Social Engineering Blogs

The Crime Psych Blog April 2, 2010

Lie-detection biases among male police interrogators, prisoners, and laypersons

I know, I’ve been away a long time, finishing off my doctorate and working hard, so no time for blogging. The doctorate is finally out of the way but I still don’t have masses of spare time. When I can I’ll update these blogs with studies that catch my eye, though I don’t think I’ll be able to comment in depth on many of them in the way that I used to. That’s partly a time issue, but also I haven’t got access to as many full text articles as I did when I was registered at a university. I’ll do what I can.

Here’s a study that sounds like an interesting addition to the literature on what people think of their own lie-detection abilities:

E Elaad (2009). Lie-detection biases among male police interrogators, prisoners, and laypersons. Psychological Reports 105(3 Pt 2): 1047-56.

Beliefs of 28 male police interrogators, 30 male prisoners, and 30 male laypersons about their skill in detecting lies and truths told by others, and in telling lies and truths convincingly themselves, were compared. As predicted, police interrogators overestimated their lie-detection skills. In fact, they were affected by stereotypical beliefs about verbal and nonverbal cues to deception. Prisoners were similarly affected by stereotypical misconceptions about deceptive behaviors but were able to identify that lying is related to pupil dilation. They assessed their lie-detection skill as similar to that of laypersons, but less than that of police interrogators. In contrast to interrogators, prisoners tended to rate lower their lie-telling skill than did the other groups. Results were explained in terms of anchoring and self-assessment bias. Practical aspects of the results for criminal interrogation were discussed.

The full text is behind a paywall – I can’t find a direct link so you have to get there by going to the publisher’s website and searching their e-journals.

The Episteme Blog November 4, 2009

Return-to-Barry-White Human Exploitation

Spent a weekend in early October hanging out with Tom and Kim at their rapport and anchoring bootcamp. And I was talking in email with my friend Cris Neckar afterward where we were talking about the large number of pre-existing anchors that exist within someone’s already vast consciousness.

Cris’s comment was that using pre-existing material for anchors is “sort of like exploiting around DEP” – basically, the idea of a “Return-to-libc” exploit. You have pre-existing functions that perform the task that you’re hoping to do.

This reminded me of something that Tom did to me during the weekend. Tom walked up to me this weekend and said:

“So, you’re a hypnotist right? You’ve been in trance before, you know what that feels like, don’t you?” And, as soon as I think about it (which I have to do to understand his question), he achors it.

Tom then proceeded to spend the rest of the weekend enjoying firing off the trance anchor at opportune times.

So, in our email conversation, Cris and I were talking about some good elicitations to anchor that many people would already have:

“Hey… remember that scene from Say Anything where John Cusack was standing outside with the boom-box on his head? How romantic was that? What was the most romantic movie scene you remember… one that just made your heart melt?”

Or: “As you wish” (for anyone who has seen the Princess Bride).

Or: “What’s the song that gets you most in the mood?”

In other words, the “Return-to-Barry-White” exploit.

Note: I’m well aware that this isn’t at all new. Neither’s ret2libc, really. But it’s a great example that hopefully drives some new ideas and new thinking.