Science of Deception: Integration of Practice and Theory

The following Scenarios and related questions were used as a platform for discussion at the Science of Deception Workshop.

Scenarios:

1. Embassy Walk-In Phenomena

Throughout the world, individuals regularly walk into an American Embassy and state that they have valuable information regarding threats to U.S. interests abroad or sensitive intelligence information. These “walk-ins” or “volunteers” will also phone in or send emails to U.S. embassies with offers of information.

Some walk-ins actually have valuable, sensitive information, some are mentally unstable, and some are “provocations,” hoping to pique the interest of the CIA to identify Agency employees and /or the methods used by the Agency to handle walk-ins. Others simply wish to provide false and misleading information to the Agency, and still others may have useful information but are trying to peddle the information to multiple governments in the hope of reaping financial gain.

Determining who has legitimate information of value and who is engaging in a deception is clearly a critical issue. Constraints include limited time to interview the walk-in, variability in interviewer skill (sometimes the interviewer is an Embassy Security Officer, other times it is an Agency ops officer), or lack of face-to-face observation in the case of individuals calling in or writing email.

• What history of successes and failures do we have, and what can we learn from our own history (avoiding hindsight bias, if possible)? How can we analyze these situations using the procedures of decision-making analysis that have been used in the practice of medicine?
  
  
• What use can we make of instances of deception among ourselves, such as the experiences of undercover agents, spies, selective sharing of information depending on classification rating; socially acceptable lies (e.g., about weight or age); lies to children from parents (Santa Claus)?
  
  
• How does the current behavior of the U.S. embassy personnel (or whomever the officers are) impact on how people offer information? How can we take into account the characteristic that deception frequently is a social interaction, and that the recipient’s behavior may determine the behavior of the deceiver in a real-time manner?
  
  
• How important are differential power and status between informer and officer?
  
  
• How does motive affect social negotiation?
  
  
• What are our cultural stories (folk psychology) regarding truth and lies, and how we value these in different situations?
  
  
• What are other cultural stories?

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2. Law Enforcement Threat Assessment

Law enforcement, especially the FBI and Secret Service, receive threats by phone, letters, and email. Responding in terms of false positives and false negatives has significant impact in terms of public safety and expending resources. How can these types of threats be validated?

• What is the impact of our felt need to act secretly? In haste? How would our behavior be different if those needs were not present?
  
  
• How does motive affect social negotiation?
  
  
• What are the working definitions of deception and deception detection? Should these include spinning, withholding, false memories, trickery, plausible denial statements, and dissociative memories and personalities? What are the relationship of these to error & lapses of memory, self-deception, Mass Psychogenic Illness, and malingering?
  
  
• Might someone who wants to evade detection systems be able to fake a temporary physical illness or mental illness in order to get past deception detection systems and then once inside (the embassy, the hospital, the office, whatever) have access to secure systems?
  
  
• How important are differential power and status between informer and officer? What role might social stigmatizing play?
  
  
• What similar situations do we have in other venues that can inform us about this (where else do we ask people to keep or divulge secrets? Separate themselves from home and family and country? Quickly size up another individual, etc.)
  
  

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3. Law Enforcement Interrogation and Debriefing

Law enforcement routinely question witnesses and suspects regarding criminal activity. How do you tell if the individual is telling the truth, lying, or something in between? Acts of omission and acts of commission are both important to identify.

• How do we find out if the informant has knowledge of which s/he is not aware?
  
  
• How important are differential power and status between witness and officer?
  
  
• What pharmacological agents are known to affect apparent truth-telling behavior?
  
  
• What are mechanisms and processes of learning to lie? Can these be demonstrated within relatively short periods of time (e.g., within a polygraph test session)?
  
  
• What are the ways lies are detected in legitimate pursuits, e.g., among those who are good gamblers? Amarillo Slim Preston says that he notes changes in patterns of behavior across short durations of time; what other social situations involve lie-detecting?
  
  
• What are sensory overloads on the maintenance of deceptive behaviors? How might we overload the system or overwhelm the senses and see how it affects deceptive behaviors?
  
  
• Lying takes more mental memory and processing effort than truth telling, because we have to remember what we said when and where, whereas truth is generally less context and time-dependent. Could we use changes in contexts in which questions are asked to look for consistency across situations as indications of deception?
  
  
• What are the effects of a “jerk” examiner in a polygraph situations?
  
  

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4. Intelligence gathering

Many government agencies, including but not limited to DOD, FBI, DOE, CIA, and the Department of Treasury, gather “intelligence” of one type of another. A high priority is how to evaluate the authenticity of both the source of information and the information itself. Issues that need to be addressed include whether the person is who s/he says s/he is, whether s/he has access to the information s/he purports to have, and whether the information accurate.

• What history of successes and failures do we have, and what can we learn from our own history (avoiding hindsight bias, if possible)?
  
  
• What are the dimensions of truth? Lies, truth, something in between? How much truth is present in our everyday social world, and how does this vary as a function of culture? How much is truth valued (as compared to other valued behaviors) and again, how does this vary as a function of culture?
  
  
• Can we reasonably map types of lies, or conceptions of lies, to specific behaviors and to the likelihood of their occurrence to specific situations (e.g., lies about bombs in suitcases to airport security)? Once we do this, can we create categories and relationships among categories, and then test the validity of such across samples? Might it be possible to greatly increase the likelihood of success if we agree that different strategies are needed to different types of interactions? That is, to propose that the same methodology may not be appropriate for personnel selection as for surveillance or law enforcement or airport screening?
  
  
• What are the important general receiver characteristics? That is, how does how you respond to me change the way I lie?
  
  
• We often assume deceit involves malice and intent to harm. But it is as often motivated by compassion and dedication to good (and God). How might deception behaviors be different depending on the underlying motivational system?
  
  
• If we are to construct a system for deception detection, how can we ensure that it “fails well?” (I.e., that it might stretch and sag before breaking, each component failure leaving the whole as unaffected as possible.)
  
  
• What are the relevant ethical and personal privacy issues that must be addressed?

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