interviewing someone with a (pretty dubious even by weird paranormal stuff standards) far-out alien abduction tale. They stopped them and asked "so you were on this ship for hours... how did you go to the bathroom?" Interview was over. They didn't have that one scripted. Turns out the person was actually trying to virally market a book.
Which part?
Honestly, I don't know how effective monitoring affect is per se but as a wild guess I'd say it's at least as accurate as a polygraph/coin flip.
However, I think there is more weight in the idea that a story that is repeated verbatim like that is more likely to be fabricated or at least neglecting some of the truth (which is the takeaway I got from the article).
Sleep deprivation appears to be a pretty popular "enhanced interrogation technique": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_deprivation#Interrogatio...
But just like every other form of torture its efficacy is highly questionable (e.g. the inherent possibility of false confessions). I think sleep deprivation is particularly problematic because while it does seem to almost universally deplete the victim's willpower/resistance, it also causes a profound detriment to memory and other cognitive function-- meaning it is completely useless in cases where the victim isn't talking because they don't remember the information rather than because they just don't want to cooperate.
See "Educing Information, Interrogation: Science and Art, Foundations for the Future": https://fas.org/irp/dni/educing.pdf
the behavioral response. Going from angry/rebel -> submissive happened with innocent people, preferring to take a penalty rather than keeping on being treated this way.
Thanks for the pdf
This one truly baffles me. Man, as soon as I find myself tied on a chair, I would spill the whole bag of beans and more. Heaven forbids they pull out the pliers.
So I don't see that they're avoiding a "Clever Hans" situation at all. They could be leading their interviewees on, providing subtle clues to the ones that are telling the truth, but not to the ones that are lying.
And even if this was double-blinded, there's still no way to ensure the interviewer doesn't interact in a different way with different interviewees, therefore messing up the results of any experiment pretty badly.
Which shows yet another deficiency in LEOs' standard methods. They interrogate until they get an inconsistency, which they know the courts will interpret as guilt, even though this research shows that it is no such thing. Therefore intelligent guilty people can talk to the police with no fear, while no innocent person should ever talk to them.
Would people memorize fakes to give away consistently, or would they just rattle off a random nine digit number?
I used to be a bouncer in my college town and you'd be surprised at what lengths kids will go to pass off their fake ID's as real. they'll memorize everything on the ID, including where the city is located - "So Flagstaff, is that North or South of Phoenix? I can never remember?"
I would ask for all the information on the ID if I thought they looked young. Then once the person was confident they had passed my tests, I'd ask them what their area code was when they call home. 9/10 a fake ID holder will fail this test because its not something on the ID, but something they should know without fail.
The difficulty here is that the incentives heavily favor allowing false negatives, and denying false positives. I know that in Virginia, the bar tenders were personally responsible if they served alcohol to anyone underage. And in a college town (where I was for quite some time in grad school), there are loads of underage kids trying to get into the bars, and the authorities would sometimes hire underage kids to test the bars.
It went something like this:
As I'm asking the kid the details on his ID, I make a hand gesture to the waitress that works the rear bar near the door. She would then have the manager call the phone at the front desk where we were. As I was talking to the kid, I would show Bouncer #2 the city and as I was talking to the kid, Bouncer #2 would ask the manager the area code over the phone in a simple coded manner.
The bouncer would give the city and state initials to the manager. So if it was Phoneix, AZ. He would say, "Yeah, its a PH, AZ." The manager would then confirm he had the right city and then relate the area code. After a few months, I had memorized a lot of the shorthand we had for cities so that it only took a few seconds to confirm. Considering most fakes come from the same states and cities, it wasn't a long list to learn.
By the time I got down stalling, the other bouncer would then ask him the question, already knowing the answer.
I would find this extraordinarily difficult to do in any state of mind.
The only way I could give you the digits of my telephone number backwards would be to mentally go through my telephone number from beginning to end once for each digit of the number, and stop a digit earlier on each pass.
I hope the poor sucker who has that number now doesn't get too many follow up calls.
However just like with drug dogs, they'll ignore the high false positives and low prior probabilities.
It's an interesting thought. Imagine the linguistic equivalent of using Benford's Law to detect accounting fraud.
The interview jumps around the story looking for any events that moved customer to or from new solution, and digs into the emotions associated with each event to get customers to recall all details.
The best way I've found to detect lies is that truth is 'internally consistent' and lies never are, all you need to do is to focus on any inconsistencies not matter how small and then to apply pressure on them, they'll fracture the story much like a crystal with a flaw in it.
That's mostly my interpretation of it, I've met only very few people that were lying outright during the course of many DDs but when they do that's how they all - so far, and of course there could be undetected ones that made it through somehow though I highly doubt that - fell down.
From what I've seen it is very hard to keep the story straight over the course of a couple of weeks if it isn't true.
Yes. I would add that it can be very hard to keep the story straight over the course of a couple weeks EVEN IF IT'S TRUE. That's what I was trying to say.
I could do this easy peasy, and then ask me to do it backwards and I'll stare at you and go "No idea, I'd have to think about it... generally don't think backwards".
The key in any case, is always... don't give them rope. Patience.
Where does that statistic come from? I've definitely read that polygraphs have over 90% success as long as you account for obvious "counter measures". Basically, the person administering the test can clearly see if you are pulling tricks to defeat it.
How do you explain this man ..