Elizabeth Loftus: Catching Liars

Short piece by Elizabeth Loftus (H/T Neuroethics).

Using gaze aversion to decide that someone is lying can be dangerous for that someone’s health and happiness. And—what was news to me—some cultural or ethnic groups are more likely to show gaze aversion. For example, Blacks are particularly likely to show gaze aversion. So imagine now the problem that might arise when a White police officer interviews a Black suspect and interprets the gaze aversion as evidence of lying. This material needs to be put in the hands of interviewers to prevent this kind of cross-racial misinterpretation.

But all is not hopeless for catching liars, since happily some speech cues are more diagnostic of deception than nonverbal cues are. The authors recommend an ‘‘information gathering’’ approach to interviewing (rather than an accusatory approach). This type of interview will result in more information being gathered than can later be checked for inconsistencies against other available evidence. The authors also recommend asking unanticipated questions. A witness who claims to have been eating lunch at a restaurant might be asked, ‘‘Who finished their meal first?’’ Liars are apparently less likely to say ‘‘I don’t know’’ to unanticipated questions and to offer some answer, possibly because they are afraid that to do otherwise would look suspicious.

Click Here to Read: Catching Liars

Infographic: Gratuitous Randomness: You're a Liar

Via Westword (H/T The Big Picture).

In every romantic comedy, it all starts with a lie: a little lie that leads to zany antics, which in turn lead to more elaborate lies, which in turn lead to madcap misunderstandings, which in turn lead to love. And isn't that what it's all about? So today, because we care -- and also because it's Wednesday, the day that we bring you the best of our weird internets world in the form of images loosely related to whatever topic we happen to come up with -- we bring you this Forensic Psychology infographic about "How to Spot A Liar," which we interpret as "Avoid these Things to Become a Better Liar." Let the wacky shenanigans ensue.

How To Spot A Liar by Forensic Psychology

Brain Scans as Evidence: Truths, Proofs, Lies, and Lessons

By Francis Shen & Owen Jones (H/T Neuroethics).

Interesting Excerpts:

In U.S. v. Semrau the government charged psychologist Dr. Lorne Semrau with Medicare/Medicaid fraud. Proving fraud requires proving that Semrau knowingly violated the law. And Semrau’s defense was built, in part, around brain scan results that allegedly demonstrated he was telling the truth when he claimed (some years after the fact) that even though he had mis-billed for services, he did not do so intending to defraud the government.

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The central legal question in the case concerned Semrau’s mental state at the time of his acts: between 1999 and 2005, did Semrau “knowingly devise a scheme or artifice to defraud a health care benefit program in connection with the delivery of or payment for health care benefits, items, or services?”

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In Laken’s own words: “What we can say is … that we believe his brain – he believes that he is telling the truth at least.”29 Verifying the truthfulness of a belief, of course, doesn’t provide the court with information on so-called “ground” truth, i.e. whether the belief is true to begin with. Rather, as Laken explained, “If [experimental subjects] say that this is the truth, then I believe them that this is the truth. At least that's what they are telling me is the truth. These are the truths of the statements.” (emphasis added).30 The truth of Semrau’s statements about mental states is, of course, distinct from the fact relevant to the case: Semrau’s actual mental states at the time of the billing.

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Neuroscientist Nancy Kanwisher, for instance, argues that “making a false response when you are instructed to do so isn’t a lie, and it’s not deception. It’s simply doing what you are told. We could call it an ‘instructed falsehood.’” 54 And neuroscientist Kamila E. Sip and colleagues similarly argue that the “absence of this intentional aspect of deception in the experiments is … more than a mere experimental confound.”55 It fundamentally changes what the brain is being asked to do. Researchers, in this view, are indeed measuring something – but they are not necessarily measuring “lying”.

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Using brain-based lie detection as an example, it has been noted that no laboratory study has been able to replicate the real-world, ecologically valid stakes (such as avoiding imprisonment) that often accompany lying.60 In Semrau, when Dr. Laken was asked on cross examination about ecological validity, he replied that “whether they're lying about biographical things, whether they're lying because they've been told a lie or not told a lie, whether they're lying about playing cards -- all of these things seem to be activating the same region. So it appears that irregardless of what type of lie, the same brain regions are out there.”61 This statement reflects an assumption that a lie – whether told in a scanner without consequence, or in the real world with great consequence – should be expected to activate the same brain regions. While theoretically plausible, there is no general acceptance of such an
assumption.

