Part 1: Discussion of who can catch a liar and some research on signs of lying.

Part 2: New technologies and deception detection, particularly recent advances in the debate over fMRI but also some news about ERP-related deception detection.

Part 3: It’s magic! Reporting on the little flurry of interest in understanding how magicians deceive us, with some lessons for how practiced liars might achieve the same effect.

Part 4: When people lie in specific situations, from 911 calls to deception by the police.

Part 5: Polygraphy, and some recent research on the psychophisiology of lying.

Part 6: Kids’ lies, online lies and my deception book of the year.

Blogging is likely to continue to be sporadic on both this and the other crimepsych blogs over the next few months as I try and finish the doctorate, but if all goes to plan I hope to be back to better blogging by the summer of this year.

Wishing you all the best for a happy, safe and successful year in 2009!

Can I, in particular, recommend you take a look at the latest issue of Criminal Justice and Behavior? It’s a special on “Pseudoscientific Policing Practices and Beliefs” pulled together by guest editor Brent Snook. Scott Lilienfeld and Kristin Landfield’s overview of science and pseudoscience is just ok (I don’t think it’s as good as it could be), but there are useful reviews (among others) of hypnosis in a legal setting (Graham Wagstaff), of detecting deception (Aldert Vrij), and of false confessions (Saul Kassin). These reviews will prove invaluable if you’re new to these areas of research or need a refresher.

Also in this issue, Snook and colleagues examine why criminal profiling is so seductive, when much of what passes for profiling is simply – according to the authors – “smoke and mirrors”. They conclude:

There is a growing belief that profilers can accurately and consistently predict a criminal’s characteristics based on crime scene evidence… We contend that this belief is illusory because a critical analysis of research on CP [criminal profiling] showed that the field lacks theoretical grounding and empirical support.

And there’s an extraordinary and provocative critique of the FBI’s programme to introduce Critical Incident Stress Debriefing for its agents, co-authored by a former agent who was involved in the programme. The authors bemoan the fact that although the business of “law enforcement is inextricably tied to facts, objectivity, organization, and high standards of proof” (p.1342), the FBI did not (according to the authors) apply the same standards when evaluating a stress debriefing programme for its agents. The evidence for the effectiveness of CISD is scant, argue the authors (and there is some evidence that CISD may even be harmful to people exposed to severe trauma). So, the authors explain: “We are thus compelled to consider how an idea so poorly grounded and so seriously discredited came to hold so tenacious a footing in the employee assistance practices of what is arguably the world’s most sophisticated law enforcement agency” (p.1342). Newbold, Lohr and Gist’s concluding comments could serve as an epitaph for the entire issue:

Pseudoscience finds its foothold where the blurring of boundaries allows the imperatives of evidentiary warrant shared by both domains to become compromised. It takes many years of training and experience to become competent as either a law enforcement agent or a psychologist, and either role requires strong focus and strict boundaries to be executed effectively. Police officers who want to play shrink and psychologists who want to play cop run a serious risk of blurring those boundaries.

Here are the contents in full:

• Brent Snook – Introduction to the Special Issue: Pseudoscientific Policing Practices and Beliefs
• Scott O. Lilienfeld and Kristin Landfield – Science and Pseudoscience in Law Enforcement: A User-Friendly Primer
• Michael G. Aamodt – Reducing Misconceptions and False Beliefs in Police and Criminal Psychology
• John Turtle and Stephen C. Want – Logic and Research Versus Intuition and Past Practice as Guides to Gathering and Evaluating Eyewitness Evidence
• Brent Snook, Richard M. Cullen, Craig Bennell, Paul J. Taylor, and Paul Gendreau – The Criminal Profiling Illusion: What’s Behind the Smoke and Mirrors?
• Graham F. Wagstaff – Hypnosis and the Law: Examining the Stereotypes
• William G. Iacono – Effective Policing: Understanding How Polygraph Tests Work and Are Used
• Saul M. Kassin – Confession Evidence: Commonsense Myths and Misconceptions
• Aldert Vrij – Nonverbal Dominance Versus Verbal Accuracy in Lie Detection: A Plea to Change Police Practice
• Katherine M. Newbold, Jeffrey M. Lohr, and Richard Gist – Apprehended Without Warrant: Issues of Evidentiary Warrant for Critical Incident Services and Related Trauma Interventions in a Federal Law Enforcement Agency
• David C. Flagel and Paul Gendreau – Commentary: Sense, Common Sense, and Nonsense

The latest issue of Psychology, Crime & Law (Volume 14 Issue 3) is one of those issues where almost all the articles look tempting. Given my particular interest in deception I’ll be starting with Granhag and Hartwig’s intriguing offering on mind-reading and deception detection, but the articles on how TV affects legal decision making and linking crimes in serial homicide will be next on the list.

Here’s the line-up:

• What judges know about eyewitness testimony: A comparison of Norwegian and US judges (Svein Magnussen; Richard A. Wise; Abid Q. Raja; Martin A. Safer; Nell Pawlenko; Ulf Stridbeck)
• A new theoretical perspective on deception detection: On the psychology of instrumental mind-reading (Pär Anders Granhag; Maria Hartwig)
• Perceptions of children during a police interrogation: Guilt, confessions, and interview fairness (Allison D. Redlich; Jodi A. Quas; Simona Ghetti)
• ‘Objection, Your Honor! Television is not the relevant authority.’ Crime drama portrayals of eyewitness issues (Sarah L. Desmarais; Heather L. Price; J. Don Read)
• Behavioural crime linking in serial homicide (Pekka Santtila; Tom Pakkanen; Angelo Zappalà; Dario Bosco; Maria Valkama; Andreas Mokros)
• What do prisoners want? Current concerns of adult male prisoners (Mary McMurran; Eleni Theodosi; Anna Sweeney; Joselyn Sellen)

This conference is mainly addressed to:
• investigators and civilian and police personnel from Québec, Canadian, and international police forces;
• investigators from Quebec, Canadian, and international governmental organizations;
• academics and researchers from fields closely related to investigations;
• and Crown Attorneys.

The chair of the Scientific committee, Michel St Yves writes:

The statements of witnesses, victims and suspects, represent a considerable part of the work conducted by investigators. Testimonials and facts must be brought together in order to solve the puzzle. Testimonials bring meaning to the facts and make them live. It is through testimonials that we establish the truth.

