Previous Newsletters have described a variety of approaches that can help increase your ability to determine if someone is telling the truth. Developing an effective interviewing skillset and then constantly honing through education and practical experience is extremely important for attorneys taking statements under oath, human resource professionals conducting pre-employment interviews and general incident interviews and insurance claims professionals gathering evidence to verify claims.
Understanding and implementing effective interviewing strategies, allows us to become better at what we do and also better at dealing with people generally. In this regard, findings from a recent study evaluating certain strategies have pulled together prior research findings and also tested and verified certain questioning techniques. The next several Newsletters will examine the value of some of these approaches.
Researchers in Spain and the United States recently published the results of a study* that describes methods by which the identification of lying can be increased through certain questioning strategies. One of those approaches involves disruptive and repetitive questioning and repetitive interviews. Here is an overview of some of their findings:
- Generally speaking, “humans are poor lie detectors” with empirical data confirming successful detection at just above chance or 50-50.
- Research over the last 75 years has found that the incidence of detection increases with those who have a better understanding of human behavior and can recognize voluntary and involuntary verbal and nonverbal behaviors which can be signals of deception.
- One interviewing strategy which can be disruptive to those who are telling lies is to increase emotional pressure and “cognitive load.” In other words, make it more difficult for the subject to tell a lie and thus make it easier for them to tell the truth. “Lying often involves greater cognitive demands than does telling the truth. If the interviewees’ cognitive load is artificially increased during the interview, the liars will have fewer resources left compared to truth tellers. They will be less able to effectively cope with the increased cognitive demands. As a result, liars might display more observable signs of cognitive overload (e.g., response latencies, pauses, and a decrease in body movements) than truth tellers.”
- By putting more pressure on the interviewee, visual and verbal cues that are signals of deception also increase. Police detectives will many times be more demonstrative in their disruptive interviewing during an interrogation. In the private sector, the approach should be more subtle.
- Liars make a conscious effort to repeat the same deceptive remarks when asked to repeat their story, and disrupting this “repeat strategy” can increase deceptive detection to between 70-90+%.
- Ways to disrupt this repeat strategy by increasing cognitive load include; (1) Intentional interruptions that limit the liar’s use of his / her repeat strategy, (2) Increasing the speed of the questioning thus causing the liar to be more prone to mistakes and (3) Intentional questioning that departs from the subject at hand again to force mistakes upon which the interviewer can capitalize.
Everyone’s personality is different, and this more aggressive approach to interviewing may or may not work for you. Give it a try, however, where you suspect deception, and see if the technique feels right. Don’t forget to take note of physical appearances and changes in behaviors especially as relates to what is being said at the time. Effective interviewing is an art; the more you practice and the more tools you put in your tool box, the better you will get!
* Frontiers in Psychology, January 4, 2018 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02207
Research North, Inc. (RNI), is a professional private detective service providing support to the business community, the insurance industry and individuals in Michigan and Wisconsin since 1981. The company also offers pre-employment background checks to small and medium sized businesses through a subsidiary called Backgroundcheckswork.com that is fully staffed by professional investigators who are retired from law enforcement.
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