"If a person moves their eyes to the right when they normally move them to the left, they are lying.
""He crossed his legs - it must be a lie.
""She was lying- she couldn't look me in the eye.
" "You can tell he was lying because he was fidgeting the whole time.
"We are exposed to so many urban legends about what are reliable signs of deception from so many supposedly informed or professional sources.
How do we know which signs are really reliable deception cues or mere assumptions based on legend and folklore?One way to be sure is to be sure that what you are being taught meets the "Daubert" challenge.
In a US Supreme Court ruling regarding Daubert vs.
Merrell Dow, the court established guidelines for what qualifies as scientific evidence.
The court's interest was to establish the rule that expert opinion based on a scientific technique is inadmissible unless the technique is "generally accepted" as reliable in the relevant scientific community.
Far too many of the claims made in some interview and interrogation courses about what are reliable human verbal and nonverbal signs of deception will not meet this standard.
The Daubert ruling requires that four main conditions be met as to what will be accepted as expert opinion on scientific evidence.
These parallel principles accepted in the scientific community as empirical evidence.
These four court-based requirements in brief state: Whether the proffered knowledge can be or has been tested empirically, i.
e.
, whether it is "falsifiable;" (Has it undergone accepted scientific disciplined testing.
) Whether the theory or technique has been subjected to peer review and publication; (Has it been reviewed by the scientific community andpublished in a scientific journal) Whether, in the case of a particularly scientific technique, the method contains a high known or potential rate of error; (Does the technique used to test the theory have a high rate of accuracy.
) Whether the methodology is generally accepted.
(Does the scientific community accept the testing method as reliable and objective) What we should do as students of interview & interrogation and human behavior is to question claims made by instructors in our academies or classrooms that certain behaviors are signs of truth or deception.
As academy directors and instructors it is time we reviewed our course materials on the topic of interview & interrogation and make sure they meet the Daubert challenge.
We should also question whether the claims made by quest or contract instructors meet these same stringent guidelines.
We can either deal with the issue now because in the future our course curriculum will be tested under Daubert's strict guidelines.
For information about Daubert vs.
Merrell Dow and its impact on what is considered expert testimony and scientific evidence, go to http://www.
Daubertontheweb.
com.
© 2005 by Stan B.
Walters "The Lie Guy®"