It is with tremendous pride that I invite you to participate in the third great assembly. The search for the truth through witness, victim, and suspect accounts, is at the very essence of the pursuit for justice.

More details, including a programme, details of speakers and a registration form on the conference website. (Note: the site doesn’t work properly with Opera but it’s fine with Firefox and IE.)

The press release gives a summary of the findings:

An academic at the University of Sheffield has used groundbreaking technology to investigate the potential innocence of a woman convicted of poisoning a child in her care. Professor Sean Spence, who has pioneered the use of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to detect lies, carried out groundbreaking experiments on the woman who, despite protesting her innocence, was sentenced to four years in prison. ….Using the technology, Professor Spence examined the woman´s brain activity as she alternately confirmed her account of events and that of her accusers. The tests demonstrated that when she agreed with her accusers´ account of events she activated extensive regions of her frontal lobes and also took significantly longer to respond – these findings have previously been found to be consistent with false or untrue statements.

In the acknowledgements section of the paper the authors reveal that the study “was funded by Quickfire Media in association with Channel Four Television”. The case Spence et al. describe as that of “Woman X” was featured in Channel 4’s Lie Lab series (and if you’re really interested, you can easily identify X in a couple of clicks). Although unusual, this isn’t the first time that research featured on TV has found its way into academic journals: see, for example, Haslam and Reicher’s academic publications based on their controversial televised replication of Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment .

In theory, I am not sure it necessarily matters if a study is done for TV, if it is carried out in an ethical and scientific way, and the subsequent article(s) meet rigorous standards of peer review. Nor does it always matter if the academic research then receives wider publicity as a result. In this case, however, I hope that anyone picking up and reporting further on this story reads the actual paper, in which Spence and his co-authors consider carefully the implications of the study and the caveats that should be applied to the results:

To our knowledge, this is the first case described where fMRI or any other form of functional neuroimaging has been used to study truths and lies derived from a genuine ‘real-life’ scenario, where the events described pertain to a serious forensic case. All the more reason then for us to remain especially cautious while interpreting our findings and to ensure that we make explicit their limitations: the weaknesses of our approach (p.4).

The authors go on to discuss alternative interpretations of their results: Perhaps X had told her story so many times that her responses were automatic? Perhaps the emotive nature of the subject under discussion (poisoning a child) gave rise to the observed pattern of activation? Maybe X used countermeasures (such as moving her head or using cognitive distractions)? Perhaps she “has ‘convinced herself’ of her innocence … she answered sincerely though ‘incorrectly’”? In this case, perhaps the researchers have “merely imaged ‘self-deception’” (p.5)? For each argument, the authors discuss the pros and cons, remaining careful not to claim too much for their results, and pointing out that further empirical enquiry is needed.

These cautions are also echoed in Spence’s comments at the end of the press release:

“This research provides a fresh opportunity for the British legal system as it has the potential to reduce the number of miscarriages of justice. However, it is important to note that, at the moment, this research doesn´t prove that this woman is innocent. Instead, what it clearly demonstrates is that her brain responds as if she were innocent.”

Reference:

• Sean A. Spence, Catherine J. Kaylor-Hughes, Martin L. Brook, Sudheer T. Lankappa and Iain D. Wilkinson (in press). ‘Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy’ or a ‘miscarriage of justice’? An initial application of functional neuroimaging to the question of guilt versus innocence. European Psychiatry.

See also :

• Mind Hacks discusses an article in which Raymond Tallis “laments the rise of ‘neurolaw’ where brain scan evidence is used in court in an attempt to show that the accused was not responsible for their actions”.
• Deception Blog posts on brain scanning and deception

Abstract below the fold.

Photo credit: killermonkeys, Creative Commons License

Abstract:

‘Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy’ characteristically describes women alleged to have fabricated or induced illnesses in children under their care, purportedly to attract attention. Where conclusive evidence exists the condition’s aetiology remains speculative, where such evidence is lacking diagnosis hinges upon denial of wrong-doing (conduct also compatible with innocence). How might investigators obtain objective evidence of guilt or innocence? Here, we examine the case of a woman convicted of poisoning a child. She served a prison sentence but continues to profess her innocence. Using a modified fMRI protocol (previously published in 2001) we scanned the subject while she affirmed her account of events and that of her accusers. We hypothesized that she would exhibit longer response times in association with greater activation of ventrolateral prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortices when endorsing those statements she believed to be false (i.e., when she ‘lied’). The subject was scanned 4 times at 3 Tesla. Results revealed significantly longer response times and relatively greater activation of ventrolateral prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortices when she endorsed her accusers’ version of events. Hence, while we have not ‘proven’ that this subject is innocent, we demonstrate that her behavioural and functional anatomical parameters behave as if she were. (c) 2007 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.

A feast of interesting material here that should keep you going, even on the longest commute, including:

• “Brain Imaging and the Mind: Pseudoscience or Science?” – William Uttal, Arizona State University
• “Overview of Brain Scanning Technologies” – John J.B. Allen, Department of Psychology, University of Arizona
• “Brain Scanning and Lie Detection” – Steven Laken, Founder and CEO, Cephos Corporation
• “Brain Scanning in the Courts: The Story So Far” – Gary Marchant, Center for the Study of Law, Science, & Technology Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law
• “Legal Admissibility of Neurological Lie Detection Evidence” – Archie A. Alexander, Health Law & Policy Institute, University of Houston Law Center
• “Demonstrating Brain Injuries with Brain Scanning” – Larry Cohen, The Cohen Law Firm
• “Harm and Punishment: An fMRI Experiment” – Owen D. Jones, Vanderbilt University School of Law & Department of Biological Sciences
• “Through a Glass Darkly: Transdisciplinary Brain Imaging Studies to Predict and Explain Abnormal Behavior” – James H. Fallon, Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, University of California, Irvine
• “Authenticity, Bluffing, and the Privacy of Human Thought: Ethical Issues in Brain Scanning” – Emily Murphy, Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics
• “Health, Disability, and Employment Law Implications of MRI” – Stacey Tovino, Hamline University School of Law

From a deception researcher’s point of view, the chance to hear from Steven Laken of commercial fMRI deception detection company Cephos will be particularly interesting.

Mind Hacks also notes that ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind on 23 June featured many of the speakers from this conference in a discussion of neuroscience, criminality and the courtroom. The webpage accompanying this programme has a great reference list. For those interested in deception research, I particularly recommend Wolpe, Foster & Langleben (2005) for an informative overview of the potential uses and dangers of neurotechnologies and deception detection.

