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The wizards of deception detection

2004; Cambridge University Press; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1017/cbo9780511490071.012

Maureen O’Sullivan, Paul Ekman,

Cybercrime and Law Enforcement Studies

For many years we have studied individual differences among people in their ability to detect deception from demeanour. Most people do rather poorly in making such judgements. In experimental situations in which someone is either lying or telling the truth half the time, people do little better than chance (i.e., they get average accuracy scores of 50 per cent). This has been found not only in our studies (Ekman and O'Sullivan, 1991), which examined high-stake lies, but also in a wide range of other studies (Malone and DePaulo, 2001). By doing an idiographic analysis, we have discovered some individuals who are highly accurate across different types of deception. This report describes our beginning research with a small group of such 'wizards' of deception detection.