We analyze the accuracy of deception judgments, synthesizing research results from 206 documents and 24,483 judges. In relevant studies, people attempt to discriminate lies from truths in real time with no special aids or training. In these circumstances, people achieve an average of 54% correct lie-truth judgments, correctly classifying 47% of lies as deceptive and 61% of truths as nondeceptive. Relative to cross-judge differences in accuracy, mean lie-truth discrimination abilities are nontrivial, with a mean accuracy d of roughly .40. This produces an effect that is at roughly the 60th percentile in size, relative to others that have been meta-analyzed by social psychologists. Alternative indexes of lie-truth discrimination accuracy correlate highly with percentage correct, and rates of lie detection vary little from study to study. Our meta-analyses reveal that people are more accurate in judging audible than visible lies, that people appear deceptive when motivated to be believed, and that individuals regard their interaction partners as honest. We propose that people judge others' deceptions more harshly than their own and that this double standard in evaluating deceit can explain much of the accumulated literature.

This article compiles results from a century of social psychological research, more than 25,000 studies of 8 million people. A large number of social psychological conclusions are listed alongside meta-analytic information about the magnitude and variability of the corresponding effects. References to 322 meta-analyses of social psychological phenomena are presented, as well as statistical effect-size summaries. Analyses reveal that social psychological effects typically yield a value of r equal to.21 and that, in the typical research literature, effects vary from study to study in ways that produce a standard deviation in r of.15. Uses, limitations, and implications of this large-scale compilation are noted.

Decades of research has shown that people are poor at detecting lies. Two explanations for this finding have been proposed. First, it has been suggested that lie detection is inaccurate because people rely on invalid cues when judging deception. Second, it has been suggested that lack of valid cues to deception limits accuracy. A series of 4 meta-analyses tested these hypotheses with the framework of Brunswik's (1952) lens model. Meta-Analysis 1 investigated perceived cues to deception by correlating 66 behavioral cues in 153 samples with deception judgments. People strongly associate deception with impressions of incompetence (r = .59) and ambivalence (r = .49). Contrary to self-reports, eye contact is only weakly correlated with deception judgments (r = -.15). Cues to perceived deception were then compared with cues to actual deception. The results show a substantial covariation between the 2 sets of cues (r = .59 in Meta-Analysis 2, r = .72 in Meta-Analysis 3). Finally, in Meta-Analysis 4, a lens model analysis revealed a very strong matching between behaviorally based predictions of deception and behaviorally based predictions of perceived deception. In conclusion, contrary to previous assumptions, people rarely rely on the wrong cues. Instead, limitations in lie detection accuracy are mainly attributable to weaknesses in behavioral cues to deception. The results suggest that intuitive notions about deception are more accurate than explicit knowledge and that lie detection is more readily improved by increasing behavioral differences between liars and truth tellers than by informing lie-catchers of valid cues to deception.

This article reports a meta-analysis of the effects of the presence of others on human task performance and physiology. In 241 studies involving nearly 24jOOO subjectSj the presence of others had small effects, accounting for .3% to 3% of the variance in the typical experiment. We conclude that (a) the presence of others heightens an individual's physiological arousal only if the individual is performing a complex task; (b) the presence of others increases the speed of simple task performance and decreases the speed of complex task performance; (c) the presence of others impairs complex performance accuracy and slightly facilitates simple performance accuracy, though the facilitation is vulnerable to the "file drawer problem" of unreported null results; and (d) social facilitation effects are surprisingly unrelated to the performer's evaluation apprehension. These metaanalytic conclusions are contrasted with conclusions reached by narrative literature reviews. Implications for theories of social facilitation are discussed.

The authors report a meta-analysis of individual differences in detecting deception, confining attention to occasions when people judge strangers' veracity in real-time with no special aids. The authors have developed a statistical technique to correct nominal individual differences for differences introduced by random measurement error. Although researchers have suggested that people differ in the ability to detect lies, psychometric analyses of 247 samples reveal that these ability differences are minute. In terms of the percentage of lies detected, measurement-corrected standard deviations in judge ability are less than 1%. In accuracy, judges range no more widely than would be expected by chance, and the best judges are no more accurate than a stochastic mechanism would produce. When judging deception, people differ less in ability than in the inclination to regard others' statements as truthful. People also differ from one another as lie- and truth-tellers. They vary in the detectability of their lies. Moreover, some people are more credible than others whether lying or truth-telling. Results reveal that the outcome of a deception judgment depends more on the liar's credibility than any other individual difference.