Reference:

• Paul Root Wolpe, Kenneth R Foster, Daniel D Langleben (2005). Emerging Neurotechnologies for Lie-Detection: Promises and Perils. The American Journal of Bioethics 5(2): 39-49

• Schema-driven information processing in judgements about rape by Barbara Krahé, Jennifer Temkin, Steffen Bieneck
• When vying reveals lying: the timed antagonistic response alethiometer by Aiden P. Gregg
• When accurate and inaccurate eyewitnesses look the same: a limitation of the “pop-out” effect and the 10- to 12-second rule by David F. Ross, Tanja Rapus Benton, Stephanie McDonnell, Richard Metzger, Christopher Silver

The June 2007 issue of Law and Human Behavior 31(3) is now online. Follow the link to the publisher’s website for abstracts and access to full text articles.

Contents include:

• The Mitigating Effects of Suspicion on Post-Identification Feedback and on Retrospective Eyewitness Memory – Jeffrey S. Neuschatz, Deah S. Lawson, Andrew H. Fairless, Ráchael A. Powers, Joseph S. Neuschatz, Charles A. Goodsell, Michael P. Toglia
• An Evaluation of Malingering Screens with Competency to Stand Trial Patients: A Known-Groups Comparison – Michael J. Vitacco, Richard Rogers, Jason Gabel, Janice Munizza
• Race-Based Judgments, Race-Neutral Justifications: Experimental Examination of Peremptory Use and the Batson Challenge Procedure – Samuel R. Sommers, Michael I. Norton
• Competence to Complete Psychiatric Advance Directives: Effects of Facilitated Decision Making – Eric B. Elbogen, Jeffrey W. Swanson, Paul S. Appelbaum, Marvin S. Swartz, Joelle Ferron, Richard A. Van Dorn, H. Ryan Wagner
• The Comparison Question Test: Does It Work and If So How? – Heinz Offe, Susanne Offe
• Incarceration and Recidivism among Sexual Offenders – Kevin L. Nunes, Philip Firestone, Audrey F. Wexler, Tamara L. Jensen, John M. Bradford

The development of lying to conceal one’s own transgression was examined in school-age children. Children (N = 172) between 6 and 11 years of age were asked not to peek at the answer to a trivia question while left alone in a room. Half of the children could not resist temptation and peeked at the answer. When the experimenter asked them whether they had peeked, the majority of children lied. However, children’s subsequent verbal statements, made in response to follow-up questioning, were not always consistent with their initial denial and, hence, leaked critical information to reveal their deceit. Children’s ability to maintain consistency between their initial lie and subsequent verbal statements increased with age. This ability is also positively correlated with children’s 2nd-order belief scores, suggesting that theory of mind understanding plays an important role in children’s ability to lie consistently. (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved

Last month on the Deception Blog we reported that according to a study by Leif A. Strömwall, Pär Anders Granhag and Sara Landström, by the ages of 11-14, children are able to deceive adults 54% of the time, when given the chance to prepare their lies (and even when they can’t prepare the figure is 43% …).

More on children and lying over on the Deception Blog here.

Reference:

• Talwar, V., Gordon, H.M., Lee, K. (2007). Lying in the elementary school years: Verbal deception and its relation to second-order belief understanding. Developmental Psychology. 2007 May Vol 43(3) 804-810

Photo credit: michaelatacker, Creative Commons License.

Questionnaires are relied upon by forensic psychologists, clinicians, researchers, and social services to assess child molesters’ (CMs’) offense-supportive beliefs (or cognitive distortions). In this study, we used an experimental procedure to evaluate whether extrafamilial CMs underreported their questionnaire-assessed beliefs. At time one, 41 CMs were questionnaire-assessed under standard conditions (i.e., they were free to impression manage). At time two, CMs were questionnaire-assessed again; 18 were randomly attached to a convincing fake lie detector (a bogus pipeline), the others were free to impression manage. The results showed that bogus pipeline CMs significantly increased cognitive distortion endorsements compared to their own previous endorsements, and their control counterparts’ endorsements. The findings are the first experimental evidence showing that CMs consciously depress their scores on transparent questionnaires.

The article is interesting on many levels: let’s unpack it a little.

Forensic psychologists who try to understand paedophiles, or, as the authors here describe them, ‘child molesters’ (abbreviated to ‘CMs’), are interested in cognitive disortions (distorted thought patterns) because it has been suggested that distorted thinking allows CMs to justify their behaviour to themselves. The sort of distorted thinking we’re talking about involves endorsement of statements such as “if an adult has sex with a child who enjoys it and seems to want it, it should not be considered a crime” or “children are not as innocent as most people think” (taken from Gannon, 2006, p.364). One of the ‘treatments’ for CMs, cognitive behavioural therapy, involves helping CMs to identify cognitive distortions and to recognise them as distortions, in the hope that this will help them control their offending in future (Gannon, 2006).

Let’s assume that CMs do indeed hold cognitive disortions about child-adult relationships, and that making CMs accept that these are not normal or healthy beliefs is key to useful treatment (note that this assumption is fairly controversial, but we haven’t the space to go into that debate here). The first step in treatment is, therefore, eliciting a CM’s beliefs about sex with children, but this is not as easy as you might think. It can often be difficult to measure true cognitive distortions in CMs. Why? Well, when any of us are asked about our attitudes or thoughts about something embarrassing or socially undesirable we have a tendency to massage the truth a little to make ourselves look better. Gannon et al. (2007) hypothesised that CMs do the same when asked about their thoughts about children.

So how can you persuade someone to reveal socially undesirable attitudes or beliefs? Enter the bogus pipeline (BPL), devised in 1971 by Edward Jones and Harold Sigall (‘pipeline’ as in ‘pipeline to your innermost thoughts’; ‘bogus’ as in fake). These researchers were initially somewhat tentative about how the BPL procedure worked and concluded that “for whatever reason or reasons, subjects attached to the bogus device appear much more ready to express negative affect in experimental settings where one might normally expect the inhibition of such feelings” (p.349). However, in their meta-analytic review of BPL research, published in 1993, Neal Roese and David Jamieson concluded that, despite criticisms, “the BPL effect reflects the valid operation of the procedure to reduce socially desirable responding” (p. 372).

