The truth is in the details: when they are too few, they unmask liars with an accuracy between 59% and 79%, much greater than that obtained with the techniques usually used. This is indicated by the study published in the journal Nature Human Behavior and led by the University of Amsterdam, which therefore argues that the best strategy to understand if someone is lying is to focus exclusively on the level of detail of their story, ignoring everything else.
After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, security personnel at US airports were trained to look for as many as 92 behavioral clues that can indicate when a person has something to hide. However, even trained professionals don’t get much better than guessing at random when trying to distinguish true from false.
Part of the problem is having to integrate a lot of conflicting data in real time: “It’s an impossible task,” says Bruno Verschuere, who led the study. “People can’t evaluate all those signals in a short time, let alone integrate them to make an accurate and truthful judgment.” Added to this are the stereotypes we have about how innocent and guilty people look, which often lead us astray.
To overcome these obstacles, the authors of the study instructed the participants in their experiment to focus only on the amount of detail told: this allowed those who used this technique to ferret out liars with an accuracy that can reach almost 80%, while those who followed more traditional methods did no better than chance. But the researchers caution that the technique may not always work: In high-risk situations, people are likely to flesh out lies with more detail to boost their credibility.
Source: Ansa
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