People sometimes lie by omitting information. The information lie tellers then report could be entirely truthful. We examined whether the truthful information that lie tellers report in omission lies contains verbal cues indicating that the person is lying. We made a distinction between (i) essential information (events surrounding the omission)…

The current study examined verbal cues of veracity and deception in 911 calls reporting homicides or suicides of another person. Specifically, the current study compared differences in the presence/absence and number of potential verbal indicators between a sample of deceptive callers who concealed their role in causing the person's death and…

Research has consistently shown people predominantly rely on undiagnostic nonverbal cues when detecting deceit, whereas verbal cues are more accurate. In three experiments, we investigated whether the simple instruction not to focus on nonverbal cues would make people focus more on diagnostic verbal cues and hence more accurate in detecting lies.…

The present experiment investigated to what extent providing participants with a model statement influences the ability of the verifiability approach to detect deception. Participants gave a true and false statement about a negative autobiographical event, with half of the participants receiving a detailed model statement just before giving their…

The verifiability approach (VA) is a lie-detection tool that examines reported checkable details. Across two studies, we attempt to exploit liar's preferred strategy of repeating information by examining the effect of questioning adult interviewees before the VA. In Study 1, truth tellers (n = 34) and liars (n = 33) were randomly assigned to…

To better understand the spread of fake news in the Internet age, it is important to uncover the variables that influence the perceived truth of information. Although previous research identified several reliable predictors of truth judgments--such as source credibility, repeated information exposure, and presentation format--little is known about…

Detecting lies is crucial in numerous contexts, including situations in which individuals do not interact in their native language. Previous research suggests that individuals are perceived as less credible when they communicate in a nonnative compared with native language. The current study was the first to test this effect in truthful and…

In this study, we investigated whether people who hold more correct beliefs about verbal cues to deception are also better lie detectors. We investigated police officers and undergraduates' beliefs about (i) cues to deception via an open-ended question and (ii) 17 specific verbal cues, after which participants were asked to judge the truthfulness…

The present study explores how well teacher trainees can detect liars. Moreover, a new method was applied to investigate beliefs that teacher trainees hold about liars. The results indicate that, overall, teacher trainees were not better than chance in detecting true and invented stories. Generally, participants reported to have used only a few…

Lay theories about the tell tale signs of deception include numerous nonverbal cues; empirically, however, a focus on message content results in better lie detection than a focus on nonverbal elements. Feelings-as-information theory (Schwarz, 1990, 2012) predicts that systematic processing of message content is more likely under sad than happy…

The three objectives of this dissertation were to develop a question type model for predicting linguistic features of responses to interview questions, create a tool for linguistic analysis of documents, and use lexical bundle analysis to identify linguistic differences between fraudulent and non-fraudulent financial reports. First, The Moffitt…

In potentially deceptive situations, people rely on mental shortcuts to help process information. These heuristic judgments are often biased and result in inaccurate assessments of sender veracity. Four such biases--truth bias, visual bias, demeanor bias, and expectancy violation bias--were examined in a judgment experiment that varied nonverbal…

Examines the relative importance of verbal, nonverbal, and social normative information in judgments of honesty and deceit. Finds strong support for the nonverbal cue primacy model and no support for the social-normative model. Suggests additional research is warranted on the relative strength of these sources and the manner of combination to form…