Click Here to Download: Brain Scans as Evidence: Truths, Proofs, Lies, and Lessons

Milgram's Obedience Studies - Not About Obedience After All?

Via Research Digest. 

Attempts to explore the issue through replication have stalled in recent decades because of concerns the experiment could be distressing for participants. Jerry Burger at Santa Clara University found a partial solution to this problem in a 2009 study, after he realised that 79 per cent of Milgram's participants who went beyond the 150-volt level (at which the 'learner' was first heard to call out in distress) subsequently went on to apply the maximum lethal shock level of 450 volts, almost as if the 150-volt level were a point of no return [further information]. Burger conducted a modern replication up to the 150-volt level and found that a similar proportion of people (70 per cent) were willing to go beyond this point as were willing to do so in the 1960s (82.5 per cent). Presumably, most of these participants would have gone all the way to 450 volts level had the experiment not been stopped short.

Now Burger and his colleagues have studied the utterances made by the modern-day participants during the 2009 partial-replication, and afterwards during de-briefing. They found that participants who expressed a sense that they were responsible for their actions were the ones least likely to go beyond the crucial 150-volt level. Relevant to this is that Milgram's participants (and Burger's) were told, if they asked, that responsibility for any harm caused to the learner rested with the experimenter.

Click Here to Read: Milgram's Obedience Studies - Not About Obedience After All?

Following the Crowd: Brain Images Offer Clues to How and Why We Conform

Via Health Canal (H/T Association for Psychological Science). You can read more about this study here.

What is conformity? A true adoption of what other people think—or a guise to avoid social rejection? Scientists have been vexed sorting the two out, even when they’ve questioned people in private.

Now three Harvard University psychological scientists have used brain scans to show what happens when we take others’ opinions to heart: We take them “to brain”—specifically, to the orbitofrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens. These regions compute what we value and feel rewarded by, both primitive things like water and food and socially meaningful things like money.

The study—by Jamil Zaki, Jessica Schirmer, and Jason Mitchell—is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association of Psychological Science.

“Conformity gets a bad rap,” says Zaki, a postdoctoral fellow. “That is partially predicated on the idea that it is a form of lying: you’re lying about yourself to try to fit in. Our data suggest that at a deep emotional level you really are changing your view.”

Click Here to Read: Following the Crowd: Brain Images Offer Clues to How and Why We Conform

How To Cheat a Brain-Scan-Based Lie Detector

Via Research Digest.

Sure, it's possible to differentiate patterns of truth-telling brain activity from patterns of lying-related activity. But contrary to media hype, experts have been quick to point out that the accuracy of brain-scan based lie detection is often no better than with traditional approaches, such as the polygraph. Furthermore, these experts warn, brain-scan methods could, in theory, be easily thwarted by liars with even modest levels of guile. That claim is no longer purely theoretical, for in a new study, Girgio Ganis and his colleagues have used a popular paradigm to show just how easy it is for lying participants to trick the brain-scanner.

Twenty-six participants had their brains scanned whilst they looked at the same six dates appearing for half a second each, one at a time, on a screen. For each date they had to indicate with a button press whether it was their date of birth - yes or no. This was repeated several times. In the truth-telling condition, none of the dates was their birth date and the participants simply told the truth and said 'no' to each date. In the lying condition, one of the dates was their birth date and their task was to lie and indicate 'no' whenever it appeared. An equivalent set-up in a real-life criminal case might involve a suspect repeatedly looking at the same selection of knives and indicating whether they owned any of them. One further twist to the task was that participants had to look out for a further specific meaningless date - this was just to make sure they stayed engaged with the task.

Click Here to Read: How To Cheat a Brain-Scan-Based Lie Detector

Study Links Brain and White-Collar Crime

Full Excerpt via The Independent (H/T Neuroethics & Law Blog).

People who commit "white collar" crime such as credit-card fraud and computer hacking have been found to have brains that are structurally different from the brains of non-criminals with similar backgrounds, scientists have found.

Psychological tests on white-collar criminals also showed that they were better at making decisions in the kind of "higher executive" brain functions associated with being good at business, researchers said.

The study found that, in effect, white-collar criminals had more grey matter than a comparable group of non-criminals, suggesting that there may be a biological basis for this kind of criminal behaviour, according to Adrian Raine, a criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

"They have better executive functions. They have better executive skills, such as planning, regulation and control. So in a sense these people have all the advantages we really want in successful business people," Dr Raine said.

