Detecting the liars

With a few exceptions, police officers are not good at detecting deception when they pay attention to someone’s behaviour. This article considers factors that hamper lie detection, including the fact that ‘typical’ deceptive behaviour does not exist and that police officers often have incorrect beliefs about how liars behave. But strangely, people’s lie-detection skills improve when they are asked to detect lies in an indirect way (‘Is the person you just saw having to think hard?’) rather than in the traditional direct way (‘Is the person you just saw lying?’) – this article will also discuss this ‘implicit lie detection method’.