Read a book on this and this seems to corroborate much of what I read. One of the most interesting and simple techniques discussed was the order in which people recounted their stories.
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.
> 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.
Well, at an airport security check I got interviewed before boarding and the guy asked me how I got here. I thought it was a weird question to ask and I answered I got here by airplane (I was in a foreign country visiting).
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". :)
Probably the point of the question was to be confusing: it strikes me that if you give the brain something to work on - parsing and responding to a confusing question - it could make responding with false information more difficult.
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.
This could also be an alternate way to ask "Did you pack your bags yourself? Did you leave them unattended?" to which everyone invariable answers 'yes'.
First off, I think this technique is completely true, in my own experience. However, I think this isn't the end-all lie detector, in that you have to know what to have the subject tell a story about.
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?
> 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.
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.
I thought this had been discussed on HN earlier this year, but searching for it has failed me. I did find https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9061964, though, which looks interesting and related and got no attention.
These kinds of analytical methods (i.e. word counting) work well in controlled experiments when you know you're going to be lied to by a subject, and also told the truth so you have a point of reference.
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.
Yeah. There's a reason why the standing order for the public is "don't ever talk to the police without your lawyer in the room". Doubt or confusion about past events is often perceived as an attempt to fabricate. Add in the ability for the interviewer to feed false facts to you in an attempt to question your story, and it's tough to pass the truth as the truth.
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?
Only if you're in a hurry! The interviewer can patiently wait for the subject to become bored. Formal interviews in intimidating settings (like panel interviews for jobs) are often scheduled to be much longer than necessary just on the expectation that the first half will be nervous ice-breaking and the real insights are after everyone loosens up and is capable of acting naturally.
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 think the point of asking about senses is that memories of feelings are more consistent than memories of detail. And if it's being done properly, the person's answers are being benchmarked against their other answers. If you're struggling to remember a particular day at all then it's not necessarily held against you, but if your recollections of what was said and done at a particular event are hazy after you've calmly explained that you know you were there until at least 8pm because you got the 8:14 train home then...
Only if this were considered conclusive (which it isn't) and if it weren't attempted first with an honest recounting of an actual memory (which they do).
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.
>Morgan found that the use of these mnemonic props – open-ended questions about various sensations and sequences of events – dramatically increased memory recall about what had happened. The subject’s stories consequently became more and more complex, and richer in detail. Or at least, they did when people were telling the truth. When it came to the lies, even well-rehearsed ones, the subjects tended to falter and were unable to complete the interview. According to Morgan, this was because when they were prompted to dredge up deeper memories, the liars had nothing to draw on.
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?
In an expansion[1](pdf) the classical Bugs Bunny at Disney study[2](pdf), over several leading interviews participants added more and more detail. So while it would probably work with an accidentally and freshly implanted memory; it could probably be defeated by either purposely pushing for sense recall, or perhaps accidentally over the course of many attempts to fix the "memory".
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).
I'm guessing it wouldn't. A memory doesn't exist as a single entity, and a false memory is often corrupting a couple real parts of memories, either overwriting (or outright adding) a small detail or mixing together real parts into something that didn't happen.
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.
When you are lying on purpose, you have to make sure whatever you say is accomplishes whatever made you lie in the first place. It has to make you look good, make it seem like something is not your fault and so on.
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.
This matches my experience that the best lies are based in truth and experience. That is, either use something which actually happened to you and change only the most necessary bits or use something which you know well to have happened, just not necessarily to you.
I wonder if successful con artists (or novel writers) have such a vivid imagination that they would be able to pass this kind of test. If you have such a good imagination that you can convince yourself you actually are in a make-believe world, does the lie become just as convincing as the truth?
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?
I'd think it depends on the amount of time you've spent imagining this experience in the novel. If you have had enough time to vividly imagine the entire experience, none of the questions should catch you by surprise and you could answer almost as if you were actually there.
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.
