Better and worse ways to spot a liar
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Re: Better and worse ways to spot a liar
#2> According to one study, just 50 out of 20,000 people managed to make a correct judgement with more than 80% accuracy. Most people might as well just flip a coin.
Oh the irony surrounding statistics and how often it is used to lie - case in point: the mode is completely absent and some useless factoid is presented instead.
That's not to say that argument is false ("you can't use body language"); merely that because of the useless information we don't know if it's true either.
Re: Better and worse ways to spot a liar
#3> According to one study, just 50 out of 20,000 people managed to make a correct judgement with more than 80% accuracy. Most people might as well just flip a coin. Oh the irony surrounding statistics and how often it is used to lie - case in point: the mode is completely absent and some useless factoid is presented instead. That's not to say that argument is false ("you can't use body language"); merely that because…
These are all general techniques, spotting a lie in someone you know is a different matter.
Re: Better and worse ways to spot a liar
#4> According to one study, just 50 out of 20,000 people managed to make a correct judgement with more than 80% accuracy. Most people might as well just flip a coin. Oh the irony surrounding statistics and how often it is used to lie - case in point: the mode is completely absent and some useless factoid is presented instead. That's not to say that argument is false ("you can't use body language"); merely that because…
Without knowing the experiment details (number of trials, ratio of people laying vs telling the truth) we don't know if 50 is actually significant. What's the curve of success for participants assuming random guessing (in line with the proportion of liars)? Is 50 to be expected?
My first thought is that with 20,000 participants, sheer chance will give you a handful of outliers, and 50 at 80% accuracy doesn't sound very high unless there were a very large number of trials per participant.
Re: Better and worse ways to spot a liar
#5[deleted]
Re: Better and worse ways to spot a liar
#6So, what's the rate of false positives, given that only 1 in 1000 is a true positive?
Re: Better and worse ways to spot a liar
#7> According to one study, just 50 out of 20,000 people managed to make a correct judgement with more than 80% accuracy. Most people might as well just flip a coin. Oh the irony surrounding statistics and how often it is used to lie - case in point: the mode is completely absent and some useless factoid is presented instead. That's not to say that argument is false ("you can't use body language"); merely that because…
After a bit of searching it's probably this study:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizards_Project#Synopsis
Granhag, Pär; Strömwall, Leid (2004). The Detection of Deception in Forensic Contexts.
Re: Better and worse ways to spot a liar
#8[deleted]
> How is it possible that academic research remains so awful at disseminating knowledge - presenting results in an open, accessible manner isn't exactly difficult?
Read to me less like academic research and more like a before/after show by the training consultant. But I only read if very fast.
Re: Better and worse ways to spot a liar
#9You will find the techniques described in the article used when you are traveling into Israel. I've gone through this many many times, and am still often taken aback by the weird questions I sometimes get asked by their officers. Still, the whole process is rather smooth and I've never been detained or even treated unfairly.
Re: Better and worse ways to spot a liar
#10The paper itself: http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xge-0000030.pdf