A meta-analysis was conducted on research investigating the effects of alcohol consumption and expectancy within the balanced-placebo design. Preliminary results indicated that both alcohol and expectancy have significant, although heterogeneous effects on behavior. Subsequent analyses were conducted to determine the factors responsible for the heterogeneity of effects. At the highest level of analysis, alcohol expectancy had strong effects on relatively deviant social behaviors and minimal effects on nonsocial behaviors. Alcohol consumption showed the opposite pattern of effects. The principal effects associated with alcohol expectancy involved increased alcohol consumption and increased sexual arousal in response to erotic stimuli. On the other hand, alcohol consumption led to significant impairment of information processing and motor performance, induced a specific set of physical sensations, resulted in general improvements of mood, and tended to increase aggression. Finally, across all studies it was observed that alcohol consumption and expectancy interacted no more frequently than would be expected by chance. These results have implications for both the theories and methods of contemporary alcohol research.According to popular lore the consumption of alcohol has certain behavioral effects. Most generally, alcohol is seen as causing a deterioration of behavior. When intoxicated, people are supposed to become uninhibited, act aggressively and abusively, lose motor control, and show impaired memory. Recently, research has attempted to determine whether alcohol has such effects and, if so, why? Alcohol Consumption Versus Alcohol Expectancy Pharmacological models of alcohol effects.Most early research assumed that alcohol has behavioral effects because of its pharmacological impact on perceptual, cognitive, and/or motivational states (see Conger, 1956; Hull, 1981; Pernanen, 1976).As a drug, alcohol was assumed to reduce anxiety or interfere with the processing of certain forms of information. By making individuals less anxious about or aware of the consequences of their actions, alcohol was theorized to disinhibit behavior. In order to test such hypotheses, early research used experimental designs in which subjects consumed either an alcoholic or a placebo beverage and then were observed with respect to some behavior (e.g., aggression). Differences between conditions were attributed to the pharmacological effects of the drug. Cognitive expectancy models of alcohol effects.Recent research has explored a different hypothesis. Specifically, the belief that one has consumed alcohol, irrespective of drink content, may be sufficient to lead to "disinhibited" behavior. This prediction can be derived from several theoretical perspectives (see Marlatt & Rohsenow, 1980). According to a conditioning analysis.We are grateful lo the alcohol researchers who provided previously unreported results.

Despite the importance of judgments of veracity in many settings, research suggests that it is difficult to detect lies. In this meta-analysis, we assess the detectability of lies from constellations of multiple cues, with a particular focus on whether lie detectability increases as the conditions approach real-life, forensic settings, as some critics of laboratory research have argued. We synthesized 144 samples, including 9380 liars and truth tellers providing a total of 26,866 messages. We examined the accuracy with which deception could be predicted on the basis of multiple behavioral cues and to what extent lie detectability was moderated by the motivation of the sender, the presence of strong emotion, the content of the lie, the context in which the lie was told, and the demographics of the senders. The findings show that lies can be detected with nearly 70% accuracy. This level of detectability is stable across settings.

This article offers a self-presentational account of performance in others' presence. The account attributes social facilitation to the performer's active regulation of a public image, and it attributes social impairment to embarrassment following loss of public esteem. Individuals lose esteem by making numerous errors on difficult tasks. This self-presentational analysis is tested in a study of context effects in verbal learning. Two tasks are studied: a difficult task that includes a few simple items and an easy task that includes a few complex items. Consistent with the self-presentational analysis (but not with drive theories of social facilitation), the presence of an observer impairs the learning of simple items if those items are embedded within a difficult task. Also, an observer's presence does not impair the learning of complex items if those items are embedded within an easy task. Questionnaire responses suggest a naturally occurring confound between task difficulty and perceived failure.