You must read the first post before you read this one. I am not going to go over the material from the last post, I will only be building on it.
Ok so where should I start?? I think I will cover detection methods by this order:
1. Text
2. Verbal
3. Visual
1. Text, let me show you how it’s done.
So, there has been a lot of research going into detection deception in witness statements from crime scenes and interview answers. I am talking about a paper full of witness stories. This method would be used when there are no real people in front of you, only their statements written down on paper by the person who conducted the interview. This will not work with social text messages and normal conversation. But it will work in interrogations, fact gathering conversations as such.
This method is called “statement analysis”
Mark McClish developed this method of analyzing text from interrogations. To show you how this works we are going to play a little game.
Ok, let’s play. We are going to try to solve a crime with only 166 words of the “victim”
(remember this is advanced analysis and is not supposed to be used on social emails. I’m just showing you what can be done)
Read the following:
Let me brief you first: A police officer and his wife went for a walk in the park in the evening hours. According to the officer, while they were at the park they were robbed by two men. The robbers shot both of them and fled the scene. The officer appeared on local television telling a reporter what happened. It became a big news story.
Since his wife was basically executed and he received a less than serious wound, the police were suspicious of his story. Take a look at his story as he described what happened that night. See if you can detect any deception?
"Decide to go for a walk. Got out there. Um stood for a few moments and a received a page from home. Something was going on at home. Let's go back and make a phone call and see what's going on. Got approached by a gentleman asking for money. When I addressed him I was struck in the rear, knocked to the ground. Struggled with him. There was a shot that went off. Struggled with him and there was another shot that went off. That was the shot that hit me. Got my gun out of the car. Tried to fire at them. Turned back called for her and just looked and she wasn't there. I, I, I had no idea she had been shot at that point. I got rid of my gun. I stepped over the top of her you know shook her a little bit. Tried to figure out you know, you know 'Patty, Patty talk to me.' She didn't respond to me."
What did you notice????
(I can see this guy is not thinking clearly.)
So I am going to show you what can be deduced and why.
Look at the sentence "Decide to go for a walk. Got out there." There is something missing in there, do you know what it is? If you said PRONOUNS you are 100% correct. Who went for a walk? The dog? It turns out that this is something universal to look for in deception detection. Usually a liar will leave out pronouns like: We, Me, I, and Us. This gets us back to “Nobody wants to lie”… What is happening here is that the subject (the officer) does not want to make the statement his own. He does that by Leaving out the pronoun “I”.
So we’ve got the officer on one charge. But remember rule #1: “Never Jump to Conclusions”
Now look at that same sentence again. "Decide to go for a walk. Got out there."
The Subject was asked what happened that night. So that means his statement was supposed to be in the past tense. The word “Decide” is present tense. This can be an indicator that it’s not coming from memory. If your witness’ statement is not coming from memory it must mean that he is creating the story in real time in his mind. This is another sign of deception.
Now you see what kind of information one can get out of one simple sentence.
I am not going to cover all of sentences, but I will point out the things to look for.
Look at the following sentence:
……………….
“Um stood for a few moments and a received a page from home.
Again we have the missing pronoun "I." He does not state, "I stood for a few moments" or "I received a page from home." In giving his statement, the officer used the word "um" to take a brief pause. This may also indicate that his story is not coming from memory. He has to pause to think about what to say.
But again he might be in shock, and forgot what to say when he rethinks the event.
…………………
"Got approached by a gentleman asking for money. When I addressed him I was struck in the rear, knocked to the ground. Struggled with him. There was a shot that went off. Struggled with him and there was another shot that went off. That was the shot that hit me."
Again the pronoun "I" is missing. "Who was approached? Who struggled with him? We do not take anything for granted.
The use of the word "gentleman" is a very polite term to use for someone who supposedly killed your wife. We would expect him to refer to the attacker as a "man" or perhaps even use harsh language to describe him.
The word "asking" is soft tone language. Again he is being polite in describing the attacker. Robbers do not ask for money. They "demand" it which is using stronger language. However, it may be that the robber used a ruse, and did ask the officer for money while his partner sneaked up behind him.
We also see that he used passive language when he talked about the gun being fired. When people use passive language, they are concealing someone's identity. He tells us that the gun "went off." Guns do not discharge by themselves. Someone has to pull the trigger. If he pulled the trigger and shot his wife, he is not going to tell us that. Telling us that a robber shot him would be a lie. Since people do not want to lie, he uses passive language which is the truth; Shots were fired. However, he neglects to tell us who fired the shots.
He repeats the phrase "struggled with him." He may have done this to give himself more time to think about what to say next. Again, this is an indication that his story is not coming from memory.
……………………….
Pages and pages of analysis can be done on these 166 words.
OK cool huh? These are some of the little things you can look for in a normal, day to day conversation:
A liar will use your words to make his point. When asked, “Did you cheat on me?” The liar will
answer, “No, I didn't cheat on you.”
In addition, when a suspect uses a contraction – “It
wasn't me” instead of “It was not me” – statistically, there is a 60% chance he is truthful.
He may stonewall, giving an impression that his mind is made up. This is often an attempt to
limit your challenges to his position.
If someone says right up front that he positively won’t
budge, it means one thing: He knows he can be swayed. He needs to tell you this so you
won’t try, because he knows he’ll cave in. The confident person will use phrases like “I’m
sorry, this is pretty much the best we can do.”
He depersonalizes his answer by offering his belief on the subject instead of answering
directly. A liar offers abstract assurances as evidence of his innocence in a specific instance.
Example: “Did you ever cheat on me?” and you hear, “You know I’m against that sort of
thing. I think it morally reprehensible.”
He will keep adding more information until he’s sure that he has sold you on his story. The
guilty are uncomfortable with silence. He speaks to fill the gap left by the silence.
He may imply an answer but never state it directly.
REMEMBER NEVER JUMP TO CONCLUSIONS !!!!!
Out of interest sake, it was found that this decorated officer went to a park with his wife and shot her at point blank range. He then shot himself in such a way that he would survive and made up the story about being robbed.
The next post will cover Body language.
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