Interview and Interrogation Techniques Tip 20
101 Tips for Interviewers and Interrogators

Is Body Language the Answer to Spotting All Deception?

Stan B. Walters The Lie Guy® Blog

For nearly six decades of interview and interrogation techniques training and application, the hypothesis has been that body language would be the best why to spot if a subject was being truthful or deceptive. The concept has reached almost mythical status. Those investigators who would be the best, would be those who could spot a large catalog of deception behaviors that a subject could possibly generate during interviewing and interrogation. In reality the results of spotting deception via body language has fallen well below expectation.

The greatest majority of the body language cues that have been and are still being touted in numerous interviewing and interrogation training courses as being almost infallible despite overwhelming empirical evidence that proves otherwise. In the meantime, innocent people are being wrongly accused and the cues of those subjects who are actually deceptive are going unnoticed.

The truth about deception cues that may be exhibited during interviewing and interrogation are in fact quite rare and their signals very faint. Observation studies of interrogators who claim to be very good at spotting body language deception cues actually perform very poorly. In fact, those interrogators who use body language cues as a tool to spot deception during interviewing and interrogation have been found to have strong “lie bias” are more likely to diagnose genuinely truthful statements as being deceptive.

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It’s about time interviewers and interrogators acknowledge the overwhelming scientific evidence and pay more attention to verbal cues as a far more productive method of spotting deception during interviewing and interrogation.

Watch Interview and Interrogation Techniques Tip # 20 of 101 Tips for Interviewers and Interrogators and learn more!

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