Indirect and Unconscious Deception Detection: Too Soon to Give Up?

Abstract

In “direct” lie detection, the receiver of a message is explicitly asked to judge its veracity. In “indirect” or “implicit1” lie detection, the receiver is asked to rate some global impression(s) of the sender (e.g., “appears friendly,” “thinks hard”), sometimes with, sometimes without knowing that the study is about deception. “Unconscious” vs. “conscious” lie detection refers to the cognitive processes assumed to be involved in detecting deception. Some studies have shown that indirect or unconscious methods may lead to more accurate veracity assessment than a direct or conscious approach. However, results appear inconsistent, and it is unclear which mechanisms could be responsible for this advantage (Granhag, 2006). Some researchers suggest the role of unconscious knowledge or intuition (Reinhard et al., 2013a; ten Brinke et al., 20142). Others propose that indirect questions do not activate stereotypical beliefs about deception cues (Vrij et al., 2001; Street and Richardson, 2015). Thus, although some of the veracity assessment methods labeled today as “indirect” or “unconscious” have been utilized for at least 40 years (DePaulo and Morris, 2004), most questions concerning their theoretical background, their accuracy, or practical applications (Granhag, 2006) remain unsolved. Even the simple decision to classify a procedure as “indirect” or “unconscious” still generates debate. This problem alonemay be one of the reasons why conclusions from different studies on “indirect” or “unconscious” lie detection approaches appear so contradictory, leading Levine (2019) to question the value of these methods categorically. It seems that different approaches have pursued their work from specific vantage points, ignoring each other like ships passing each other in the night. Although the five reasons Levine (2019) postulates are essential and well worth considering, his conclusions may be based on limited evidence [see Bond et al. (2015)]. Street and Vadillo (2016) have also criticized these approaches claiming the involvement of unconscious processes in lie detection as a specific instance of the general replication crisis observed with other social psychological phenomena attributed to unconscious processing. We concur with their theoretical arguments in so far as we also like to see evidence that indeed unconscious processes, in the absence of conscious processing, are at work in “unconscious lie detection.” However, we disagree with their conclusions based