believed cues to deception: judgments in self-generated trivial and serious situations

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Believed cues to deception: Judgments inself-generated trivial and serious situations

Rachel Taylor1* and Rachel F. Hick2

1University of Glamorgan, UK2 University of Manchester, UK

Purpose. To investigate the beliefs that people hold about the cues to deception inserious and trivial lies.

Method. A questionnaire study considered the beliefs which people have about thecues to deception in themselves and other people in both trivial and serious lies.Participants were asked to consider how likely it was that a number of verbal and non-verbal behaviours would give themselves or someone else away during deception. Halfthe participants considered cues to deception in themselves and the remainderconsidered cues in other people. All participants were asked to make a judgment oncues to deception in both trivial and serious situations.

Results. It was predicted that making the consequences of the lie both salient andmeaningful to participants would make participants less stereotypical in their beliefs.Results partially supported these hypotheses – serious lies were associated with morenervous behaviours than trivial ones and a total of six behaviours were regarded asoccurring significantly less often in trivial lies than in truthful situations.

Conclusions. While similar results were found for serious self-generated lies tothose found in previous research using vignettes, there was some suggestion that theuse of a more individually salient lying situation did reduce the reliance on stereotypedbehaviour. The believed decrease in certain behaviours during trivial lies is a promisingresult, and these results are discussed with reference to the roles that stereotypes andheuristics play in ineffective lie detection.

Examination of findings from over 30 years of research on deception tells us that people

are not particularly good at determining when someone is lying to them. Accuracy rates

for detecting deception typically range from 45 to 60% (Vrij, 2000), and these rates do

not seem to improve evenwhen the lie catcher is an ‘expert’ such as a police officer (e.g.

Kohnken, 1987; Vrij, 1993, although more ecologically valid lies may lead to higher

accuracy rates e.g. Mann, Vrij, & Bull, 2004). One possible explanation for this is

that people associate incorrect cues, especially signs of nervousness, with deception

* Correspondence should be addressed to Rachel Taylor, School of Humanities, Law and Social Sciences (Forest Hall),University of Glamorgan, Pontypridd, RCT, CF37 1DL , UK (e-mail: [email protected]).

TheBritishPsychologicalSociety

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Legal and Criminological Psychology (2007), 12, 321–331

q 2007 The British Psychological Society

www.bpsjournals.co.uk

DOI:10.1348/135532506X116101


(e.g. Anderson et al., 1999; Granhag, Andersson, Stromwall, & Hartwig, 2004; Vrij &

Semin, 1996; Zuckerman, Koestner, & Driver, 1981). These results are equally likely to

be found for students (e.g. Akehurst, Kohnken, Vrij, & Bull, 1996) and for expert lie

catchers (e.g. Akehurst et al., 1996; Granhag, Hartwig, & Stromwall, 2005; Stromwall &

Granhag, 2003). In other words, people’s beliefs about the cues to deception are

consistent with the emotional explanation for deception, namely that deception is anemotionally arousing activity (e.g. Ekman, 2001), and that this physiological arousal will

be seen in an increase in movements and speech hesitations, a higher voice pitch and a

decrease in eye contact.

However, this association of nervous behaviour, such as an increase in movements,

with deception does not tally with the findings from studies on actual cues to deception

(e.g. DePaulo et al., 2003; Vrij, 1995; Vrij & Mann, 2001; Vrij & Winkel, 1993) as these

tend to show that liars decrease their movements. A recent meta-analysis (DePaulo et al.,

2003) found few reliable cues that effectively distinguished truth tellers from liars.Specific cues to deception, such as gaze aversion and postural shifts, showed small

overall effects but these were decreases rather than increases. Generally, these results

support two other theoretical models of deceptive behaviour, namely the cognitive and

control approaches. The cognitive approach argues that deception is cognitively

complex and therefore signs of high cognitive load will betray liars. This may be through

increases in speech disturbances and decreases in speech rate (e.g. Vrij & Heaven,

1999), through decreases in movement through reduced attention to non-verbal

behaviour (Mann, Vrij, & Bull, 2002) or even through increased reaction times whenproviding deceptive compared with truthful responses (e.g. Walczyk et al., 2005). The

control approach argues that liars deliberately try to control their physiological arousal

in order to present a credible impression, however that this is overdone, is perhaps

because of a lack of awareness about the non-verbal behaviour that they are actually

displaying (Vrij, Edward, & Bull, 2001). Therefore why do we see such a discrepancy

between actual and believed cues to deception?