This seems to have been what happened with Gannon et al.’s study. Their results indicated that when CMs were attached to a fake lie detector, they responded with increased endorsements of cognitive disortion items (such as those I mentioned earlier) compared to when they were not subjected to the BPL procedure. Thus, Gannon et al. argue:

Our results suggest that CMs consciously minimize both the extent to which they hold offense-justifying beliefs and the extent to which they engage in socially disapproved of behaviors (p.18).

This has particular contemporary resonance because sex offenders are now being polygraphed as part of their treatment in the UK. However, as we’ve pointed out before in the Deception Blog, the effectiveness of polygraphy with sex offenders is probably more about ‘truth facilitation’ than ‘lie detection’. One possibility is that the polygraph acts as a kind of ‘bogus pipeline’, facilitating the disclosure of socially undesirable responses…

References:

• Theresa A. Gannon, Kirsten Keown and Devon L. L. Polaschek (2007). Increasing Honest Responding on Cognitive Distortions in Child Molesters: The Bogus Pipeline Revisited. Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment 19(1):5-22
• Gannon, T. A. (2006). Increasing Honest Responding on Cognitive Distortions in Child Molesters: The Bogus Pipeline Procedure. Journal of Interpersonal Violence 21(3): 358-375
• Jones, E.E. & Sigall, H. (1971). The bogus pipeline: A new paradigm for measuring affect and attitude. Psychological Bulletin. 76(5):349-36
• Roese, N. J. & Jamieson, D. W. (1993). Twenty years of bogus pipeline research: A critical review and meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin. 114(2):363-375.

Photo credit: Josh Bancroft, Creative Commons License

The first issue this year of the Journal of Personality Assessment 88(1) is a special issue on the Personality Assessment Inventory, with free access to full text articles. There are several papers here that will be of value to anyone who is interested in measurement of malingering and deceptiveness, and a few more that are of interest in a broader forensic context.

More details below the fold.

The articles on deception and malingering:

• Deceptiveness on the PAI: A Study of Naïve Faking With Psychiatric Inpatients – Matthew R. Baity, Caleb J. Siefert, Anthony Chambers, Mark A. Blais
• Detection of Malingering of Psychiatric Disorder With the Personality Assessment Inventory: An Investigation of Criminal Defendants – L. Thomas Kucharski, Joseph P. Toomey, Katarzna Fila, Scott Duncan
• Detection of Malingering in Psychiatric Unit and General Population Prison Inmates: A Comparison of the PAI, SIMS, and SIRS – John F. Edens, Norman G. Poythress, M. Monica Watkins-Clay
• Malingering on the Personality Assessment Inventory: Identification of Specific Feigned Disorders – Christopher J. Hopwood, Leslie C. Morey, Richard Rogers, Kenneth Sewell

Other articles with forensic relevance:

• Assessing Male Batterers With the Personality Assessment Inventory – Anthony L. Chambers, Melvin N. Wilson
• Validity of the Personality Assessment Inventory Aggression Scales and Violence Potential Index in Veterans With PTSD – Eric F. Crawford, Patrick S. Calhoun, Loretta E. Braxton, Jean C. Beckham
• Predicting Institutional Adjustment With the Lifestyle Criminality Screening Form and the Antisocial Features and Aggression Scales of the PAI – Glenn D. Walters
• Risk Factors for Institutional Misconduct Among Incarcerated Women: An Examination of the Criterion-Related Validity of the Personality Assessment Inventory – Nancy A. Skopp, John F. Edens, Mark A. Ruiz

Follow the link to the publisher’s website for abstracts and access to full text articles.

Contents include:

• Risk and need assessment in British probation: the contribution of LSI-R – Peter Raynor
• The influence of sample type, presentation format and strength of evidence on juror simulation research – Ma Eva Martín; Leticia De La Fuente; E. Inmaculada De La Fuente; Juan García
• The usefulness of measuring spatial opportunity structures for tracking down offenders: A theoretical analysis of geographic offender profiling using simulation studies – Wim Bernasco
• The roles of interrogation, perception, and individual differences in producing compliant false confessions – J. P. Blair
• Automation of a screening polygraph test increases accuracy – Charles R. Honts; Susan Amat
• Heuristics in causal reasoning and their influence on eyewitness testimony – Caroline A. C. Remijn; Hans F. M. Crombag
• Guilty and innocent suspects’ strategies during police interrogations – Maria Hartwig; Pär Anders Granhag; Leif A. Strömwall

Forty or more people, ranging from a boy aged 10 months to a 32-year-old mother of three, may have fallen victim to two of India’s most prolific serial killers as the authorities revealed their suspicion that murders may have been carried out to harvest body parts such as kidneys, livers and kneecaps.

[...] Yesterday, as police fought to control further riots by angry locals, the leader of India’s ruling coalition, Sonia Gandhi, made a surprise visit to the scene of the crime and harshly criticised the local police handling of the investigation. Responsibility for it has now been handed over to India’s top federal investigating agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation.

In the last week, six police officers have been suspended after it emerged that Pandher, the prime suspect in the case, was arrested 13 months ago following a series of complaints from local residents in the slum bordering his house who suspected his involvement in the disappearance of their children. But the suspect walked out of the police station the same night.

Two men have been arrested in the case, and CNN-IBN News (5 Jan) explains what lies in store:

The Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, is currently conducting a narco-analysis test on the two accused in the Nithari serial killings case – Moninder Singh Pandher and Surinder.

[...] An anesthetist, a forensic expert and two psychologists. All of them are being given a comprehensive briefing by the Noida Police as to the questions that need to be posed to the accused once the truth serum has been administered.

[...] Assistant Director, FSL, Gandhinagar, V H Patel, “We inject drugs into a person, which makes his conscious mind relax. It is under the influence of these drugs that a person begins to speak out the things that he would normally try to hide.”

The chemical injected during the test is sodium pentathol, which is popularly known as the truth serum, for obvious reasons. [...] The effect of the drug makes the person semi conscious, restricting their ability to manipulate answers or use their imagination.

In addition to the narco-analysis test, the Nithari accused will have to undergo a Brain Finger Printing Test and a Lie Detection or Polygraph Test.

[...] Says an FSL official, Namrata Khopkar, “Once the sensors are placed, and we show pictures to the accused and make them hear things. The way one’s brain reacts to these sounds can establish a lot of things.”

