Cognitive Algebra to Deception Detection: Information Integration Theory Contributions to Study Human Deception Detection's Cognitive Nature

INTRODUCTIONAll of us have lied to someone else in our lives. Deception is a fundamental behavior to adapt oneself to everyday situations and even with its negative connotations, it is also necessary to achieve harmonious relations with our family, at work and in a social context. Deceiving is an innate goal-oriented behavior capacity (Ekman, 1992; Sporer and Schwand, 2006) that regulates and facilitates peoples personal interests, triggered by personal motivations or socially driven scripts (Porter, Campbell, Stapleton and Birt, 2002; Sporer and Schwand, 2006).Academic research trends on deception have focused on specific modalities of deception detection and deception production such as facial expression, voice tone, body gestures, etc. (DePaulo, Lindsay, Malone, Muhlenbruck, Charlton and Cooper, 2003), or through integral body expression (Heinrich and Borkenau, 1998; Kappas, Hess and Scherer, 1991). For instance, it has been suggested that tone of voice and cadence of speech allow by themselves a clear footprint for deception detection in humans (Hancock, Thom-Santelli and Ritchie, 2004; Hauch, Blandon-Gitlin, Masip and Sporer, 2012) as well as for mechanical lie detectors (Elkins, Derrick and Gariup, 2012).Even when vocal cues claim supremacy over other kinds of cues as indicators of deceptive behavior (Bond and DePaulo, 2006), it has also been argued that visual cues alone are sufficient enough to catch a liar. In particular, facial visual displays (Horn, 2001) and specific facial micro expressions (Ekman, 1992) are ecologically relevant and biologically constrained resources either to produce or recognize deception. Debates about whether a separate sense modality is better for deception detection or if a holistic use of information is better to judge if someone is lying seem to be fruitless, since in any instance there is a widespread belief that humans are not skilled at detecting lies. Academic evidence strongly suggests that peoples deception detection accuracy rates are slightly better than chance (Aamodt and Mitchell, 2006; Depaulo, Kashy, Kirkendol, Wyer and Epstein, 1996; Vrij, 2000). Even professionals trained to detect deception achieve a ceiling effect between 70 and 75% accuracy rates (Levine, Park and Mcornack, 1999).Overall, meta-analytical findings seem to confirm this human inability to detect deception (Bond and DePaulo, 2006), and it is suggested that this poor performance is due to the deceived person's bias to believe that deceivers are prone to tell the truth (Levine, Park and Mcornack, 1999). Immediate skepticism to this frequently replicated result emerges from methodological considerations and from commonsense scrutiny. It makes no sense from an evolutionary point of view to assume that we are born to be deceived our whole lives. Rather, sophisticated ways to deceive others race against sophisticated ways of detecting deception and thus, the accuracy of a deception judgment depends more on the deceiver than the lie detector (e.g., Bond, Kahler and Paolicelli, 1985).Academic concerns challenging these findings express the idea that methodological approaches on deception research (for a review, see Gokhman, Hanckok, Prabu, Ott, andCardie, 2012) may be surrounded by experimental artifacts. For instance, Hippel and Trivers (2011) emphasize that many studies on deception detection involve scenarios where consequences are low to the deceiver, deceived individuals are not allowed to question the deceiver, signs of cognitive load like nervousness or suppression failure tend to be missed, and in most of this kind of research, the deceived and the deceiver are unfamiliar to each other. Bond and DePaulo (2006) stress that many experimental designs misrepresent the real social interaction role between the deceived and the deceiver. Finally, additional criticism can be found over the method and accuracy of accuracy data analysis (Levine, Park and Mcornack, 1999).Framing the above criticism is the low understanding we still have about the mind's cognitive nature to detect a lie. …