Perhaps the situations used to identify actual cues do not elicit enough emotion from

the participants to produce the suggested nervous behavioural increases. Behaviour inexperiments may correspond to behaviour in ‘trivial’ lying situations, whereas

perceived and believed cues to deception put forward by participants may refer to

‘serious’ lying situations. There are clear theoretical reasons why high stake situations

should elicit nervous behaviours (Ekman, 2001). Furthermore research in laboratory

settings suggests that many people do leak cues to emotion (either experienced emotion

which is being masked, guilt at deceiving or fear of being caught) when faced with a

high stake lying situation (Ekman, O’Sullivan, & Frank, 1999; Frank & Ekman, 1997).

So, do participants believe there is a difference in a liar’s behaviour depending on theconsequences of their lies being discovered? People may believe that in ‘trivial’

situations liars are more able to control their behaviours – hence their believed cues

would correspond to the actual cues observed in experimental manipulations. Studies

which have previously examined differences in participants’ beliefs about the cues to

deception according to whether the situation was high or low stake (Lakhani & Taylor,

2003; Taylor & Vrij, 2000; Vrij & Taylor, 2003) have revealed some interesting findings.

Taylor and Vrij asked participants to rate 30 verbal and non-verbal behaviours in one of

six different scenarios, these varying in stakes and also amount of effort required to liesuccessfully. Differences between high and low stake situations were found mainly for

verbal behaviours, with those in high stake lies engaging in verbal ‘credibility-

maintaining’ behaviours, however, all participants expected liars to behave nervously in

322 Rachel Taylor and Rachel F. Hick


terms of their non-verbal behaviour regardless of whether it was a serious or trivial lie

being told.

The findings of Taylor and Vrij (2000) would suggest that people are unaware of the

importance of stake in affecting non-verbal cues to deception, however, there were two

problems with this study. The first of these was that high and medium stake situations

were based on interviewswith a police officer and the low stake situationwas based on aconversation with a friend. The changes in relational familiarity and status between these

two sets of situations may have confounded the results. The second problem was that

Taylor and Vrij used a between-subjects design which may have not encouraged

participants to consider fully the stake of the situation as they had no formof comparison.

Both of these problems were addressed in a recent study by Lakhani and Taylor (2003)

which used both awithin-subjects design and controlled for the target of the lie by having

both a high stake and a low stake lie directed towards a person’s parents. Lakhani and

Taylor did find some effects for stake on non-verbal behaviours, while all liars wereexpected to behave somewhat nervously, those in high stake situationswere expected to

behave significantly more so. Thus, it seems as though people do show some awareness

of the importance of stake in influencing non-verbal cues to deception.

However,while this study assesses differences in the same person’s beliefs in high and

low stake situations, it has one problem. All participants were given the same scenarios

and asked to base their judgments on these. However, it might have been that these were

considered differently by some participants. For example, one of the high and low stake

scenarios both involved a deception with a parent. While this was important in order tomaintain some form of consistency in the stakes’ manipulation, it is possible that this

scenario was more meaningful to younger than older adults because they could more

easily imagine themselves in this scenario. Therefore, the current study tries to balance

the need for consistencywith recognition that participants should have anopportunity to

select scenarios which better enable them to imagine the situation. This has been

achieved by asking participants to generate a trivial and a serious situation for themselves,

to describe the situation and then to rate its seriousness. This is to ensure firstly that

serious situations are rated asmore serious than trivial ones and then to allowexclusion ofparticipants who did not rate their scenarios similarly in terms of seriousness/triviality.

Two hypotheses are generated here with regard to the stakes manipulation alone.

H1. Participants will believe that certain nervous behaviours are likely to decrease during trivialdeceptions when compared with truth telling. This will particularly apply to those which arecharacteristic of verbal or paralinguistic behaviour.

H2. Participants will rate nervous behaviours as increasing during serious deceptions bothwhen compared with truth telling and in comparison to trivial deception situations.