Both the use of sodium pentathol and “brain fingerprinting” techniques are highly controversial. Previous Deception Blog posts on ‘truth serums’ can be found here, and previous coverage of the use of brain scans by the Indian police can be found here and here.

Contents include:

• Group Differences in Fairness Perceptions and Decision Making in Voting Rights Cases – Angela P. Cole, Ewart A. C. Thomas
• Adults’ Judgments of Children’s Coached Reports – R. C. L. Lindsay, Victoria Talwar, Nicholas Bala, Kang Lee
• Assessing the Generalization of Psychopathy in a Clinical Sample of Domestic Violence Perpetrators – Jennifer Langhinrichsen-Rohling, Matthew T. Huss
• Decision-Making About Volitional Impairment in Sexually Violent Predators – Cynthia Calkins Mercado, Robert F. Schopp, Brian H. Bornstein
• Strategic Use of Evidence During Police Interviews: When Training to Detect Deception Works – Maria Hartwig, Ola Kronkvist, Pär Anders Granhag, Leif A. Strömwall
• Symptom Overreporting and Recovered Memories of Childhood Sexual Abuse – Harald Merckelbach, Elke Geraerts, Marko Jelicic

• Introduction to this issue: malingering – Alan R. Felthous
• Psychopathy and malingering of psychiatric disorder in criminal defendants – L. Thomas Kucharski, Scott Duncan, Shannon S. Egan, Diana M. Falkenbach
• Damages and rewards: assessment of malingered disorders in compensation cases – Richard Rogers, Joshua W. Payne
• Do tests of malingering concur? Concordance among malingering measures – Melanie R. Farkas, Barry Rosenfeld, Reuben Robbins, Wilfred van Gorp
• From flawed self-assessment to blatant whoppers: the utility of voluntary and involuntary behavior in detecting deception – Paul Ekman, Maureen O’Sullivan
• Investigating the M-FAST: psychometric properties and utility to detect diagnostic specific malingering – Laura S. Guy, Phylissa P. Kwartner, Holly A. Miller
• Adults’ ability to detect children’s lying – Angela M. Crossman, Michael Lewis

Police officers ability to detect deception in high stakes situations – 29th August. Report of a study from Aldert Vrij and his colleagues at Portsmouth University, published in the latest issue of Applied Cognitive Psychology

How to detect bullshit – 28th August. Light-hearted guidance from Scott Berkun.

Time Magazine wonders how to spot a liar – 26th August

Newsflash for Aussies! – 22nd August. A programme on deception, which you can now watch again on the TV station’s website.

Weeding Out Terrorists: Officials Turn To Behavior Profiling To Find Would-Be Attackers – 22nd August. CBS news item highlighting the work of psychology Prof Mark Frank who is working, along with his former supervisor Paul Ekman, with the US TSA to develop methods of behavioural profiling.

New-age lie detector takes a different tack – 22nd August. Some comments on an interview with Dr Britton Chance, University of Pennsylvania, in the latest issue of the RCMP Gazette.

Behavioural profiling at airports – 19th August. The New York Times reports on behavioural profiling at airports.

Pages on deception on WikiHow – 18th August. Sadly unscientific pop advice on deception.

Which Travelers Have ‘Hostile Intent’? Biometric Device May Have the Answer – 14th August. A polygraph exam at check-in, madam?

Training law enforcement officers to detect deception – 13th August. A good overview of literature on deception detection training, and some sensible suggestions for improving training in this article from the latest issue of Police Quarterly.

Researchers say technology can show when and how a lie is created inside the brain – 11th August. The work of No Lie MRI, the commercial fMRI-for-deception-detection company. Scary.

Criteria-Based Content Analysis: An empirical test of its underlying processes – 1st August. The latest issue of Psychology, Crime and Law features an article by Aldert Vrij and Sam Mann from Portsmouth University (UK) on Criteria-Based Content Analysis.

Damn Interesting posts on the polygraph – 1st August.

PRISONS: The Observer (13 Aug), in Jail doesn’t work, say crime victims, highlights a new study from Smart Justice that suggests that:

The vast majority of crime victims do not believe that prison reduces levels of offending [...]. The surprising findings of the first survey of those whose lives have been affected by crime suggest the public is losing faith in the penal system.

BEHAVIOURAL PROFILING: The New York Times (16 August) provides more on behavioural profiling at airports :

[...] after the reported liquid bomb plot in Britain, agency officials say they want to have hundreds of behavior detection officers trained by the end of next year and deployed at most of the nation’s biggest airports. “The observation of human behavior is probably the hardest thing to defeat,” said Waverly Cousin, a former police officer and checkpoint screener who is now the supervisor of the behavior detection unit at Dulles. “You just don’t know what I am going to see.”

Even in its infancy, the program has elicited some protests. [...] concerns were raised this week by two of the foremost proponents of the techniques, a former Israeli security official and a behavioral psychologist who developed the system of observing involuntarily muscular reactions to gauge a person’s state of mind. They said in interviews that the agency’s approach puts too little emphasis on the follow-up interview and relies on a behavior-scoring system that is not necessarily applicable to airports.

DATING VIOLENCE: A Wake Forest University press release dated 10 August reports on a new study on dating violence by adolescents who have been watching wrestling on TV:

The frequency of adolescents viewing wrestling on TV was positively associated with date fighting and other violent behaviors, according to a study, published by researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in the August issue of Pediatrics. […] Adolescents who watch wrestling on TV are exposed to a high frequency of violence between men and women, alcohol use and hearing women referred to in derogatory terms such as “bitch,” according to the study. In addition, the scenarios played out in the TV dramas often present violence as a solution to a problem.

• Reference: Robert H. DuRant, Heather Champion, and Mark Wolfson (2006). The Relationship Between Watching Professional Wrestling on Television and Engaging in Date Fighting Among High School Students. Pediatrics 118(2), e265-e272
  

MENTAL HEALTH: Hat tip to Psych Central (10 Aug) for a link to a piece on the BBC website on severe mental illness and criminal behaviour

UK experts studied 13 years of data from Sweden, where population data on mental health and crime is kept. It was found 18% of murders and attempted murders were committed by people with a mental illness. [...] Dr Seena Fazel, the forensic psychiatrist who led the research, said: “The figure of one in 20 is probably lower than most people would imagine. [...] In many ways the most interesting aspect of our findings is that 19 out of 20 people committing violent crimes do so without having any severe mental health problems.”