"This study is agnostic in terms of the cause of these differences. All it is saying is that there are some differences."

The study, which has been submitted for publication in a scientific journal, used magnetic resonance brain scanners to compare 21 convicted white-collar criminals with a similar group of people of the same age and social class who had not committed such crimes, Dr Raine said.

He emphasised that the study did not show that difference in brain structure was the cause of someone turning to crime, only that there was an association between the two that might indicate a cause and effect.

Click Here to Read: Study Links Brain and White-Collar Crime 

In Praise of the Handshake

Via Dan Ariely (H/T Abnormal Returns).

A CEO of a large internet company recently told me about one of the worst decisions of his career. He instituted a very specific performance-evaluation matrix that would determine 10% of his employees’ compensation. Before this, the firm, like most, had a general agreement with its employees—they had to work hard, behave well, and were measured on certain goals. In return they were rewarded with salary increases, bonuses, and benefits. This CEO believed he could eliminate the uncertainty of the incomplete contract and better define ideal performance.

The complete-contract approach backfired. Employees became obsessively focused on meeting the specific terms of their contracts, even when it came at the expense of colleagues and the company. Morale sank, as did overall performance.

Even lawyers see the risks of complete contracts. As part of my research, I asked the dean of Duke’s law school, David Levi, if I could take a look at the school’s honor code. Expecting a detailed contract written by lawyers for lawyers, I was shocked to find that the code went something like this: If a student does anything the faculty doesn’t approve of, the student won’t be allowed to take the bar exam. It was, in essence, a handshake agreement!

Click Here to Read: In Praise of the Handshake

Video: The Psychological Power of the Status Quo

Via The Situationist from 2009.

Part I




Part II
 


Part III
 

Emotion, Neuroscience, and Law: A Comment on Darwin and Greene

By John Mikhail (H/T Neuroethics). 

Abstract:  

Darwin’s (1871) observation that evolution has produced in us certain emotions responding to right and wrong conduct that lack any obvious basis in individual utility is a useful springboard from which to clarify the role of emotion in moral judgment. The problem is whether a certain class of moral judgments is “constituted” or “driven by” emotion (Greene 2008, p. 108) or merely correlated with emotion while being generated by unconscious computations (e.g., Huebner et al. 2008). With one exception, all of the “personal” vignettes devised by Greene and colleagues (2001, 2004) and subsequently used by other researchers (e.g., Koenigs et al. 2007) in their fMRI and behavioral studies of emotional engagement in moral judgment involve violent crimes or torts. These studies thus do much more than highlight the role of emotion in moral judgment; they also support the classical rationalist thesis that moral rules are engraved in the mind.

Click Here to Download: Emotion, Neuroscience, and Law: A Comment on Darwin and Greene  

Book: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

This is a great read! Highly recommend this to anyone who wants to understand the psyche of our marketplace. It's hard for me stop reading it.

By Charles Mackay (H/T to Miguel & Money Science).

Preface (Via Charles Mackay):

In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.

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Some delusions, though notorious to all the world, have subsisted for ages, flourishing as widely among civilized and polished nations as among the early barbarians with whom they originated, -- that of duelling, for instance, and the belief in omens and divination of the future, which seem to defy the progress of knowledge to eradicate entirely from the popular mind. Money, again, has often been a cause of the delusion of multitudes. Sober nations have all at once become desperate gamblers, and risked almost their existence upon the turn of a piece of paper. To trace the history of the most prominent of these delusions is the object of the present pages. Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

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In the present state of civilization, society has often shown itself very prone to run a career of folly from the last-mentioned cases. This infatuation has seized upon whole nations in a most extraordinary manner. France, with her Mississippi madness, set the first great example, and was very soon imitated by England with her South Sea Bubble. At an earlier period, Holland made herself still more ridiculous in the eyes of the world, by the frenzy which came over her people for the love of Tulips. Melancholy as all these delusions were in their ultimate results, their history is most amusing. A more ludicrous and yet painful spectacle, than that which Holland presented in the years 1635 and 1636, or France in 1719 and 1720, can hardly be imagined. Taking them in the order of their importance, we shall commence our history with John Law and the famous Mississippi scheme of the years above mentioned.