In addition to the manipulation of stakes when looking at beliefs about the cues to

deception, we also asked participants to rate either their own behaviour or the

behaviour of another person. Akehurst et al. (1996) found that participants’ assessment

of their own deceptive behaviour corresponded more to actual deceptive behaviour

cues. Ratings of the deceptive behaviour of others produced larger increases in non-

verbal behaviours, such as eye blinks, twitches and turning towards interviewer, all

behaviours that have actually been found to decrease during deception (DePaulo et al.,2003). However, Akehurst et al. did not compare self/other ratings in high and low stake

situations. It is therefore unclear whether their participants were considering a serious

or trivial lie when answering the questions.

Believed cues to deception 323


We would therefore like to consider a potential interaction between stakes and the

person being rated. It is possible that considering one’s own behaviour in a serious

situation would cue participants to thinking about how nervous they would actually feel

in this context. Conversely, considering a trivial situation might not be associated with

the same self-awareness and we would expect results for this situation to be in line with

those of Akehurst et al. Therefore, we predict different effects for the self/othermanipulation in the two stakes’ conditions.

H3. Participants will rate themselves as displaying more stereotypical indicators of deception,including indicators of arousal, than others when judging behaviour in serious situations.

However:

H4. When judging behaviour in trivial situations, participants will rate themselves as displayingfewer indicators of arousal and fewer stereotypical indicators of deception than when judgingother people’s behaviour in trivial situations.

Method

DesignA 2 £ 2 design was used for this study. There were two independent variables: stakes

(within-subjects, two levels, trivial/serious) and object (between-subjects, two levels,

self/other person). Dependent variables were believed cues to deception (24

behaviours) each measured on a seven-point scale.

ParticipantsA total of 108 people participated in this study; however, the final sample was made up

of only 87 people. The remaining 21 participants were excluded because of theirresponses to the manipulation checks, with participants being excluded if they rated the

serious situation as less than 7 on the seriousness scale, rated the trivial situation as more

than 4 on this scale or if they rated both the serious situation at 7 and the trivial situation

at 4. Participants were all students at the University of Glamorgan who completed the

questionnaire in small groups and received course credit for participation in the form of

a ‘research reflection sheet’ to include in a portfolio for their methods module. Students

were recruited by signing up at the end of lectures and then turning up to a specified

time slot or by participating during seminar sessions.In the final sample of 87 participants, there were 25 males and 62 females, with a

mean age of 22.31 years (SD ¼ 5:95 years). Forty-seven questionnaires were

completed and returned in the ‘self’ condition and 40 in the ‘other person’ condition.

There were no differences between these two groups in terms of age,

tð73:71Þ ¼ 1:27, p . :05, or in the distribution of males and females, x2ð1Þ ¼ 1:41,p . :05. Participants were also asked whether, in line with previous research (e.g.

Akehurst et al., 1996), they had read any literature about deceptive behaviour. Only 4

of the 87 participants had read any such literature (4.6%). Therefore this variable wasnot considered further.

Materials and procedureParticipants received a questionnaire to complete which asked participants either about

their own behaviour or about the behaviour of another person. In each of these



conditions, half of the participants were asked for a description and rating of a serious

situation first and a trivial one second, with the order being reversed for the other half of

the participants.

The questionnaire comprised a number of different elements. Participants were

asked to provide background information, namely age and gender, as well as whether

they had read any literature on deceptive behaviour (and if so whether this was‘popular’ or academic psychology). They were then asked to generate two situations,

one trivial and one serious, these terms being explained as:

. Trivial: ‘a situation where the lie being detected will have minor (or no)

consequences for the deceiver’.

. Serious: ‘a situation where the lie being detected will have severe negative

consequences for the deceiver’.

For each, participants had to describe briefly the situation being considered, to rate

how serious this situation was on a scale of 1–10 (with 1 being ‘not at all serious’

and 10 being ‘extremely serious’), and then to answer a number of questions with

reference to this scenario. The average word length of each description was 11.23

words (range 3–40 words) for serious lies and 13.14 words (range 4–36 words) for

trivial lies. An overview of the types of serious and trivial situations generated (with

examples) can be found in Table 1. This shows that there were three main

categories of serious lies: crime relevant ones (where the person was either lying tothe police or about a serious crime), lies to employers or tutors (e.g. at a job

interview) and lying about infidelity (either own or that of another person). A small

category of ‘other serious’ lies included lies to medical practitioners and criminals.

For trivial lies, there were four main categories into which all lies fell. These were

lies about chores or minor transgressions, ‘excuse-making lies’ (lies to save other’s

feelings or own embarrassment), lies to get sick days from employer or to get out of

other activities and conversational lies (including ‘jokes’).