CRIMINAL BEHAVIOUR: Maori slam ‘warrior’ gene study (ABC News, Australia, 9 August):

A New Zealand scientist says the country’s indigenous Maori people have a ‘warrior’ gene which makes them more prone to violent and criminal behaviour. Dr Rod Lea revealed his theory [...] at the 11th International Congress of Human Genetics in Brisbane, Australia, acknowledging that it is controversial to suggest an ethnic group is predisposed towards criminal behaviour. Maori leaders immediately panned his claims. Maori Party co-leader Tariana Turia told The Press newspaper that while she had heard of Maori having a genetic predisposition towards alcoholism, it was a big leap to include violent tendencies.

POLICING: The Philadephia Inquirer (13 August) published a review of sexual misconduct by police officers:

Hundreds of police officers across the country have turned from protectors to predators, using the power of their badge to extort sex, an Inquirer review shows. Many of those cases fit a chilling pattern: Once abusers cross the line, they attack again and again before they are caught. Often, departments miss warning signs about the behavior.

[…] Sex abuse by police has received little of the attention or urgency given police brutality or shootings. A handful of studies suggest the magnitude of the problem. In one of the earliest, Roger L. Goldman and Steven Puro of St. Louis University examined Florida cases from the 1970s and 1980s in which officers lost their law-enforcement certifications. […] A 2003 analysis found that sexual misconduct was the leading reason that officers lost their badges in Utah. […] Another study – called “Driving While Female” because so many cases begin with traffic stops – argues that the problem “parallels the national problem of racial profiling.” […] Criminologist Timothy Maher, who has surveyed chiefs and rank-and-file officers about sexual abuse, said the profession recognizes the issue but has not done much about it.

ROBBERY / JUVENILE CRIME: The Enquirer (Cinncinnati, 15 Aug), reports on a growing trend towards the involvement of teens in aggravated robbery and muses on the involvement of women in such crimes:

Last week, the FBI sent a memo to state bank robbery coordinators saying the agency is seeing an emerging trend in the number of juvenile bank robbery suspects. The trend is consistent with overall crime, the memo said. […] “We’re seeing women really taking a more aggressive role in bank robberies than in years past,” [FBI bank robbery coordinator] Trombitas said. “Women are more involved in violent crimes and bank robbery goes hand in hand with that.”

Commercialisation of MRI for deception detection – 2nd July 2006
Coverage and commentary about two companies that are about to start offering commercial deception MRI tests

Testing the Behavior Analysis Interview – 2nd July 2006
A new article by Aldert Vrij and colleagues puts the Reid Technique’s BAI to the test.

FOI request from the ACLU aims to expose whether US Government agencies are using brain scanning technology to detect deception – 1st July 2006

Using polygraph tests during the security clearance process – 25th June 2006

Nature focuses on ethics of brain scanning to detect deception – 22nd June 2006
Two new articles putting MRI under the spotlight.

FBI to give police lie-detector tests – 19th June 2006
… and some police aren’t too happy about it.

Tremors of the Trade – Investigative tool or troublesome black magic? – 17th June 2006
Another valiant attempt to persuade law enforcement not to buy into the Voice Stress Analysis snake oil, from Warren J Sonne on Officer.Com.

Article on pathological lying – 16th June 2006
New article in The Journal of Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology

Lies, Damned Lies and Résumés – 2nd June 2006
Comments on deception in résumés (or Curricula Vitae to us Brits).

27 May: A comment on a recently published study on “Detecting Lies in Children and Adults” by Gail S. Goodman and her colleagues exploring whether observers could detect children’s lies, with results suggesting that we might be biased towards believing adults and disbelieving children.

27 May: I highlight a new study published by Siefgried Sporer and Barbara Schwandt — “Paraverbal indicators of deception: a meta-analytic synthesis” — that also serves as a pretty good critique of previous deception studies.

29 May: I try and explain the different types of ‘brain scanning’ that researchers and criminal justice professionals suggest might be useful new technologies in deception detection (“Call me picky, but Brain Fingerprinting and fMRI are not the same thing…”)

For full posts, just follow the links!

Eyewitnesses: Malcolm Gladwell (26 Apr) uses a recent case (an allegation of rape against members of the Duke University Lacrosse team) to make some points about the fallibility of eyewitnesses, particularly in cross-racial identifications:

[...]the Duke case is an example of another, even more problematic aspect of eyewitness identifications, and that is that we aren’t particular good at making them across races. There is a huge amount of psychological research in their area, pioneered by Roy Malpass at the University of Texas at El Paso. A few years ago, John Brigham and Christian Meissner did a big meta-analysis of all of the cross-racial identification studies and concluded that given the task of picking someone out of a lineup, the average person is something like 1.4 times more likely to correctly identify an own-race face than a different-race face, and 1.6 times more likely to incorrectly identify a different race face. These are not trivial error rates. Clearly we need to treat cross-racial identifications with a special level of caution.

Rehabilitation of prisoners: Offenders’ anger control classes help make some more dangerous, according to The Guardian (24 Apr).

[...] Home Office instructions sent to the probation service say that anger management courses are counterproductive and actually help violent offenders who make premeditated attacks to manipulate the situation to their advantage.[...] A Home Office spokesman said that anger management courses were effective at teaching self-management techniques. However, some offenders did not engage in violent behaviour because of anger. “They use violence as a means to achieve a specific goal, for example to intimidate a victim during the course of a robbery, or the imposition of will on a partner in … domestic violence. There are other interventions and therapies that address the root causes of this instrumental violence (such as lack of empathy) which might be more beneficial to these individuals when delivered as part of a risk management package.”

Prostitution: Men who knowingly have sex with trafficked prostitutes will be prosecuted for rape as part of a police crackdown, reports the Guardian (25 Apr).

South Yorkshire deputy chief constable Grahame Maxwell, Pentameter’s programme director, said: “Trafficked women are being forced to work through fear and intimidation. Men who act as their clients risk being charged with rape.”

Criminal aetiology: Also in the Guardian (25 Apr), a report on a new study on criminal careers, suggesting that criminal mentors are crucial. The study’s authors, Carlo Morselli and Pierre Tremblay, of the Université de Montréal, and Bill McCarthy, of the University of California at Davis, examined the lives of 268 prison inmates in Quebec.

