Friends of the Nonverbal Communication Blog, this week we present the paper “The Limits of Conscious
Deception Detection: When Reliance on False Deception Cues Contributes to Inaccurate Judgements”,
by Stel, M.; Schwarz, A.; van Dijk, E. and van Knippenberg, A. (2020),in which authors explore the ideas
of unconscious thought, fake cues of deception and people’s ability to detect lies.

We have already seen in several articles how the ability to deception detection, in addition to being one of the most interesting fields in the study of non-verbal language, is an extremely important and practical skill in everyday life.

However, it is important to remember that most studies show that the level of this ability does not usually exceed the level of probability.

One of the arguments used to explain this is that people have a tendency to believe in the information that is presented to them. This is called the truth bias or the “default value of truth.” Since most communications are honest most of the time, the benefits of believing are higher than the costs of the occasional deception. Therefore, it is understood that people can detect truths with greater precision than lies.

So, if overconfidence gets in the way of a successful deception detection, wouldn’t mistrust be an antidote to it?

In this article, authors investigate whether people’s ability to detect deception varies depending on whether or not they feel mistrust.

Previous research shows that increasing suspicion would decrease truth bias. However, studies about the effects of suspicion on the accuracy of deception detection offer mixed results: some are positive and others negative.

But only a few studies on deception detection focused on the effects of mistrust instead of suspicion. They are similar concepts, but different. In a state of suspicion, the perceivers are not sure of the motivations of the others; while in a state of mistrust, negative expectations about these motivations are added. As a result, suspicious perceivers are more willing to seek information to determine whether or not someone else’s motivations are honest. On the other hand, mistrust affects the perceiver’s need to face a possibly threatening situation. By having different effects, they are likely to affect deception detection abilities differently as well.

According to some experts, distrust indicates that the environment is not the usual and, as a result, people avoid routine strategies, and examine deeply more people’s behavior. This encourages deliberate conscious processing, whereas when we have signals that a situation is safe, less effort cognitive processing is encouraged.

In other words, it is suggested that a state of mistrust would promote the conscious processing of information, while a state of trust would promote intuitive or unconscious processing. Decisions for both thought forms have differences: for unconscious thinking decisions, attention is directed elsewhere before making them; for conscious or automatic decisions, the decision is made immediately. All this makes these ideas attractive to authors and they decide to explore them.

Other findings suggest that conscious processes may hamper the ability to detect deception. Judging whether a person is truthful or deceiving us, can be a complex decision to make. First, we evaluate the signals, such as the level of detail, the plausibility of the story …, and this is cognitively demanding. Second, we must process verbal and nonverbal content, and pay attention to different types of observable cues. Because judging whether a person is telling the truth or not is a demanding process, the theory of unconscious thought suggests that the detection of deception can be better handled with it, since it is assumed that the unconscious thought would have more processing power.

Research focused directly on conscious and unconscious thinking showed that people’s ability to detect deception increased when they were prevented from consciously deliberating on the information presented.

For the experiment carried out, authors used covert manipulation, causing observers to adopt facial expressions of distrust (narrowed eyes) or confidence (wide eyes). The aim was to induce these states of mind, based on previous studies.

A total of 93 university students participated and watched eight video clips showing a person lying or telling the truth. The participants were then asked how much they trusted this person, requiring a score on a scale to measure this aspect.

A second study was conducted that investigated whether confidence in the use of false indicators of deception influenced mistrust in detection. 54 people participated in it. The experiment was similar to the first one, but the participants had to explain why they trusted or mistrusted the people in the videos.

Although increasing mistrust was expected to reduce the truth bias, the results did not show that distrustful people were less likely to mistake a lie for a truth. On the contrary, it happened that mistrust led the participants to confuse truths with lies.

That is, mistrust led participants to misjudge those who told the truth as liars. Furthermore, with study 2, it was shown that distrustful people relied more on false beliefs about lying when judging truth-tellers than when judging liars.

Although the existence or not of benefits in unconscious deception judgments was finally not directly proven, authors showed that contextually induced modes of thought affect the ability to detect deception, when confidence or mistrust was induced in the subjects.

One limitation is that the sample in Study 2 is quite small, and as such, the results should be interpreted with caution.

In conclusion, authors showed that contextual mistrust difficulties people’s ability to detect deception, especially for those who tell the truth, who are often judged as liars.

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