There can be many reasons for and importance of developing skills when it comes to detecting deceit. Such skills can prove to be useful in the field of criminal justice and law enforcement. Professionals who work in these fields often engage in interviews and interrogations with suspects, witnesses, and other key persons involved in a subject incident, and making sure that every key person is telling the truth is often vital to the process of solving cases or even in gathering information in a surveillance operation.
Detecting deception can be considered both a science and an art. There are many tricks and principles that govern this practice. Some of the hottest topics in relation to this practice are behavioral interviewing and interrogation techniques. Behavioral interviewing can be used in a lot of fields, including law enforcement, justice, and even the human resources industry.
The main objective of behavioral interviewing is to evaluate the interviewee’s experiences and behaviors and use whatever findings as predictors of future performance and or behavior . Interrogation techniques on the other hand are more commonly used by police, intelligence, and military agencies. The primary goal of these practices is often to extract information from witnesses, victims, and suspects who are obtained during interviews. Although these two belong to the category of inexact science, there are numerous studies, some dating back to as early as the 20th century, suggesting that such techniques can be accurate by as high as ninety five percent .
Kinetics, body posture, eye movement, Neuro-linguistic Programming, Facial Coding, Qualifiers, Hedging, and Manipulators are all techniques used in the practice of lie or deception detection. Under that context, all of these techniques would automatically belong to the field of inexact sciences. The accuracy of each or a combination of these techniques greatly varies. Some sources suggest that there are a lot of factors, some of which may be environmental and or demographic, that can affect the accuracy of these techniques . In terms of court admissibility, courts in the U.S. often do not make rulings and sentences based on deception detection techniques, mainly because they cannot be expected to be one hundred percent accurate and reliable. This means that as a rule, they are inadmissible in court proceedings and in most cases, they are only used for intelligence and information gathering purposes .
References
Hakun, J. (2009). Towards Clinical Trials of Lie Detection with fMRI. Neurocase, 518.
Langleben, D., Loughead, J., Bilker, W., Ruparel, K., Childress, A., Busch, S., et al. (2005). Using pattern recognition training on this same initial data the accuracy became 93%: Telling the truth from lie in individuals with fast even-related fMRI. Journal of Human Brain Mapping, 262.
Rothwell, J., Bandar, Z., O'shea, J., & McLean, D. (2006). Silent Talker: A New Computer-based system for analysis of facial cues to deception. Journal of Applied Cognitive Psychology, 757.
Simpson, J. (2002). Admissiblity of Evidence Obtained by Scientific Devices and Analyses. Florida Law Review, 5.
