Lying and wht people do it

are already intruments which recognize liars. Kind of investigations What kind of investigations has been done and how do researchers get their information? What are the results of their observations? Psychologist Bella DePaulo (picture) is one of the researchers who has investigated how people lie and what the symptoms are of lying people. Before she started testing she had a hypothesis. She thinks that lying people will react nervous, that they would look down, avoid eye contact, that they speak with many eh’s and ah’s, that their heart rate is higher than normal, higher blood pressure, uncontrolled respiration, a different skin temperature and even a different skin conductance. Since 1970 she found one hundred and twenty different expiriments done by other researchers and analysed them. She looked if there are connections between those experiments. Most testpersons of the experiments were students and some were junks or criminals. The idea was to test the reaction of behaviour for truthspeaking and lying persons by asking simple questions. Example are the trick with playing cards, asking for personal facts, what they had seen in movies or the crime they had committed. Totally she combined 1.338 possible effects of 158 cues at 5.728 testpersons. In fact she was dissapointed with the results, because there were no significant differences, but only some hardly manageable marks. She concluded that a lying person is less personal and less direct. The testresults are given in the table below. Action Person lies Person tells the truth Differences in behaviour 7 % 93% Less cooperative 10% 90% Using less details when speaking 2% 98% Not remembering facts 4% 96% Higher voice 1% 99% More nervous 1% 99% These tests show that differences in behaviour will not directly prove that a person is lying. Quite the contrary! That a person is speaking the truth is more expectable than that he is lying. That makes it very difficult for researchers to find out when people are lying, because the results are not representative. Another investigation by another person was a lie detector. The detector was based on the same principles as the hypothesis of DePaulo. It’s called a polygraph. The typical lie detector, like a biofeedback instrument, simply measures many different physiological processes such as heart rate, respiration, blood pressure, skin temperature, and skin conductance. The word ‘polygraph’ is composed of poly- (from the Greek poly, many) and -graph (from the Greek graphos, writing) in reference to the instrument’s multiple recording channels. It can combine the results and only the administrator can see them. The administrator asks different questions, beginning with simple fact-questions, like: “what’s your name” and “how old are you”. The person who is interviewed would react quite relaxed. But when the person lies about a more difficult question like “do you use any drugs”, the administrator can see a change in the pattern of the detector. The instrument will detect more nervous signs of the person and his behaviour and the administrator will think he is lying. But is the person really lying? That’s the question. If we look at the testresults of DePaulo above, we can conclude (=constateren) that if the instrument tells us in (more than) ten times that there is a possible lie, in fact there would be one lie! That means that 90% of the time you would think somebody is lying, it is not true. That makes it very difficult to make a good and reliable lie detector. Another investigation done by the Dutch psychologist Gün Sein and the British investigator Aldert Vrij was looking for the answer who can best recognize a liar. For example prisoners, detectives, police officers, jailors, customhouse officers or students. The results were quite surprising. The professionals or experts seem to have the same stereotype ideas and wrong thoughts about lie detectors as for instance the criminals. The professional expects that the liar will show strange behaviour, the liar is aware of the risk of doing so. With their experience they judge the other persons. The prisoners had the best results in this investigation. Evendently the professional liar scores best in recognizing other liars! How reliable are the results of the researchers? The main conclusion of the investigations is that there is no reliable method to recognize liars. Even the results of a lie detector are absolutely not reliable. That’s a pity, because it reduces the possibilities of this report. The results of the conclusions of DePaulo however, seem very reliable to me. What kind of research has been done in the past? In the past an old Babylonian clay tablet was found with the phrase: ‘When a man lies, he looks at the ground and moves his toe in circles.’ Now we know this assumption is not true. And according to an old Chinese wisdom from 3000 years ago, liars would have more saliva in their mouth. Possibly these marks refer to nervousness or shyness. But most liars aren’t nervous or shy at all! The conclusion is that people always have been interested in lies, liars and methods to recognize them. Research have been done during the the whole history. DePaolo evaluated former research, with the results as described above. Conlusions How to recognize a liar? That’s a difficult question, because research shows that it is not reliable to say with 100% that a person is lying or not. Polygraphs are made to recognize differences in behaviour and nervousness. They do that well, but the nervousness and the difference in behaviour will not by definition say that a person is lying. And that’s a great made mistake. So it’s also possible that a very nervous person is saying the truth. I hope you liked reading this ANW project. I think it’s a very interesting subject, but it’s difficult to collect information about results of lie tests. If there was more specific information about the results, it would be much easier. Nevertheless I liked making this piece of work. Discussion I liked it to work on this ANW-project. I chose to work on it alone. Because of my training and competitions for speed skating I could not make appointments on a regular basis. Now I could work on it at times that suited me. A disadvantage of this choise was that the moral pressure of working together was missing. It is much easier to postpone things, with time pressure as to be expected. And indeed, planning of the project was not really difficult, but realizing it was. And you will always notice that, even if you’re planning is really great, a lot of work will have to be done at the last moment. So even it was not really planned, many little things had to correct the day before this piece of work had to be finished. It was obvious again that working many times a little bit does not work. A few times several hours does work, but of course also give a lot more stress. A second disadvantage is that I had to do everything alone. It is time consuming and two persons together are able to do more than two singles. Yet I’m glad with the result. The most difficult thing for me was to write everything in English. I am convinced that this was the major part of the project. The online Van Dale dictionary was a great help. I am satisfied with the result. It was a lot of work, but I learned a lot of it. Before I started I did not know anything about lie detectors. Now I do! Quotation of sources http://www.cavalierdaily.com:2001/.Archives/1998/February/24/lfliar.asp http://www.people.virginia.edu/~bmd/ (dePaulo’s lab) http://www.groene.nl/1995/07_26/detect.html >>'Een zogenaamde leugendetector is niets anders dan een apparaatje waarmee je de hartslag, de ademhaling, de bloeddruk en de zweetsecretie van de handpalmen registreert. Zo'n ding staat op iedere sportkeuring en intensive care-afdeling en is dus niets bijzonders. Het instrument kan gewoon een aantal fysiologische functies tegelijk registreren en daaraan ontleent het ook de naam polygraaf, oftewel veelschrijver.' http://www.guidetopsychology.com/testing.htm grappig artikel: http://www.cnn.com/2000/US/10/16/morality.study.ap/ http://antipolygraph.org/articles/article-033.shtml Goed verhaal van een agent die een leugentest doet. Hij is heel negatief http://antipolygraph.org/statements/statement-012.shtml Article ‘De leugen regeert, by Hendrik Spiering’. in scientific supplement of NRC handelsblad, 5th July 2003 Vocabulary