Testing the Effects of Nonverbal Behavior Training on Accuracy in Deception Detection with the Inclusion of a Bogus Training Control Group

Abstract

Previous deception detection training studies have compared people receiving training in nonverbal behaviors associated with deception to control groups receiving no training and found that people who are trained are slightly to moderately more accurate than people who have not been trained. Recent research on the relationships between source veracity and specific nonverbal behaviors, however, suggests that those relationships are weak, inconsistent, and limited to high stakes lies. If specific nonverbal behaviors are not reliable indicators of deception, then one might wonder why training improves accuracy. This paper tests the speculation that the simple act of training, independent of the training content, may improve accuracy simply because those in training conditions process messages more critically. This speculation was tested in three experiments that included both no training and bogus training control groups. The bogus training group was most accurate in Study 1, but this finding failed to replicate in Study 2. A coding study (Study 3) examined behavioral differences in the stimulus tapes. The predicted differences were observed in a final experiment (Study 4) were training was based on the coded stimulus tapes. The results suggest that the effects of training are generally small and highly variable from message to message, that valid training does not produce large improvements over a bogus training control, and that bogus training can produce statistically significant improvements over a no‐training control.

Keywords:

• Lies
• Deception
• Detection
• Training

Notes

[1] Whereas some behaviors might show statistically significant differences between truth and lies, to the extent that the effect size for the difference is small, the utility of that behavior for detection accuracy training might be questioned. Trends that are statistically reliable at p < .05 are not necessarily useful in this context, and a correlation of r = .10 might not be visible even to the trained eye.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chad M. Harms

Timothy Levine is Professor, Steven McCornack is Associate Professor, and Mikayla Hughes is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at Michigan State University. Thomas Feeley is Associate Professor at Family Medicine Research Institute, and Department of Communication, State University of New York at Buffalo. Chad M. Harms is Assistant Professor in the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University. An earlier version of this paper was presented to the International Communication Association Annual Convention in Korea, May, 2002.