They offer up a nugget from Indiana University criminologist Edwin H Sutherland’s 1937 book The Professional Thief, By a Professional Thief. “Any man who hits the big-time in crime, somewhere or other along the road, became associated with a big-timer who picked him up and educated him,” the thief told Sutherland, adding that: “No one ever crashed the big rackets without education in this line.”

• Reference: Morselli, C., Tremblay, P. and McCarthy, B. (2006). Mentors and Criminal Achievement. Criminology 44(1). Follow the link for access to the free PDF download.

Deception: Yet more depressing news about the use of voice stress analysers, this time reported in the Stamford Advocate,(26 Apr).

Norwalk police used a lie detector that many scientists say is inaccurate to draw confessions from at least two men in the 2004 murder of a cab driver.[...] Norwalk’s police department is one of about 1,400 police departments and government agencies in the country that own the controversial voice stress analyzer, according to the Web site for the National Institute for Truth Verification, manufacturer of the machine.

Juries: Potential Jurors May Lie to Gain Seats on Important Cases, according to the American Bar Association eReport (14 Apr).

Are “stealth jurors” infiltrating jury pools, lying on questionnaires and during voir dire to land seats on high-profile cases for bragging rights? [...] Several other jury experts agree that jurors sometimes lie or omit key information, but they say most do so for other, more innocent reasons. The jurors are embarrassed and don’t want to speak up about sensitive issues in a room full of strangers. But Anthony says his research shows that between 15 percent and 18 percent of potential jurors have a distinctly biased mindset, one that views jury service as a way to comment on or influence the outcomes of trials. This is a stark contrast from the traditional view of jury service as a civic responsibility, Anthony says.

The Courier-Journal (23 April) runs a story about what happens when jurors are allowed to ask questions during trials:

[...] critics, including some judges, say a slew of questions from the jury can cause difficulties. “Everybody becomes Perry Mason, and that becomes a problem because all you are doing is answering questions,” most of them irrelevant, said Circuit Judge Geoffrey Morris.

Juvenile sex offenders: The dangers of including juvenile sex offenders in online sex offender registries is highlighted by the Delaware News Journal (22 Apr)

Juveniles make up a third of the people charged with child sexual abuse in Delaware and nationwide. If convicted, their names, addresses, pictures, birthdays and sometimes schools can be included on the state’s sex-offender registry. [...]The easy, online availability of juveniles’ personal information worries their families and counselors, especially in light of the slayings of two adult sex offenders in Maine last weekend. Police say Stephen Marshall of Nova Scotia, Canada, looked up 34 sex offenders before shooting two of them with a .45-caliber handgun. Marshall killed himself after police cornered him on a bus in Boston.

Two on terrorism:

• Terrorism Between “Syndrome” and “Tool” – Arie W. Kruglanski and Shira Fishman in Current Directions in Psychological Science 15(1), February 2006
• Psychological Responses to Continuous Terror: A Study of Two Communities in Israel – Arieh Y. Shalev, Rivka Tuval, Sarah Frenkiel-Fishman, Hilit Hadar, and Spencer Eth inAmerican Journal of Psychiatry 163(4), April 2006

Two on media violence:

• Effects of Media Violence on Health-Related Outcomes Among Young Men – Sonya S. Brady and Karen A. Matthews in Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine 160(4), April 2006
• Short-term and Long-term Effects of Violent Media on Aggression in Children and Adults – Brad J. Bushman and L. Rowell Huesmann in Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine 160(4), April 2006

An interesting approach in deception detection:

• Detecting deception by manipulating cognitive load – Aldert Vrij, Ronald Fisher, Samantha Mann and Sharon Leal in Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10(4), April 2006

• Failure to Thrive as Distinct From Child Neglect – Maureen M. Black and 10 co-authors in Pediatrics 117(4), April 2006

And finally, how to deter repeated drink driving:

• An application of Stafford and Warr’s reconceptualisation of deterrence to a group of recidivist drink drivers – James Freeman and Barry Watson in Accident Analysis & Prevention 38(3), May 2006

• Tyler, J.M., Feldman, R.S. and Reichert, A. (2006). The price of deceptive behavior: Disliking and lying to people who lie to us. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 42(1), pp 69-77.
  

In the March issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Gerd Boher and colleagues examined the impact of rape myth acceptance-related norms on rape proclivity.

• Bohner, G., Siebler, F. and Schmelcher, J. (2006). Social Norms and the Likelihood of Raping: Perceived Rape Myth Acceptance of Others Affects Men’s Rape Proclivity. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 32(3), pp 286-297.

In the same issue, Peter Fischer and colleagues report data on the effects of increasing salience of terrorism on religious and non-religious people.

• Fischer, P., Greitemeyer, T., Kastenmuller, A., Jonas, E. and Frey, D. (2006). Increased Salience of Terrorism on Mood and Self-Efficacy of Intrinsically Religious and Nonreligious People. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 32(3), pp 365-377
  

Looking for the Lie
The New York Times, February 5th, 2006
An excellent, interesting and detailed article from the New York Times this weekend about the science and practice of lie detection. The author, Robin Marantz Henig, covers many areas, including fMRI, ERPs and ongoing research at the DoDPI, and interviews several of the key figures in these fields.

Webcast on “Criminal Memories” and deception
The Dana Centre at London’s Science Museum runs regular science events for the general public. Most of these are available as webcasts via the Dana site. On 13 January they had an event on the science and ethics of deception detection, entitled “Naked Science: Criminal memories”, and the webcast is now available to view online.

The future of lying: Polygraphing sex offenders in the UK and US$5 million for ERP research
BBC News Online 14 January, 2005
The BBC’s online News Magazine featured an article discussing the recent US grant to Jennifer Vendamia to further her research on ERPs and deception, linking it to the recent decision to polygraph sex offenders in UK prisons.

Who’s the liar? Brain MRI stands up to polygraph test
January 31st, 2006
Yet more fMRI coverage, this time a press release from the publishers of Radiology referring to the following study: Brain Mapping of Deception and Truth Telling about an Ecologically Valid Situation: Functional MR Imaging and Polygraph Investigation – Initial Experience
Feroze B. Mohamed, Scott H. Faro, Nathan J. Gordon, Steven M. Platek, Harris Ahmad, and J. Michael Williams
Radiology Volume 238, Issue 2, February 2006

New article on global beliefs about deception
An interesting paper on worldwide stereotypes of liars, published by the Global Deception Research Team, 90 international researchers recruited via e-mail by Charles F. Bond, Jr. A World of Lies appears in the January 2006 issue of Journal Of Cross-cultural Psychology, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 60-74.

