When and how are lies told? And the role of culture and intentions in intelligence‐gathering interviews

Abstract

Purpose. Lie-tellers tend to tell embedded lies within interviews. In the context of intelligence-gathering interviews, human sources may disclose information about multiple events, some of which may be false. In two studies, we examined when lie-tellers from low-and high-context cultures start reporting false events in interviews and to what extent they provide a similar amount of detail for the false and truthful events. Study 1 focused on lie-tellers' intentions, and Study 2 focused on their actual responses.Methods. Participants were asked to think of one false event and three truthful events. Study 1 (N = 100) was an online study in which participants responded to a questionnaire about where they would position the false event when interviewed and they rated the amount of detail they would provide for the events. Study 2 (N = 126) was an experimental study that involved interviewing participants about the events.Results. Although there was no clear preference for lie position, participants seemed to report the false event at the end rather than at the beginning of the interview. Also, participants provided a similar amount of detail across events. Results on intentions (Study 1) partially overlapped with results on actual responses (Study 2). No differences emerged between low-and high-context cultures.Conclusions. This research is a first step towards understanding verbal cues that assist investigative practitioners in saving their cognitive and time resources when detecting deception regardless of interviewees' cultural background. More research on similar cues is encouraged.Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, codenamed 'Curveball', is an Iraqi defector who gave intelligence about clandestine biological weapons in Iraq to German and American Intelligence Services, after which a war was waged on Iraq (Chulov & Pidd, 2011). It was later discovered that Curveball gave fabricated intelligence. He claimed that he was hoping that, based on his fabrications, the West would end the dictatorship regime of Saddam Hussein (Chulov & Pidd, 2011).This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

The Location of Maximum Emotion in Deceptive and Truthful Texts

“…In another paper, Deeb and colleagues (2020) evaluated the location of lies and truths in interviews across those from high-and low-context cultures. The results generally suggested that people told lies toward the end of an interview, presumably to prepare for their deception and gauge the responsiveness of the interviewer (Deeb et al, 2020). Those who lied at the beginning of an interview suggested that this strategy might have been unexpected by the interviewer or to simply "be done with the lie" (Deeb et al, 2020, p. 13).…”