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The authors report a meta-analysis of individual differences in detecting deception, confining attention to occasions when people judge strangers' veracity in real-time with no special aids. The authors have developed a statistical technique to correct nominal individual differences for differences introduced by random measurement error. Although researchers have suggested that people differ in the ability to detect lies, psychometric analyses of 247 samples reveal that these ability differences are minute. In terms of the percentage of lies detected, measurement-corrected standard deviations in judge ability are less than 1%. In accuracy, judges range no more widely than would be expected by chance, and the best judges are no more accurate than a stochastic mechanism would produce. When judging deception, people differ less in ability than in the inclination to regard others' statements as truthful. People also differ from one another as lie- and truth-tellers. They vary in the detectability of their lies. Moreover, some people are more credible than others whether lying or truth-telling. Results reveal that the outcome of a deception judgment depends more on the liar's credibility than any other individual difference. (Contains 1 table and 4 figures.)

C. F. Bond and B. M. DePaulo reported a quantitative synthesis of individual differences in judging deception. Here, the authors respond to a pair of commentaries on this synthesis: a statistical critique by T. D. Pigott and M. J. Wu and a narrative reaction by M. O'Sullivan. In response to suggestions made by Pigott and Wu, the authors conduct several alternative analyses of individual differences in judging deception. Without exception, these yield results similar to those that the authors reported earlier. In response to O'Sullivan's questions, the authors point to their meta-analyses of relevant moderator variables. (Contains 1 table.)

We discuss the ways in which deception can be used to protect privacy, as well as the ways in which claims to privacy can provide the latitude to lie. In their attempts to maintain their own privacy and their secrets, people can be assisted by others who overlook their lies. Habits of honoring other people's verbal and nonverbal claims about themselves, even when they are not totally convincing, and expectations of similar indulgences from others can keep interactions from getting derailed by small interpersonal bumps. But they also enable exploitation in the form of frauds and scams.

Do people behave differently when they are lying compared with when they are telling the truth? The combined results of 1,338 estimates of 158 cues to deception are reported. Results show that in some ways, liars are less forthcoming than truth tellers, and they tell less compelling tales. They also make a more negative impression and are more tense. Their stories include fewer ordinary imperfections and unusual contents. However, many behaviors showed no discernible links, or only weak links, to deceit. Cues to deception were more pronounced when people were motivated to succeed, especially when the motivations were identity relevant rather than monetary or material. Cues to deception were also stronger when lies were about transgressions.

One member of each of 52 pairs of friends told true and fabricated stories to a partner (the judge) who guessed whether each story was true. This procedure was followed when the friends had known each other for 1 month and again 5 months later. Across all of the pairs, accuracy at detecting deception did not improve over time. However, judges from the emotionally closer pairs did become more accurate at 6 months than they had been at 1 month. The judges from the less-close pairs instead became less inclined to regard the stories as truthful, especially when they actually were truthful. Results of a second study ruled out the alternative interpretation that the closer friends told stories that were more obviously truthful or deceptive at 6 months than they had at 1 month. On indirect measures of deception detection, all of the groups of judges could distinguish the truths from the lies.

In 2 diary studies, 77 undergraduates and 70 community members recorded their social interactions and lies for a week. Because lying violates the openness and authenticity that people value in their close relationships, we predicted (and found) that participants would tell fewer lies per social interaction to the people to whom they felt closer and would feel more uncomfortable when they did lie to those people. Because altruistic lies can communicate caring, we also predicted (and found) that relatively more of the lies told to best friends and friends would be altruistic than self-serving, whereas the reverse would be true of lies told to acquaintances and strangers. Also consistent with predictions, lies told to closer partners were more often discovered.

Buller and Burgoon's synthesis and evaluation of the mechanics of interpersonal deception produced inconsistent and unintelligible results. The synthesis of both authors on interpersonal communication and deception was based on three parallel language studies that have produced inconclusive and unreliable results. The authors should have utilized noninteractive paradigms in analyzing the regularities of interpersonal communication.

Seventy-seven undergraduates and 70 demographically diverse members of the community completed 12 individual-differences measures hypothesized to predict lie-telling in everyday life and then kept a diary every day for a week of all of their social interactions and all of the lies that they told during those interactions. Consistent with predictions, the people who told more lies were more manipulative, more concerned with self-presentation, and more sociable. People who told fewer lies were more highly socialized and reported higher quality same-sex relationships. Manipulative people, less highly socialized people, and people with less gratifying same-sex relationships also told especially more self-serving lies, whereas people with higher quality same-sex relationships told relatively more other-oriented lies.

In 2 diary studies of lying, 77 college students reported telling 2 lies a day, and 70 community members told 1. Participants told more self-centered lies than other-oriented lies, except in dyads involving only women, in which other-oriented lies were as common as self-centered ones. Participants told relatively more self-centered lies to men and relatively more other-oriented lies to women. Consistent with the view of lying as an everyday social interaction process, participants said that they did not regard their lies as serious and did not plan them much or worry about being caught. Still, social interactions in which lies were told were less pleasant and less intimate than those in which no lies were told.

