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5
Deception Detection Primer
This book is well written and is perfect for the newbie like me to grasp the concepts: easy to follow, logically structured, points explained well and with examples, points tied together so you understand how they fit. A few reviewers think the points in the book are obvious. Many of them are, but I think the easy-to-follow writing makes the points seem even more obvious. Superficially, and taken separately, many of these ideas do seem obvious. The hard part is coming to an accurate conclusion about deception.
One reason is because many deception indicators can be false positives. For example, a commonly-believed indicator of deception is crossing your arms. How do you tell if a specific instance of this behavior is a deception indicator or not? The book gives a framework for when deception indicators are, at that moment, an indicator of deception. Another reason is that verbal indicators of deception can be missed or misunderstood. The book goes into excellent detail about how to recognize verbal indicators and to tell when a verbal indicator is, in fact, likely to be deception.
One of the better parts of the book, in my opinion, discussed the initial interrogation of OJ Simpson before his murder trial. They run through the questions that the detectives asked and explained how and why these questions did not work in eliciting possible deception. They then ran through the questions they would ask, following the model in the book, and explained how these questions would have been more effective.
The book stresses the limits of these ideas. You will not read this book and become a human lie detector. Being really good at spotting the lies AND directing an interview to extract those lies takes, I'm sure, lots of practice. However, you CAN gain insights and be better at deception detection just from reading this book. For example, when you watch a suspect interviewed on a news show like Dateline NBC, you'll spot the verbal cues that indicate possible deception, and you'll never watch these shows in quite the same way.
Prior to reading this book, I read "I Know You Are Lying" by McClish. Both books cover a lot of the same material, but from slightly different perspectives. I highly recommend both books if you're interested in this topic. I recommend reading "Spy the Lie" first, as it seems to give a more complete framework for implementing these ideas, then read the McClish book for additional insights.
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Reviewed in the United States on April 16, 2013
