Detecting Deception

Detecting deception can be difficult since there are several different strategies a person can employ to hide the truth and/or sell an alternative account of events, etc. Whilst they can overtly/directly falsify details, they can also exaggerate facts, omit and conceal information, and mislead and misdirect, which may also involve deliberately failing to correct a person’s misunderstanding concerning them and/or an incident. In many cases, several – and sometimes all – of these strategies will be combined to tell an untruthful story/account. This makes detecting deception problematic since there cannot be a simple and singular test for determining the truth when multiple strategies may be at play. Coupled with this is our general inability to determine fact from fiction when we actively try to do so; studies show that when we directly try to identify deceit, we are no better at doing so than chance. However, if we are tasked with indirectly detecting deception, we do a lot better e.g. if we try to ascertain whether somebody is thinking longer than usual about what they are saying, or are thinking too hard when answering a question, etc. – our rates actually rise to about 75%. It seems that we are not so good at determining the truth, as we are at recognizing the “indirect” actions and behaviors connected with lie telling. In this article, I want to look at how recognizing the use of pronouns and determining whether somebody is using an active/passive voice can help guide us in determining whether somebody might be lying or not. It is worth noting that these things may indicate deception, but they cannot categorically determine it – only concrete evidence, or an admittal/confession can do this.

Pronouns are generally used to replace proper nouns, and make our sentences, whether spoken or read, easier to follow e.g. rather than say, “…and then Paul drew a knife, and after that Paul ran around looking for people to stab.”, we might change it to, “…and then Paul drew a knife, and then he ran around looking for people to stab.” i.e. we replace the second use of “Paul” to “he”. However, from a psycholinguistic perspective, pronouns can be used to distance somebody from their actions and/or allow them to make statements that they do not have to own. Some lies may seem innocuous or aimed at charming somebody in order to make them more receptive to a request. Many predatory individuals use charm as a device, to get their potential/intended victims to like being with them; who does not like to be around people who have nice things to say about you? However, having an indication as to whether that charm is purely superficial or whether there may be some genuineness and authenticity behind it, may help us identify someone who is using charm in a purely transactional way. If somebody says, “I really like what you have done with your hair”, they are speaking in the first person and are owning their statement, however if somebody says, “your hair looks nice”, they are speaking in the second person, and making an observation that they don’t actually own i.e. they are making a statement without inserting their relationship to it, which makes it a much more superficial compliment. This doesn’t necessarily mean that it indicates harmful intent, but that it is more likely to be said as oil to grease the wheels of conversation in order to accomplish some short/long-term goal as opposed to a sincere statement that is able to stand on its own.

Pronouns, can also indicate how an individual relates to others e.g. there is a big difference between, “we were shouting at each other”, and, “He was shouting at me, and I was shouting back at him” etc. Using the term “we” suggests that both parties are involved in the act of shouting together, whereas using the pronouns “He” and “I” suggests, that each party was participating as individuals and that there is an absence of a relationship – at least in the moment – between them. Changes in pronoun use can also indicate changes in intimacy and relationship, such as at the start of a statement a person uses the term “we”, to explain the events of the night concerning their partner, but then at a point starts to refer to them as “he”, and they as “I”, when it would have been more natural – and consistent – to use the term “we”. This suggests that at some point during the evening/night there was a degree of distancing and disagreement between them over something. Distancing can also be seen when people start to move from speaking with an active voice to a passive one. Imagine the police are interviewing somebody about the whereabouts of a missing person, because they were the last one to be seen with them at a bar or club. If during the interrogation they make a statement such as, “I was talking to her in the bar, and then she left around closing time”, the person is likely being extremely candid and honest about their relationship with the individual, because they lead with, “I was talking to her” (which also denotes some distance between them as if they were in a more intimate relationship, saying something like, “we were talking together” might be expected). If, however, the individual says, “She left the bar around closing time, after I’d been talking to her”, their reordering of the events, suggests that they are trying to distance themselves to some degree, by emphasizing her leaving rather than the conversation, etc. This might be a more subtle way of destressing the importance of the conversation, rather than omitting it altogether by just saying, “She left the bar around closing time.”

These may seem subtle cues in detecting deception, but they can be important indicators. A lot of our speech bypasses any cognitive processes and can reveal a lot about what we are trying to accomplish in a conversation. When engaged in lying, most of our cognitive processes are involved in creating and managing facts, and so we pay little attention to the way we say things – and it is this which can help us discern whether somebody is being deceitful. While these patterns can indicate deceit, it should be remembered that we can only categorically know somebody is telling a lie, if we have knowledge of the real facts and/or they confess to us that this is the case.