Table 1. Overview of the lies generated by participants

Serious lies Trivial lies

Crime relevant (e.g. ‘after being chargedfor sexual assault’) – 64.37% of lies

Lying about chores/minor transgressions(e.g. ‘eating all the biscuits in the biscuit tin andsaying it wasn’t me’) – 45.98% of lies

Lying to employer/tutor (e.g. ‘lyingto employer about criminalconvictions’) – 10.34% of lies

Excuse-making (e.g. ‘lying to your mother saying youcouldn’t visit because you had coursework to do.The truth of the matter is you couldn’t bebothered’) – 27.59% of lies

Lying about infidelity (e.g. ‘lying aboutbeing with friends when in fact you’rewith another bloke’) – 18.39% of lies

Lying to obtain a sick day from employer – 10.34%of lies

Other serious lies (e.g. ‘lying after beingcaptured and interrogated by aterrorist group’) – 6.90% of lies

Conversational lies (including jokes and ‘wind-ups’)(e.g. ‘a friend asks about how much courseworkyou’ve done and you say a lot when you haven’tdone any’) – 14.94% of lies



The current study focused on the behaviour believed to be displayed by the liar

and was judged in comparison to the behaviour that this person would display

when telling the truth. Therefore, participants were asked to rate 24 verbal and

non-verbal indicators of nervousness, each on a seven-point scale (with 1 being

‘very much less during deception’ and 7 being ‘very much more during deception’

in the present study). These 24 behaviours included speech characteristics, facialbehaviours and body movements, and were chosen to facilitate comparisons with

previous research (e.g. Lakhani & Taylor, 2003). All behaviours had previously been

identified as being associated with nervousness in previous research (e.g. Burgoon,

Kelley, Newton, & Keely-Dyreson, 1989). The full list of behaviours is included in

Table 2. Participants were also provided with brief verbal explanations about these

behaviours and had an opportunity to clarify further the terms with the researchers

prior to completing the questionnaire.

Table 2. Descriptive statistics for all items on the questionnaire

Trivialsituations

Serioussituations

Behaviour M SD M SD F-ratios (all 1,85 df )

Speech characteristics1. Pauses 20.67a 1.52 0.69a 1.59 55.74*2. Stuttering 21.09a 1.49 0.43 1.72 65.28*3. Hesitance 20.29 1.61 0.95a 1.70 52.13*4. Grammatical errors 20.98a 1.62 0.08 1.56 63.18*5. Slips of the tongue 20.43 1.74 0.62 1.65 61.69*6. Pitch 20.45 1.55 0.58a 1.56 38.46*Facial behaviours7. Eye contact (decrease ¼ nervousness) 0.13 1.36 0.92a 1.27 11.57*8. Facial twitching 20.60a 1.54 20.09 1.60 19.61*9. Blinking 20.31 1.48 0.41 1.56 46.78*

10. Pupil dilation 20.44 1.54 0.26 1.55 33.09*11. Smiling (decrease ¼ nervousness) 0.39 1.55 20.34 1.78 0.3712. Head movements 20.52 1.31 20.03 1.34 19.81*13. Variation in facial behaviour 20.45 1.15 0.17 1.36 15.78*14. Turning pale 20.59 1.70 0.36 1.65 41.05*15. Swallowing 20.45 1.70 0.56a 1.40 39.64*16. Biting lips 20.43 1.66 0.67a 1.66 38.03*Body movements17. Shaking 20.77a 1.63 0.22 1.83 36.61*18. Self-manipulations 20.57a 1.57 0.25 1.50 37.14*19. Postural shifts 20.26 1.54 0.76 1.61 35.17*20. Arm movements 20.21 1.52 0.20 1.58 24.24*21. Hand movements 0.21 1.58 0.79a 1.74 24.37*22. Leg movements 20.40 1.59 0.09 1.68 25.78*23. Foot movements 20.10 1.54 0.31 1.76 21.99*24. Tense posture 20.28 1.65 1.15a 1.57 54.14*

a Significant difference (p , :001) between mean score and test value of 0 (‘no change’).

*p , .001.



