Spy the Lie: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Detect Deception

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The idea is, if you want to know if someone is lying, you need to ignore truthful behavior so that it is not processed. DENIAL PROBLEMS. Closely related to the failure to answer is the absence of an explicit denial of something in your question that involves an act of wrongdoing, or has consequences associated with it. Bianchi, F., Rossiello, G., Costabello, L., Palmonari, M., Minervini, P.: Knowledge graph embeddings and explainable AI. arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.14843 (2020) Spy the Lie chronicles the captivating story of how they used a methodology the author developed to detect deception in the counterterrorism and criminal investigation realms, and shows how these techniques can be applied in our daily lives. Through fascinating anecdotes from their intelligence careers, the authors teach readers how to recognize deceptive behaviors, both verbal and nonverbal, that we all tend to display when we respond to questions untruthfully. For the first time, they share with the general public their methodology and their secrets to the art of asking questions that elicit the truth. Summary Points & Takeaways from Spy the Lie

Goyal, N., Sachdeva, N., Choudhary, V., Kar, R., Kumaraguru, P., Rajput, N.: Con2kg-a large-scale domain-specific knowledge graph. In: Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, pp. 287–288. HT 2019, ACM, New York (2019) Truthful responses tend to be direct and spontaneous. Deceptive verbal behaviors that people use when the facts aren’t their ally: Nonspecific denial. If the “no” statement is delivered in a way that’s more of a general focus than a specific expression of denial of the matter at hand (“I didn’t do anything,” “I would never do something like that”), that’s also significant. It’s subtle, but if a person says he didn’t do anything, psychologically he’s letting himself off the hook so he doesn’t have to tell the bald-faced lie, “I didn’t do it.” It’s a nuance that’s easily missed by an untrained ear. Non-specific denial. When they don’t respond to anything directly but instead use phrases like “I didn’t do anything.” If the response is yes and names a drug, follow with: “Okay, what other things have you tried?” or “When was the last time you experimented?”construed as asserting or implying U.S. Government authentication of information or Agency endorsement So we know what to look out for when someone is lying to us, but what can we do in the way we talk to them to help reveal the lie? Timing: look for the first deceptive behavior to occur within the first five seconds after a stimulus is delivered (a question, for example). There are a couple of caveats associated with this particular indicator. First, this indicator is only applicable in a narrative response, not in a one-word or short-phrase response. Consider, for example, that a person’s head might make a sharp nodding motion when he says “No!” That’s not a disconnect; it’s simple emphasis. Second, it’s important to keep in mind that in some cultures, a nodding motion doesn’t mean “yes,” and a side-to-side head motion doesn’t mean “no.” So, you need to ensure you’re familiar with the cultural patterns of the person who’s being questioned. This question has been routinely asked in interviews of suspects since at least the 1970s, and it’s probably the least understood and most misused question employed by law enforcement officers today. If you are interviewing the guilty party, you are, in effect, asking the person to sentence himself. The theory is that the guilty party will, naturally, suggest a relatively light punishment. On the other hand, the theory goes, the response of a person who is innocent will likely reflect a stiffer punishment, and an especially harsh one for heinous crimes.

Repeating the question. This is done to buy more time to think, or because guilty people are more likely to find silence awkward. You want to ensure that if there is a deceptive response to the question, the deceptive behavior is related to your question, and not to your delivery. Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-beta-20210815 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 1.0000 Ocr_module_version 0.0.13 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-WL-0000245 Openlibrary_edition First, make sure you are neutral and calm in your questioning. This way you can be sure the deception is a result of the actual question and not the way you presented it. Avoid asking the same question over and over, because this just makes it easier for them to repeat the lie every time, making it more convincing. BEHAVIORAL PAUSE OR DELAY. You ask a person a question and you initially get nothing. After a delay, he begins to respond. How long does a delay have to be before it’s meaningful, before you would consider it a deceptive indicator? Well, it depends.

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Identifying verbal and nonverbal cues: The authors teach readers to identify verbal and nonverbal cues that may indicate deception, including changes in tone of voice, body language, and facial expressions. Vrandečić, D., Krötzsch, M.: Wikidata: a free collaborative knowledgebase. Commun. ACM 57(10), 78–85 (2014) THROAT-CLEARING OR SWALLOWING. If a person clears his throat or performs a significant swallow prior to answering the question, that’s a potential problem. If he does it after he answers, that doesn’t bother us. But if he does it before he answers, a couple of things might be happening. He might be doing the nonverbal equivalent of the verbal “I swear to God . . .”—dressing up the lie in its Sunday best before presenting it to us. Or physiologically, the question might have created a spike in anxiety, which can cause discomfort or dryness in the mouth and throat. Potthast, M., Kiesel, J., Reinartz, K., Bevendorff, J., Stein, B.: A stylometric inquiry into hyperpartisan and fake news. arXiv preprint arXiv:1702.05638 (2017) Khandelwal, S., Kumar, D.: Computational fact validation from knowledge graph using structured and unstructured information. In: Proceedings of the 7th ACM IKDD CoDS and 25th COMAD, pp. 204–208. CoDS COMAD 2020. ACM, New York (2020)

Lying is a stressful activity that triggers physical responses in the body. When we lie, our stress levels rise Omar shifted in his seat, paused, and with visible discomfort responded with a question: "Can I pray?"Philip Houston, a twenty-five-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency and a recipient of the Career Intelligence Medal, is a nationally recognized authority on deception detection, critical interviewing, and elicitation. He has conducted thousands of interviews and interrogations for the CIA and other federal agencies, and is credited with developing a detection of deception methodology currently employed throughout the U.S. intelligence and federal law enforcement communities.

Legitimacy statement: an explanation that asking the question is an important step in the accomplishment of a resolution.Phil sat on the sofa, and invited Omar to have a seat in the adjacent easy chair. With hundreds of similar interviews under his belt, Phil had the drill thoroughly rehearsed. He was relaxed, but businesslike, as he began to go through the prepared list of standard questions. Not surprisingly, Omar responded to them directly and comfortably—Phil could see that after twenty years Omar, too, knew the drill. I have read a number of books on being better at lie detection and for the most part I have been severely underwhelmed. Normally these books are full of subjective lessons that are about as useful as flipping a coin to decide whether or not someone is lying... that might even be a generous analogy. Vidros, S., Kolias, C., Kambourakis, G., Akoglu, L.: Automatic detection of online recruitment frauds: characteristics, methods, and a public dataset. Future Internet 9(1), 6 (2017) But no matter why people lie, many of us are involved in activities that require us to have access to truthful information. If you’re a lawyer, CEO or accountant, it doesn’t matter why people lie. What matters is the truth. QUALIFIERS. There are two types of qualifiers that are potential deceptive indicators: exclusion qualifiers and perception qualifiers. Exclusion qualifiers enable people who want to withhold certain information to answer your question truthfully without releasing that information. Examples of qualifiers of this type include “basically,” “for the most part,” “fundamentally,” “probably,” and “most often.” Perception qualifiers are used to enhance credibility: “frankly,” “to be perfectly honest,” and “candidly” are examples. Keep in mind that we all have speech habits and patterns that can account for the presence of these qualifiers, so again, remember the cluster rule. Also, we don’t count each qualifier as a separate indicator. Consider the use of multiple qualifiers in response to a question as one indicator. There can be a lot of them in a single response.