Research published in the Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis suggests it is difficult to detect when someone is lying about their job.

The study of 31 participants found a verbal veracity assessment tool called the Verifiability Approach failed to differentiate between deceptive and truthful statements regarding a person’s occupation. The VA assumes that liars provide fewer verifiable details than truth tellers.

PsyPost interviewed the study’s corresponding author, Louise Jupe of the University of Portsmouth. Read her responses below:

PsyPost: Why were you interested in this topic?

Jupe: Lying about identity is the main theme of my doctoral research programme. Identity deception (or false identity) was a significant contributor to the 9/11 terrorist attacks yet within the deception domain, the study of identity deception is underrepresented. Before looking at identity deception as a singular theme we drew upon a facet of identity deception; lying about occupation. The aim was to see if we could use an existing approach, The Verifiability Approach, to distinguish between individuals who lie or tell the truth about their identity.

What should the average person take away from your study?

That identity deception detection is not straight-forward and when an individual is able to lie about a large facet of one’s identity, they are able to draw on a fairly large narrative to present to an interviewer. This may, in essence, make the detection of cues more difficult than if, for example, we were to ask individuals about a set period of time in which we know they may be telling the truth about pre-event periods but lying about the event (e.g., empirical police-suspect deception interviews). Although the VA was not a successful for tool for deception detection in this particular study, this is not to say that without further exploration the approach can not be tailored to be suited to lies of this kind.

Are there any major caveats? What questions still need to be addressed?

In this particular study, the data set was not obtained with the primary aim of applying the VA to the interview responses. That means that we did not use what we refer to an ‘Information protocol’; that is when we advise the interviewee of what it is that we are looking for when we analyse their responses. Informing interviewees that the interviewer will be looking for verifiable details may allow differentiations between identity liars and truth tellers to be made, as per other VA studies which have used an information protocol (e.g., Nahari, Vrij & Fisher, 2014; Harvey, Vrij, Nahari & Ludwig, 2016). In addition, further exploration of the strategies that individuals who lie about facets of their identity should be addressed.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

Lying about identity is particularly underrepresented within lie detection, which is surprising given the seriousness of events which can happen when an individual lies about who they are, including terrorism, legal and medical situations. It hope that by further exploring the topic we may be able to better inform policy on how we can use verbal veracity tools to assist in the detection of identity deceivers.

The study, “The Lies we Live: Using the Verifiability Approach to Detect Lying about Occupation“, was also co-authored by Aldert Vrij, Sharon Leal, Samantha Mann, and Galit Nahari.