Deception is the act of convincing one or many recipients of untrue information. The person creating the deception knows it to be false while the receiver of the message has a tendency to believe it. It is often done for personal gain or advantage. Deception can involve dissimulation, propaganda and sleight of hand as well as distraction, camouflage or concealment. There is also self-deception. It can also be called, with varying subjective implications, beguilement, deceit, bluff, mystification, ruse, or subterfuge.
A lie is an assertion that is believed to be false, typically used with the purpose of deceiving or misleading someone. The practice of communicating lies is called lying. A person who communicates a lie may be termed a liar. Lies can be interpreted as deliberately false statements or misleading statements, though not all statements that are literally false are considered lies – metaphors, hyperboles, and other figurative rhetoric are not intended to mislead, while lies are explicitly meant for literal interpretation by their audience. Lies may also serve a variety of instrumental, interpersonal, or psychological functions for the individuals who use them.
Self-deception is a process of denying or rationalizing away the relevance, significance, or importance of opposing evidence and logical argument. Self-deception involves convincing oneself of a truth so that one does not reveal any self-knowledge of the deception.
A microexpression is a facial expression that only lasts for a short moment. It is the innate result of a voluntary and an involuntary emotional response occurring simultaneously and conflicting with one another, and occurs when the amygdala responds appropriately to the stimuli that the individual experiences and the individual wishes to conceal this specific emotion. This results in the individual very briefly displaying their true emotions followed by a false emotional reaction.
Impression management is a conscious or subconscious process in which people attempt to influence the perceptions of other people about a person, object or event by regulating and controlling information in social interaction. It was first conceptualized by Erving Goffman in 1959 in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, and then was expanded upon in 1967.
In social science generally and linguistics specifically, the cooperative principle describes how people achieve effective conversational communication in common social situations—that is, how listeners and speakers act cooperatively and mutually accept one another to be understood in a particular way.
On Bullshit is a 2005 book by the American philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt which presents a theory of bullshit that defines the concept and analyzes the applications of bullshit in the context of communication. Frankfurt determines that bullshit is speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care whether what they say is true or false. Frankfurt's philosophical analysis of bullshit has been analyzed, criticized and adopted by academics since its publication.
Pathological lying, also known as pseudologia fantastica, is a chronic behavior characterized by the habitual or compulsive tendency to lie. It involves a pervasive pattern of intentionally making false statements with the aim to deceive others, sometimes for no clear or apparent reason, and even if the truth would be beneficial to the liar. People who engage in pathological lying often claim to be unaware of the motivations for their lies.
Lie detection is an assessment of a verbal statement with the goal to reveal a possible intentional deceit. Lie detection may refer to a cognitive process of detecting deception by evaluating message content as well as non-verbal cues. It also may refer to questioning techniques used along with technology that record physiological functions to ascertain truth and falsehood in response. The latter is commonly used by law enforcement in the United States, but rarely in other countries because it is based on pseudoscience.
Interpersonal deception theory (IDT) is one of a number of theories that attempts to explain how individuals handle actual deception at the conscious or subconscious level while engaged in face-to-face communication. The theory was put forth by David Buller and Judee Burgoon in 1996 to explore this idea that deception is an engaging process between receiver and deceiver. IDT assumes that communication is not static; it is influenced by personal goals and the meaning of the interaction as it unfolds. IDT is no different from other forms of communication since all forms of communication are adaptive in nature. The sender's overt communications are affected by the overt and covert communications of the receiver, and vice versa. IDT explores the interrelation between the sender's communicative meaning and the receiver's thoughts and behavior in deceptive exchanges.
Information Manipulation Theory (IMT) & is a theory of deceptive discourse production, rooted in H. Paul Grice's theory of conversational implicature. IMT argues that, rather than communicators producing "truths" and "lies," the vast majority of everyday deceptive discourse involves complicated combinations of elements that fall somewhere in between these polar opposites; with the most common form of deception being the editing-out of contextually problematic information. More specifically, individuals have available to them four different ways of misleading others: playing with the amount of relevant information that is shared, including false information, presenting irrelevant information, and/or presenting information in an overly vague fashion. As long as such manipulations remain covert - that is, undetected by recipients - deception will succeed. Two of the most important practical implications of IMT are that deceivers commonly use messages that are composed entirely of truthful information to deceive; and that because this is the case, our ability to detect deception in real-world environments is extremely limited.
