Veracity Judgements, Not Deception Detection: Understanding How We Really Judge Liars

I articulate a new position in the exploration of deception and the role that emotions have on veracity judgement. Contrary to the dominant emotion-based approach, which argues that emotions experienced by liars and truth-tellers can produce diagnostic markers of veracity that an astute decoder can use to make accurate decisions (aka. the encoder-decoder perspective), I argue that emotional signals are not useful in making such judgements. The contemporary emotion literature has found little to no evidence for the diagnosticity of emotional cues in inferring underlying affect – namely, there are no reliable marker to distinguish genuine from fabricated emotional displays (at least perceivable by human judges). In the research presented, I demonstrate the judges make poor authenticity discrimination decisions (even when placed in an asocial environment with the sole focus on such decisions, i.e., optimal circumstances), and extend this to a typical deception scenario. In the deception scenario, neither individual differences in emotion recognition or training in their detection leads to improved accuracy. Indeed, and in line with my hypotheses, emotion recognition relates to poorer veracity judgements. The model I propose frames this field as human veracity judgement research, instead of the classical decoder deception detection approach, where the focus is on understanding how people form judgements, and what factors impact their perceptions and decisions.