Click Here to Read: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

Crocodile Tears Don't Fool Us All

Via Science Daily.

The authors grouped the emotions displayed in facial expressions into three categories: positive (happiness), negative (sadness, fear, anger, contempt, disgust) and neutral (neutral, surprise). They found that participants who were genuinely remorseful did not often swing directly from positive to negative emotions, but went through neutral emotions first. In contrast, those who were deceiving the researchers made more frequent direct transitions between positive and negative emotions, with fewer displays of neutral emotions in between. In addition, during fabricated remorse, students had a significantly higher rate of speech hesitations than during true remorse.

The authors conclude: "Our study is the first to investigate genuine and falsified remorse for behavioral cues that might be indicative of such deception. Identifying reliable cues could have considerable practical implications -- for example for forensic psychologists, parole officers and legal decision-makers who need to assess the truthfulness of remorseful displays."

Click Here to Read: Crocodile Tears Don't Fool Us All

The More You Lie, The Easier It Gets

Via NewScientist (H/T Phil's Stock World).

"In people who lie a lot in real life [such as pathological liars], this dominant truth response might not be as strong as we theorise," says Ewout Meijer of Maastricht University in the Netherlands.

Crucially, says psychologist Scott Lilienfeld of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, the results raise the intriguing possibility that at least some lie detector measures may be relatively ineffective for practiced liars, including psychopaths. "Lie detector tests are most often used on people suspected of crimes, who have higher rates of psychopathic characteristics – including pathological dishonesty – than other individuals," he says.

"The finding implies that peppering a lie-detector test with simple questions designed to elicit a truthful response will strengthen the brain's truth response, making it harder for someone to lie. This will increase the accuracy of such tests," says Meijer.

Click Here to Read: The More You Lie, The Easier It Gets 

Psychiatrist Reveals How to Spot Another Bernie Madoff

Via Vince Calio @ International Business Times (H/T FraudBytes).

Dr. Bryant told International Business Times that Madoff and other perpetrators of massive fraud typically suffer from narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), a condition in which the sufferer is absolutely convinced that he or she is better than everyone else.

“He, and others like him, most likely believe that no matter what they do they are justified in doing it and won't get caught,” said Bryant.

He added that the fact that it took so long to catch on to Madoff’s scam simply verified in Madoff's warped mind that there was nothing wrong with what he was doing.

“Authorities looked at Madoff a number of times and didn’t do anything, and so [Madoff’s] crimes became substantiated in his mind," Dr. Bryant said. "He most likely felt no remorse over what he had done whatsoever.”

Bryant listed some behavioral trends to look for in order to differentiate between a legitimate money manager and a snake oil salesman.

Click Here to Read: Psychiatrist Reveals How to Spot Another Bernie Madoff

Missing the Obvious

Via Why We Make Mistakes Blog. 

"I’ve already mentioned the biggest mistakes we made," he told the Commission. "In mortgage underwriting, somehow, we just missed that home prices don’t go up forever..."

This admission startled one of the commissioners, who asked Dimon, "Did you do a stress test that showed housing prices falling?"

"No," said Dimon. "I would say that’s probably one of the big misses."

Yes, indeed. Home prices still haven't recovered, as the latest Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller index makes clear. In many big cities, home prices have sunk to their lowest prices in years.

As the article in the Times goes on to point out, "one striking finding (of the FCIC report) is its portrayal of incompetence."

"It quotes Citigroup executives conceding that they paid little attention to mortgage-related risks. Executives at the American International Group were found to have been blind to its $79 billion exposure to credit-default swaps, a kind of insurance that was sold to investors seeking protection against a drop in the value of securities backed by home loans. At Merrill Lynch, managers were surprised when seemingly secure mortgage investments suddenly suffered huge losses."

Click Here to Read: Missing the Obvious

Confabulation and Transparency

Via Janet Kwasniak (H/T SimoleonSense).

We are shockingly ignorant of the causes of our own behavior. The explanations that we provide are sometimes wholly fabricated, and certainly never complete. Yet, that is not how it feels. Instead it feels like we know exactly what we’re doing and why. This is confabulation: Guessing at plausible explanations for our behavior, and then regarding those guesses as introspective certainties. Every year psychologists use dramatic examples to entertain their undergraduate audiences. Confabulation is funny, but there is a serious side, too. Understanding it can help us act better and think better in everyday life.