Wonder if there's a dataset for this. Maybe run a simple n-gram over the interviews and see if certain phrases show up more often for truth tellers vs liars.
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.
Interesting how this dovetails with the art of writing -- when you're writing a book, it makes the story much more compelling if you engage all five senses. I wonder if we have some intuition about this and a story that doesn't feels "one dimensional."
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.
I remembered those tricks but not the movie it came from. How true is this though ? even innocent people cracks down under pressure even if they rebel against injustice at first. The amount of "intelligence" and organization to protect whatever dogma a government wants to protects scared me. Noticed the check mark when the student asked for a little humanity.
It's interesting that a low occurrence of unique words in a story can be an indication of a lie. Does that position people speaking a secondary language in an unavoidable place of distrust? Beyond body language, it's just more difficult to tell if someone's story lacks richness because they're not telling the truth, or they're simply not comfortable with the language and have a small vocabulary to draw upon.
I think ideally you'd compare the story you're investigating with other, provably-truthful stories told by the secondary-language speaker. That way word reuse could be a relative value rather than an absolute one.
I think I see a very obvious problem with this: in the experiment they ran, the interviewer seems to be leading the interviewee in how to remember an episode. Which means there is no way to make sure the interviewer is not (consciously or not) planting those very same "rich details" that purportedly make the difference between a lie and a truth, into the interviewee's narration.
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.
Nothing new here, this interviewing technique by storytelling has been standard procedure for a long time with the British Police. One simple variation is to recall the story from the beginning, then recall from the end and see what doesn't match up.
I used a variation of this trick when I was a resident assistant in college. We had the unfortunate job of busting drinking parties in the dorms and part of our responsibility was to collect ID numbers or social security numbers if the person claimed to not have their IDs. People would quite happily rattle-off a fake SSN. But if you wait 60 seconds and come back to them and ask for the number in reverse, it's essentially impossible to repeat the same fake, especially if you've been drinking.
That's not exactly what's going on here. The point is to use the sensory memories to improve the interviewee's ability to recall, and then see who actually recalled better the second time around. Yes, you could probably compare the two for inconsistencies as well, but that's not what he was measuring for this—just the change in level of detail between the two versions.
This reminds me of Jobs To Be Done (http://jobstobedone.org/) interviews style that dig into emotions of why customer switched to a different product.
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.
That's a nice write-up but I think that experienced and well prepared liars would be able to beat that.
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.
Considering that 'truth' is really our best recollection of past events, why do you say that truth is internally consistent? I mean, maybe it is, but it's not a given.
[+] [-] mankyd|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] caminante|10 years ago|reply
Alternatively, the liar's experienced, good at his craft, and more capable of jumping around.
[+] [-] DennisP|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw7|10 years ago|reply
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". :)
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|10 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] zhte415|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexggordon|10 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] AnthonyMouse|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dang|10 years ago|reply
Edit: I found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10180728. Interesting and related and got lots of attention. But not a duplicate.
[+] [-] iamleppert|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] babo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barce|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cryoshon|10 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] bcoates|10 years ago|reply
That's probably half of "in vino veritas": drinking is an excuse to spend a few extra hours with nothing to do but chat.
[+] [-] notahacker|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] washadjeffmad|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jasode|10 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] yasth|10 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] Lawtonfogle|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] saint_fiasco|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] JackFr|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacinda|10 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] fjolthor|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] swang|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] divs1210|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] api|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dbbolton|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] urlgrey|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jessaustin|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YeGoblynQueenne|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Theodores|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrestko|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcphage|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] learc83|10 years ago|reply
However just like with drug dogs, they'll ignore the high false positives and low prior probabilities.
[+] [-] redler|10 years ago|reply
It's an interesting thought. Imagine the linguistic equivalent of using Benford's Law to detect accounting fraud.
[+] [-] djkz|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] thehoff|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] betenoire|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teabee89|10 years ago|reply