Overlooking the Obvious: Incentives to Lie

Over the years, people have searched for deception cues in the liar's behavior. However, the sender's incentives to lie might be more revealing than behavior. In Experiment 1, an incentive was developed that was predictive of lying. Judges with access to incentive information in addition to behavior achieved almost perfect lie/truth detection. This was not a result of the speakers' behavior being transparent (Experiment 2) but because incentive information was useful to separate lies from truths (Experiments 2 and 3). Experiment 3 revealed that people may forego perfectly diagnostic contextual cues to base their judgments on illusory behavioral cues.