Experience, learning and the detection of deception

Abstract

Deceptive communication or behavior can inflict loss, so it may be important to be able to distinguish these from trustworthy ones. Repeated exposure or experience can cause learning and hence better detection of deception. We investigate whether experience improves deception detection by enabling learning, using data from a TV game show. Decision makers in the show repeatedly faced situations where they had to correctly identify a person from within a group all claiming to be that individual. We found increased experience reduced detection error. Analysis of the data suggested this correlation was driven by learning.