Past research has shown that people are only slightly better than chance at distinguishing truths from lies. Higher accuracy rates, however, are possible when contextual knowledge is used to judge the veracity of situated message content. The utility of content in context was shown in a series of experiments with students (N = 26, 45, 51, 25, 127) and experts (N = 66). Across studies, average accuracy was 75% in the content in context groups compared with 57% in the controls. These results demonstrate the importance of situating judges within a meaningful context and have important implications for deception theory.

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In potentially deceptive situations, people rely on mental shortcuts to help process information. These heuristic judgments are often biased and result in inaccurate assessments of sender veracity. Four such biases-truth bias, visual bias, demeanor bias, and expectancy violation bias-were examined in a judgment experiment that varied nonverbal cue availability and deception. Observers saw a complete videotaped interview (full access to visual, vocal, and verbal cues), heard the complete interview (vocal and verbal access), or read a transcript (verbal access) of a truthful or deceptive suspect being questioned about a mock theft and then rated the interviewee on information, behavior, and image management and truthfulness. Results supported the presence of all four biases, which were most evident when interviewees were deceptive and observers had access to all visual, vocal, and verbal modalities. Deceivers' messages were judged as increasingly complete, honest, clear, and relevant; their behavior as more involved and dominant; and their overall demeanor as more credible, with the addition of nonverbal cues. Deceivers were actually judged as more credible than truthtellers in the audiovisual modality, whereas best discrimination and detection accuracy occurred in the audio condition. Results have implications for what factors influence judgments of a sender's credibility and accuracy in distinguishing truth from deception, especially under conditions where senders are producing messages interactively. Cognitive biases, nonverbal cue availability, and deception detectionOne of the most well-documented claims in the deception literature is that humans are poor detectors of deception. A recent meta-analysis reveals that although people show a statistically reliable ability to discriminate truths from lies, overall accuracy rates average 54% or only a little above chance (Bond & DePaulo, 2006). A primary causal mechanism cited for biased judgments of deception and credibility is reliance on heuristic social information processing-a nonanalytic orientation to

Absent a perceived motive for deception, people will infer that a message source is honest. As a consequence, confessions should be believed more often than denials, true confessions will be correctly judged as honest, and false confessions will be misjudged. In the first experiment, participants judged true and false confessions and denials. As predicted, confessions were judged as honest more frequently than denials. Subsequent experiments replicated these results with an independent groups design and with a sample of professional investigators. Together, these three experiments document an important exception to the 50%+ accuracy conclusion, provide evidence consistent with a projected motive explanation of deception detection, and highlight the importance of the content-in-context in judgmental processes.

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