Statement analysis is a technique used to determine whether a suspect is telling the truth or being deceptive based on linguistic indicators. The basic principles of statement analysis are straightforward: a suspect always reveals much more than they realize. Language moves so quickly that no one has complete control over what they say and try to conceal.
The Wizards Project was a research project at the University of California, San Francisco led by Paul Ekman and Maureen O'Sullivan that studied the ability of people to detect lies. The experts identified in their study were called "Truth Wizards". O'Sullivan spent more than 20 years studying the science of lying and deceit. The project was originally named the Diogenes Project, after Diogenes of Sinope, the Greek philosopher who would look into people's faces using a lamp, claiming to be looking for an honest man.
Non-verbal leakage is a form of non-verbal behavior that occurs when a person verbalizes one thing, but their body language indicates another, common forms of which include facial movements and hand-to-face gestures. The term "non-verbal leakage" got its origin in literature in 1968, leading to many subsequent studies on the topic throughout the 1970s, with related studies continuing today.
Othello error occurs when a suspicious observer discounts cues of truthfulness. Essentially the Othello error occurs, Paul Ekman states, "when the lie catcher fails to consider that a truthful person who is under stress may appear to be lying," their non-verbal signals expressing their worry at the possibility of being disbelieved. A lie-detector or polygraph may be deceived in the same way by misinterpreting nervous signals from a truthful person. The error is named after William Shakespeare's tragic play Othello; the dynamics between the two main characters, Othello and Desdemona, are a particularly well-known example of the error in practice.
Mark G. Frank is a communication professor and department chair, and an internationally recognized expert on human nonverbal communication, emotion, and deception. He conducts research and does training on micro expressions of emotion and of the face. His research studies include other nonverbal indicators of deception throughout the rest of the body. He is the Director of the Communication Science Center research laboratory that is located on the North Campus of the University at Buffalo. Under his guidance, a team of graduate researchers conduct experiments and studies for private and government entities. Frank uses his expertise in communication and psychology to assist law enforcement agencies in monitoring both verbal and nonverbal communication.
Post-truth politics, also described as post-factual politics or post-reality politics, amidst varying academic and dictionary definitions of the term, refer to a recent historical period where political culture is marked by public anxiety about what claims can be publicly accepted facts.
Truth-default theory (TDT) is a communication theory which predicts and explains the use of veracity and deception detection in humans. It was developed upon the discovery of the veracity effect - whereby the proportion of truths versus lies presented in a judgement study on deception will drive accuracy rates. This theory gets its name from its central idea which is the truth-default state. This idea suggests that people presume others to be honest because they either don't think of deception as a possibility during communicating or because there is insufficient evidence that they are being deceived. Emotions, arousal, strategic self-presentation, and cognitive effort are nonverbal behaviors that one might find in deception detection. Ultimately this theory predicts that speakers and listeners will default to use the truth to achieve their communicative goals. However, if the truth presents a problem, then deception will surface as a viable option for goal attainment.
Jeffrey T. Hancock is a communication and psychology researcher and professor at the College of Communication Stanford University. Hancock is best known for his research in fields of deception, trust in technology, and the psychology of social media. Hancock has been published in over 80 journal articles and cited in National Public Radio (NPR) and CBS This Morning.
Motivation impairment effect (MIE) is a hypothesised behavioral effect relating to the communication of deception. The MIE posits that people who are highly motivated to deceive are less successful in their goal when their speech and mannerisms are observed by the intended audience. This is because their nonverbal cues, such as adaptor gestures, sweating, kinesic behaviors, verbal disfluencies, etc., tend to be more pronounced due to increased stress, cognitive load, and heightened emotional state. There is some disagreement regarding the MIE hypothesis, with a few nonverbal communication scholars arguing that deception should not be examined as separate for senders and receivers, but rather as an integral part of the overall process.
