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Essay on Deception

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Deception According to Hyman (1989) deception implies that an agent acts or speaks so as to induce a false belief in a target or victim. Deception can occur in everyday life. Whether it is telling someone they look nice or not telling them that they look fat. This is an important process for forming relationships and general social interaction. However, although this is useful for social interaction, it is a serious problem in other areas. Deception can be a problem when people actively deceive in job applications, giving evidence and in court. Being able to detect whether a person is lying or …show more content…

Police officers). A recent study by Mann, Vrij and Bull (2004) showed that when shown videotapes of real-life lies and truths and found that the officers had an accuracy of 65%. This was found to be better than lab studies using, normal (non-trained) participants. Additionally, accuracy was negatively correlated with popular stereotypical cues such as gaze aversion and fidgeting. However, although this suggests that human lie detection is fairly accurate, earlier research has found the opposite. According to Wallace (1999), psychological research on deception shows that most of us are poor judges of truthfulness. One may assume that this only applies to only ordinary people and not professionals. However further research shows that ‘this applies to professionals such as police and custom inspectors, whose jobs are supposed to include some expertise at lie detection’ (Wallace, 1999). An early study by Kraut and Poe (1980) that custom inspectors showed accuracy scores rarely exceed 65% where 50% is the chance level. A later study by Kohnken (1987) showed that police officers performed no better than chance when judging the truthfulness of witness statements (on video). Furthermore, it was found that the more confident the officer was of their judgement, the more likely they were wrong. This

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