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Ironically, that is exactly what makes confabulation so dangerous. If we routinely got the explanation for our behavior totally wrong — as completely wrong as split-brain patients sometimes do — we would probably be much more aware that there are pervasive, unseen influences on our behavior. The problem is that we get all of our explanations partly right, correctly identifying the conscious and deliberate causes of our behavior. Unfortunately, we mistake “partly right” for “completely right”, and thereby fail to recognize the equal influence of the unconscious, or to guard against it.

Click Here to Read: Confabulation and Transparency  

Video: The Truth About Lies

Via CBS News. 

Introduction via The Invisible Gorilla. 

An extremely animated Dan Simons helps CBS Sunday Morning understand why people keep believing things even when the evidence isn't there. The neurobabble and brain porn about the hippocampus and cortex were added by the producers -- not Dan! (But that stuff probably makes the segment more persuasive to many viewers.) 

Click Here to Watch: The Truth About Lies

Financial Memory Syndrome

Via The Psy-Fi Blog (H/T Phil's Stock World).

The malleability of memory appears to come out of the mechanics behind it. We simply can’t remember all of the details of everything that happens to us so we resort to short-cuts. In particular memory fades quite quickly and when asked to retrieve them we seem to merge a general template of similar situations – a so-called schema – with the few details we can retrieve to complete a “whole” memory. Unfortunately our remembrances of things past are far from accurate.

Additionally our reliability as witnesses to our own lives is often somewhat undermined by the fact that, as the psychologist Richard Wiseman has shown, we often fail to spot the strangest things if our attention is focused elsewhere. In order to record stuff in memory we need to notice it in the first place (make sure you follow the instructions).

Human memory is fallible and malleable and we don’t even know it. Memory research shows quite clearly that eye witness testimony is unreliable and should never be relied upon unless corroborated in other ways. Yet in court cases we rate such evidence as overwhelmingly more important than other sources, presumably because we believe our own memories are perfect rather than reconstructed palimpsests of dubious authenticity.

Click Here to Read: Financial Memory Syndrome

Does Anger Mean Honesty?

Via Bakadesuyo.

A fairly robust finding in the deception literature is that lie-tellers show more negative emotion than truth-tellers. Ekman (1985), however, has reasoned that a specific type of negative emotion – anger – is especially difficult to feign and therefore should be more prevalent in truth-tellers who are falsely accused of a transgression than in lie-tellers who are guilty. To our knowledge, Ekman’s prediction has not yet been empirically tested. By comparing the verbal and nonverbal cues associated with truths and lies across a number of lie-eliciting situations, we demonstrate that truth-tellers accused of a wrongdoing do show more anger, both verbally and nonverbally, than lie-tellers accused of the same act, but only in situations where students choose to commit a transgression (or not) and actually believe themselves to be in trouble. Results underlie the importance of taking into consideration the type of lie being told in order to accurately predict deceptive cues.

Click Here to Read: Does Anger Mean Honesty?

Secrets Of Special Agents

Must Read! Via Psychology Today.

A baseline reading allows one to distinguish between a personal quirk (some people are jittery, even when relaxed) and a hot spot, a contradiction in behavior or demeanor—an utterance, expression, or gesture that doesn’t compute. A person might shake their head “no” while stating that they do, indeed, like someone. Hot spots are not so much goalposts that signal deception as signposts suggesting there’s more to the matter.

“If you judge a lie you could be wrong. If you judge a hot spot you’ll be right: ‘This person’s account is not consistent with how he or she normally displays information,’” says Frank.

A shrewd interrogator not only notices hot spots but also foments them. Commenting on the “lovely” family photos in the home of a man suspected of viewing child pornography could be a surefire trigger. You might spark enough tension in the suspect to provoke a pacifying gesture or two, perhaps a quick exhale or, if seated, a “leg cleanse,” rubbing the hands palms down on the thighs.

“I once found a fugitive in his mother’s house by simply watching her reaction to a question about his whereabouts,” recalls Navarro, whose own demeanor is calm and courteous. “Every time I asked whether her son might be in the home, she put her hand to her neck.” Touching or covering the suprasternal notch is a protective gesture that indicates discomfort, especially in women. (Men tend to stroke the neck, which may calm them by lowering the heart rate.) The woman’s hand trumped her consistent denials. Her son was found hiding in a closet.

Click Here to Read: Secrets Of Special Agents