Results

Preliminary analysisA preliminary analysis was undertaken to establish the validity of the manipulations.These took the form of a paired-samples t test where the independent variable was stake

(two levels, serious/trivial) and the dependent variable was the seriousness of the

scenario. This was measured by the question ‘How serious is the situation you are

thinking of?’ and was answered using a 10-point scale, where 1 was ‘not at all serious’

and 10 was ‘extremely serious’. The serious situation was rated as significantly more

serious than the trivial one, tð86Þ ¼ 242:15, p , :001; M ¼ 8:92 ð1:08Þ serious,

M ¼ 2:06 ð0:89Þ trivial. This demonstrated that the serious/trivial manipulation was

successful. However, this did not demonstrate that different serious situations wereregarded as equally serious by different people or that there was parity across different

trivial situations.

In order to establish some form of consistency, questionnaires were only included in

the final analysis if they contained both a trivial scenario rated at 4 or less and a scenario

rated at 7 or more. In addition, those questionnaires which were borderline on both (i.e.

those where trivial was 4 and serious 7) were also excluded. This was to ensure both

consistency within conditions and differentiation across conditions. The questionnaire

was then transformed so that all dependent variables were rated on a scale of23 to þ3with a midpoint of 0. This was to facilitate meaningful comparisons with ‘no change’ for

the one sample t tests.1

Main analysisIn order to assess the effects of stakes and person being rated on the believed cues to

deception, a multivariate analysis of variance for a mixed design was conducted.

Independent variables were stake (within-subjects, two levels – serious/trivial) and

person being rated (between-subjects, two levels – self/other). There were 24

dependent variables, these being the cues to deception rated by the participants.Initially, order was included as a covariate, however, no effects were found for this

variable and therefore it was removed from the analysis. This analysis was used to test

the interaction between stake and person being rated as predicted in Hypotheses 3 and

4 as well as to test the difference between trivial and serious deceptions as predicted by

Hypothesis 2.

The MANOVA produced a multivariate main effect for stake, Fð23; 63Þ ¼ 2:85,p , :01, �h2 ¼ 0:51. No main effect was found from this analysis for person being rated,

Fð23; 63Þ ¼ 0:39, p . :05, �h2 ¼ 0:23 and no interaction was seen between the twovariables, Fð23; 63Þ ¼ 0:58, p . :05, �h2 ¼ 0:17. These results indicated initial support

for H2 in terms of comparisons between trivial and serious deceptions, however, failed

to lend support to either H3 or H4.

In order to test H2 further, univariate ANOVAs were computed for each individual

dependent variable. The results for these analyses, along with mean scores and standard

deviations for trivial and serious conditions, can be seen in Table 2. As can be seen from

Table 2, almost all of the behaviours identified as nervous were expected to increase

during serious deceptions when compared with trivial ones. The only behaviours thatdid not show this pattern were smiling, which did not differ between deception

1 The authors would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing this to our attention.



situations, and eye contact, which was in fact believed to increase during serious

deceptions as compared with trivial ones. The fact that 23 out of the 24 behaviours

received different ratings (22 of these in the predicted direction) in serious as opposed

to trivial lies provides strong support for H2 in terms of comparisons between stake

situations.

In order to test H1 and the comparisons with truth telling for H2, one-sample t testswere carried out for all 24 behaviours in the trivial and serious conditions. The mean

scores were compared with a test value of 0, which was the mid-point of ‘no change’ on

the questionnaire. A significance level of .001 was applied to these results, to control for

the large number of tests used. Those behaviours which were rated as significantly

different from the ‘no change’ are indicated by superscripts in Table 2.

A total of six behaviours were rated as significantly decreasing during trivial

deceptions as compared with truth telling: pauses, stuttering, grammatical errors, facial

twitching, shaking and self-manipulations. Three of these are characteristic of verbal orparalinguistic behaviour; however, three were nervous non-verbal behaviours. For

serious deceptions, a total of eight behaviours were rated as significantly increasing

during deception. These were: pauses, hesitance, voice pitch, eye contact, swallowing,

biting lips, hand movements and tense posture. With the exception of eye contact, all of

these behaviours would be stereotypical indicators of nervousness, as for eye contact

we would expect a decrease if the person were behaving nervously. Hypothesis 1 was

therefore partially supported. Additionally, partial support was found for Hypothesis 2 in

terms of comparisons between serious deceptions and truth telling.

Discussion

This study has yielded some promising findings, with participants showing differences

in their beliefs about the cues to deception in serious and trivial lying situations.