An investigation disproved the assumption that people can ignore procedural errors in research, based on the significance of the subject of study. Research psychologists and faculty at a medical school assessed the procedural fidelity and publishability of brief descriptions of erroneous research analyses. The significance of the subject was the only difference in the two forms of each study that were examined. In cases where the subject was unimportant, the analysts in both samples were much less accomodating in their recommendations, and much less likely to ignore procedural errors.

Meta-accuracy is the extent to which people know how others see them. Following D. A. Kenny and L. Albright (1987), we show how the social relations model (SRM) can be used to investigate meta-accuracy. The results from 8 SRM studies involving 569 subjects are reviewed. We argue that people determine how others view them not from the feedback that they receive from others but from their own self-perceptions. Consistent with this argument are the findings that (a) people overestimate the degree of consistency in the ways that different targets view them and (b) people are better at understanding how others generally view them than how they are uniquely viewed by specific individuals.

Dispositionally expressive and unexpressive male subjects told truths and lies under low and high scrutiny. Subjects acted expressive, inhibited, and naturally. Judges rated subjects' performances. Subjects were able to regulate their expressiveness deliberately, but they were less successful when more highly scrutinized. Dispositionally expressive subjects appeared more expressive and attractive than unexpressive subjects. Unlike unexpressive subjects, they did not appear any less attractive when trying to act inhibited than when trying to act expressive, nor did they appear any more deceptive when lying than when telling the truth. Unexpressive people, even when trying to act expressive, did not appear as expressive as expressive people when the latter were acting naturally. Similarly, expressive people, even when trying to act inhibited, did not appear as inhibited as the unexpressive people acting naturally. Differences in expressiveness were conveyed most compellingly in channels that included nonverbal cues.

Because of special characteristics of nonverbal behaviors (e.g., they can be difficult to suppress, they are more accessible to the people who observe them than to the people who produce them), the intention to produce a particular nonverbal expression for self-presentational purposes cannot always be successfully translated into the actual production of that expression. The literatures on people's skills at using their nonverbal behaviors to feign internal states and to deceive are reviewed as they pertain to the question of whether people can overcome the many contraints on the translation of their intentions into expressions. The issue of whether people's deliberate attempts to regulate their nonverbal behaviors can be detected by others is also considered.

When people are motivated to tell an effective lie, they are less successful when others can observe their nonverbal cues. It was predicted that expectations for success would moderate this motivational impairment effect, such that it would occur primarily when expectations were low. Ninety-six women who thought of themselves as very independent told two stories (one true, one fabricated) that illustrated their dependence and two that illustrated independence to an interviewer described as very trusting (high expectations for success) or very wary (low expectations). They either expected to be evaluated by the interviewer (high importance of success) or did not (low importance). Judges rated the sincerity of each story. As predicted, participants' lies were especially detectable (in relation to their truths) when it was important to the participants to succeed but they had low expectations for success.

We predicted that socially anxious people who are faced with the prospect of an interpersonal evaluation will act in an inhibited and withdrawn way. Subjects who scored low or high on a measure of social anxiety told four stories about themselves to an interviewer. In the anticipated-evaluation condition, the subjects learned that after they had told their stories, the interviewer would tell them her impressions of them. In the control condition, no mention was made of an evaluation. Judges rated transcripts of the stories. As predicted, socially anxious subjects who thought they were going to be evaluated (relative to anxious subjects in the control condition and nonanxious subjects in both conditions) told shorter stories, and the events in their stories were commonplace rather than unique. Their stories were also less revealing about them as individuals, and less vivid. Contrary to a second prediction, socially anxious subjects who expected to be evaluated did not act any less inhibited or withdrawn when their interviewers were described as very trusting than when they were described as very wary. Implications are discussed.

Three different analyses have shown that the more information available in a nonverbal decoding task, the less efficiently younger subjects utilize the information relative to older ones. This differential effectiveness in the utilization of available information was discussed in terms of processing capacity, effort, and strategies for sampling a diversity of cues. (Author/MP)

Middle class children and adults (n=632) from eight age levels (mean ages 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 17, 19 and 33 years) were tested with the Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity (the PONS test) to measure accuracy in decoding nonverbal cues. The prediction that nonverbal skills would increasingly differentiate over ages was confirmed. (RH)

Describes an experiment designed to investigate the characteristics of speech addressed to children and to determine if they are distinctive enough to be perceived as a special register. Explains how evidence for specialness was found in the judgments of observers exposed to messages addressed to different categories of listeners, including children. (MES)

Reviews nonverbal behavior research which reveals a recurrent theme of greater politeness and accommodation by women rather than men in the encoding and decoding of nonverbal cues. These findings complement a large literature on sex differences which suggests that women are more emotionally expressive, sensitive, supportive, and accommodating than men. (JMF)