Imposing cognitive load to detect prepared lies: A T-pattern approach

One of the most well-documented claims in the deception literature is that humans are poor detectors of deception. Such human fallibility is exacerbated by the complexity of both deception and human behavior. The aim of our chapter is to examine whether the overall organization of behavior differ when people report truthful vs. deceptive messages, and when they report stories in reverse vs. chronological order, while interacting with a confederate. We argue that recalling stories in reverse order will produce cognitive overloading in subjects, because their cognitive resources are already partially spent on the lying task; this should emphasize nonverbal differences between liars and truth tellers. In the present preliminary study, we asked participants to report specific autobiographical episodes. We videotaped them as they reported the stories in chronological order or in reverse order after asking to lie about one of the stories. We focused in analyzing how people organize their communicative styles during both truthful and deceptive interactions. In particular, we focused on the display of lying and truth telling through facial actions. Such infl uences on the organization of behavior have been explored within the framework of the T-pattern model. The video recordings were coded after establishing the ground truth. Datasets were then analyzed using Theme 6 beta software. Results show that discriminating behavioral patterns between truth and lie could be easier under high cognitive load condition. Moreover, they suggest that future research on deception detection may focus more on patterns of behavior rather than on individual cues.