Stan Walters, an interview and interrogation expert, is back in our blog with information on the untruths in deception detection courses.
In the video below, he discusses the various ways in which certain courses being taught on deception detection are full of lies themselves. He focuses on one particular course and goes through the various ways in how their information is not only misguided but false.
His advice: “Look for empirical evidence…[and] Look at what is [actually] being taught..“
Remember the importance of knowing exactly where your getting your information from and make sure that it’s credible.
I suspect that the industry is absolutely flooded with frauds, and for people trying to figure out who is and who isn’t before they’ve been exposed to the industry and real, valid training must be like shooting craps. If you have no ability to discern deception, then how can you know if your deception training is training or deception itself? Caveat emptor I guess. Stan gives some pretty good advice here, but even worse are the people who teach some good with some bad, because then with a cursory look, they might still LOOK credible even when they’re not.
I’ve seen plenty of imposters out there, but I haven’t seen many as egregious as this example. Most of them tend to trot around the usual suspects like gaze direction, gaze aversion, scratching the nose etc. as reliable cues. They also don’t tend to emphasize the importance of looking for at least 2-3 signs of deception, or warn against common mistakes like Othello’s Error. They also, if you listen to them carefully, don’t really sound like they know what they’re talking about a lot of the time– they sound more like they’re just regurgitating the same words they’ve read elsewhere but never stopped to try to actually understand or internalize.
One interesting point though is that the truth wizards DO seem to be able to tell a lot about a person just by looking at their appearance, but that seems so complicated that I’m not sure it could ever be taught effectively to anyone who doesn’t already have that ability.
Keith D. – It is great to have you back and commenting: Great comments/observations in the first paragraph.
It is very important to make sure that the deception detection training you are receiving is from a credible and learned source. There are a lot of people/companies that just regurgitate what they have read in a few books but have not researched the science behind detecting deception techniques.