Research suggests that females, from birth, pay more attention to faces than males, and they may pick up subtle nonverbal cues that males miss,” says Dr Rebecca Wilcoxson, a psychology lecturer and expert in lie detection, speaking to Women’s Agenda.
“This may be helpful if trying to assess the emotion of the person they are talking to, but people of all genders should be careful not to attribute specific nonverbal behaviours to lying,” she says adding that research has suggested “that men lie more than women”.
But through her overall research, Dr Wilcoxson has found that we’re all better liars than we realise and use the technique pretty much everyday.
t’s a common misconception that liars will display nervous-type behaviour or won’t maintain eye contact, says Dr Wilcoxson, noting that the problem in Australia’s criminal justice system “is that most people do not realise this, and many still use fallible methods, leading to inaccurate convictions”.
Global studies have found people around the world believe lying is accompanied by these behaviours, but Dr Wilcoxson says the current research doesn’t not support this, and tells Women’s Agenda that it’s “likely that someone who, due to neurodivergent, mental health, or cultural reasons, averts their gaze or displays nervous-type behaviours may be perceived as dishonest or untrustworthy”.
In a multicultural society, such as Australia, this misconception of how to detect liars can cause even more problems when it comes to assessing the truth. In many cultures and certain religions, eye contact is a sign of respect for authority or modesty.
One report by Queensland Health states that some Indigenous people avoid eye contact as a gesture of respect.
“If we use gaze aversion to detect deceit in Australia, we may have a lie bias against some cultures,” Dr Wilcoxson tells Roberts.
[A]uthors of the most recent peer-reviewed publication on effective lie detection methods have said “the best general advice from the psychological literature on verbal lie detection remains simply that a person is lying if what they say is inconsistent either with other things that they have said or with other evidence”.
Source: Can you spot a workplace liar? Dr Rebecca Wilcoxson’s research shows it’s hard