More details on the Deception Blog.

[...] fMRI is poised to transform the security industry, the judicial system, and our fundamental notions of privacy. I’m in a lab at Columbia University, where scientists are using the technology to analyze the cognitive differences between truth and lies. By mapping the neural circuits behind deception, researchers are turning fMRI into a new kind of lie detector that’s more probing and accurate than the polygraph, the standard lie-detection tool employed by law enforcement and intelligence agencies for nearly a century.

Comment: a detailed article on developments in fMRI research on identifying brain activity associated with deception. Silberman has done a thorough job, but glosses over many of the theoretical and practical problems with application of this technique in law enforcement work, including the fact that it requires a highly co-operative subject (and one without any shrapnel in their body, given that the test involves lying in a giant magnet). There are also potential legal and ethical issues – see:

Cory Doctorow’s comment at Boing Boing

and

Thompson, Sean Kevin, “The Legality of the Use of Psychiatric Neuroimaging in Intelligence Interrogation” . Cornell Law Review, Vol. 90, No. 6, September 2005
Link (for access to full text pdf)

THE US Department of Defense has revealed plans to develop a lie detector that can be used without the subject knowing they are being assessed. The Remote Personnel Assessment (RPA) device will also be used to pinpoint fighters hiding in a combat zone, or even to spot signs of stress that might mark someone out as a terrorist or suicide bomber.

In a call for proposals on a DoD website, contractors are being given until 13 January to suggest ways to develop the RPA, which will use microwave or laser beams reflected off a subject’s skin to assess various physiological parameters without the need for wires or skin contacts. The device will train a beam on “moving and non-cooperative subjects”, the DoD proposal says, and use the reflected signal to calculate their pulse, respiration rate and changes in electrical conductance, known as the “galvanic skin response”. “Active combatants will in general have heart, respiratory and galvanic skin responses that are outside the norm,” the website says.

Call for proposals

Title: Remote Personnel Assessment
Close Date: 1/13/2006

Description: Recent research has supported the belief that active combatants will in general have heart, respiratory and galvanic skin responses that are outside the norm with respect to rate and rate variability. Therefore being able to perform real time physiological monitoring from a distance using a microwave/laser based system may provide for early detection and identification of terrorists, suicide bombers, and other personnel posing a threat. Such a device would also be useful for detection of subterfuge or deception during prisoner interrogation, and remote detection and targeting of life signs through obstructions and severe urban clutter. [...]

Moderator comment: A lot rides on the accuracy of the first sentence of the description. What research are they are referring to? I note that one of the two references provided at the end of the call is Storm, Hanne, �Development of emotional sweating in preterms measured by skin conductance changes�, Department of Paediatric Research and Section on Neonatology, Department of Paediatrics, the National Hospital, 0027 Oslo, Norway, 29 January 2001. Is the proposed research really predicated on findings of research carried out on premature infants and not (yet?) published in a peer reviewed journal?

Update!

I tracked this reference down to an article of the same name in Early Human Development 62(2), May 2001, pp 149-158.

The question remains: is the proposed DoD research really predicated on findings of research carried out on premature infants?

A new walk-through airport lie detector made in Israel may prove to be the toughest challenge yet for potential hijackers or drugs smugglers. Tested in Russia, the two-stage GK-1 voice analyser requires that passengers don headphones at a console and answer “yes” or “no” into a microphone to questions about whether they are planning something illicit.

Liars could be caught out by the reaction of their stomachs to telling untruths, suggests preliminary research from the University of Texas, US. The team believe that the early-stage technique could one day improve the accuracy of polygraph tests, which rely mostly on monitoring heart activity. [...] “This might very well be the case,” says Kevin Murphy, a psychologist at Penn State University, Pennsylvania, US, who recently headed a panel for the US National Academy of Sciences to analyse the science behind polygraph devices. “But polygraph detectors, whatever their ilk, measure stress and not lying. This new test might give more, potentially very useful, data. But it won�t give you the definitive truth.”

At least 20 Arizona law enforcement agencies are relying on a voice-measuring lie detector for criminal investigations even though experts say the device does not stand up to scientific scrutiny and may prompt innocent suspects to make false confessions. The Computer Voice Stress Analyzer, or CVSA, purportedly measures FM radio waves produced by muscles around the larynx. Deceptive answers cause stressful “micro-tremors” in the voice that are charted by the device’s software program, the manufacturer says. Yet, independent experts have consistently found the instrument to be dubious, at best, when it comes to separating truth from lies.

A scientist at the Medical University of South Carolina has found that magnetic resonance imaging machines also can serve as lie detectors. The study found MRI machines, which are used to take images of the brain, are more than 90 percent accurate at detecting deception, said Dr. Mark George, a distinguished professor of psychiatry, radiology and neurosciences. That compares with polygraphs that range from 80 percent to “no better than chance” at finding the truth, George said. His results are to be published this week in the journal Biological Psychiatry.

Citation:

Detecting Deception Using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging
F. Andrew Kozel, Kevin A. Johnson, Qiwen Mu, Emily L. Grenesko, Steven J. Laken and Mark S. George
Biological Psychiatry (in press)

The ability to accurately detect deception is presently very limited. Detecting deception might be more accurately achieved by measuring the brain correlates of lying in an individual. In addition, a method to investigate the neurocircuitry of deception might provide a unique opportunity to test the neurocircuitry of persons in whom deception is a prominent component (i.e., conduct disorder, antisocial personality disorder, etc.). In this study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to show that specific regions were reproducibly activated when subjects deceived. Subjects participated in a mock crime stealing either a ring or a watch. While undergoing an fMRI, the subjects denied taking either object, thus telling the truth with some responses, and lying with others. A Model-Building Group (MBG, n = 30) was used to develop the analysis methods, and the methods were subsequently applied to an independent Model-Testing Group (MTG, n = 31). We were able to correctly differentiate truthful from deceptive responses, correctly identifying the object stolen, for 93% of the subjects in the MBG and 90% of the subjects in the MTG. This is the first study to use fMRI to detect deception at the individual level. Further work is required to determine how well this technology will work in different settings and populations.