Furthermore, there were some differences in the behaviours believed to be shown intrivial/serious deceptions when both were compared with truth telling. Six behaviours

were believed significantly to decrease during trivial deceptions when compared with

truth telling, even after the application of a more stringent criterion for judging

statistical significance. This contrasted with the significant increases found for serious

behaviours, with seven of the eight results being for stereotypically nervous behaviours.

However, there were no differences found between participants who rated their own

behaviour and those who rated the behaviour of another person.

The findings with regard to stakes are interesting. To some extent they supportprevious research, finding differences between high and low stake situations in terms of

both verbal (Taylor & Vrij, 2000) and non-verbal (Lakhani & Taylor, 2003) behaviours.

This suggests that participants are just as aware of stakes differences when the situations

are self-generated as well as in situations generated by the researcher. We would argue

that, while there are similarities in findings between the present study and previous

research, this study has greater ecological validity, as a result of allowing participants to

generate scenarios for themselves which fit their ideas of seriousness of consequence.

A further important and interesting implication of these findings, however, concernswhere they do not support previous research. Lakhani and Taylor (2003) found that

behaviours were believed significantly to increase more during serious than trivial

situations, but that trivial situations were associated with more nervous behaviour than

truth telling was. This was argued to be due to the use of unsuccessful and easily



accessible deceptions as a model for deceptive behaviour and may be considered to be

an application of a different type of heuristic to the simple ‘liars behave nervously’ rule

of thumb.

In the present study, we see a general trend towards believed decreases in nervous

behaviours in trivial lies, compared with truth telling, with six of these being significant

decreases at a more stringent level of significance. This suggests that liars may be awareof the relative ease with which trivial lies can be undertaken and believe they (and other

people) would feel less guilty during the telling of these lies. This was in contrast to the

findings for serious lies, with beliefs about these reflecting the majority of previous

research (e.g. Lakhani & Taylor, 2003; Stromwall & Granhag, 2003). The exception in

the current study was that participants rated eye contact as significantly increasing

during serious deceptions when compared with truth telling. This may reflect the belief

among our participants that liars would use a stereotypical cue in a strategic and

controlled manner as a deliberate ‘double bluff’. Future research should further explorethis possibility.

Therefore, what we find in this study, is that providing an opportunity to generate

scenarios in which it is possible to imagine the self or another person, seems to reduce

the impact of a wide range of heuristics and provides an opportunity for participants

fully to consider how the situation will impact on deceptive behaviour. It is argued that

this technique provides important support for the notion that judges of deceptive

behaviour have the capacity to be flexible in their beliefs. This flexibility has been

argued to be important in lie detection as poor lie detectors often rely on stereotypesand heuristics to determine credibility (e.g. Fiedler & Walka, 1993; O’Sullivan, 2003;

Porter, Campbell, Stapleton, & Birt, 2002; Porter, Woodworth, & Birt, 2000). Future

research should perhaps attempt to link flexibility in beliefs about the cues to deception

with flexibility and success in lie detection.

Despite previous research (e.g. Akehurst et al., 1996) showing that people have

different beliefs about the cues to deception when they are rating their own behaviour

or the behaviour of another person, no such results were found in this study.

Participants believed that similar behaviours would be displayed by themselves and byother people and these beliefs were not affected by the stakes of the situation. While it is

difficult to draw conclusions from non-significant findings, two tentative explanations

do suggest themselves. First, it is possible that the differentiation between self and other

person was not highlighted clearly enough on the questionnaire and so participants did

not properly consider the impact of this factor. We consider this explanation to be

unlikely as the person that participants rated was clearly indicated on each page of the

questionnaire. Another possibility is that participants found it quite difficult to put

themselves into another person’s position and therefore simply saw the way thatanother person behaved would be the same way that they rated their own behaviour.

This may particularly apply given that the scenarios were generated by the participants

themselves. Further research using a within-subjects quantitative methodology should

test this possibility.

In conclusion, this study provides a more meaningful and ecologically valid approach

to the investigation of believed cues to deception. Participants generate situations which

they may be able to link to their own deceptive experiences and which conform to their

understanding of the terms ‘serious’ and ‘trivial’. While the findings broadly supportprevious studies using researcher-generated scenarios, the finding that trivial lies may be

regarded as resulting in less nervous behaviour than truth telling is an indication that lie

detectors may be more flexible than previously believed.



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Received 15 September 2005; revised version received 2 May 2006


believed cues to deception: judgments in self-generated trivial and serious situations

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