By Dr. Amir Gilat and Michael Breckenridge
Every time an investigator goes out to visit a client, there is the possibility that the situation has been misinterpreted or exaggerated by the client, due to actual fear or simply watching too many ghost hunting shows. Lurking in the shadows is a third possibility – the client is lying. The will to deceive transcends time and culture, and has been the source of much research through the years, from interrogation techniques to polygraphs. Now there is a new technology for ferreting out less than truthful written accounts of paranormal circumstances.
Various cognitive characteristics in written falsities are distinctly different from those that are exposed in truthful writing. This has been revealed in new research carried out by the Faculty of Social Welfare and Health Sciences at the University of Haifa, Israel. These differences can be identified by a computerized writing-analysis system that can measure differences in pressure on the page, duration of the pen on and off the page and the flow of writing.
“It seems that the act of writing a false text involves extensive cognitive resources and the automatic act of writing is thereby affected,” said Dr. Gil Luria of the Department of Human Services and Dr. Sara Rosenblum of the Department of Occupational Therapy who carried out the research.
Despite the need and desire that most people have to identify lies, it has always been a difficult and complex task. The tools available today, such as the polygraph, are still problematic. While the polygraph attempts to identify physiological changes, the current study has examined whether the act of lying causes cognitive changes. This approach is based on the assumption that lying – writing lies in this particular case – requires special resources and causes cognitive stress, which in turn affects performance that would otherwise be carried out automatically.
The participants in the study were asked to write two paragraphs. First they were told to describe an event that really took place and then to give a description of an event that did not really occur. The participants wrote the paragraphs with an electronic pen on a page that was placed on an electronic board. The data was analyzed with the help of a program that Dr. Rosenblum developed a few years ago. The system is able to garner data that cannot be measured manually, such as pressure, rhythm and speed, duration and frequency.
The study reveals that pressure on the page when writing deceptive content is significantly heavier than when writing the truth. Likewise, the flow of strokes when writing false text, as expressed in the height and length of the letters, is distinctly different from these elements in truthful writing. According to the researchers, the results of the study show that when writing a lie, otherwise automatic acts become more controlled by the brain and consequently performance is altered, which is expressed in the size, duration and pressure of the false writing.
The research points to the importance of carefully studying not just what the clients’ words say on an interview questionnaire, but the look and form of the handwriting itself from one section to another, and the feel of it through the back side of the paper, betraying pen pressure differences. Changes in writing style as discovered by the study may hint at something not told or intentionally misdirected.
“A lie detector that analyses handwriting has many advantages over the existing detectors, since it is less threatening for the person being examined, is much more objective and does not depend on human interpretation. The system also provides measures that the individual has difficulty controlling during performance. This is certainly a system that can improve – alongside the existing detectors – our ability to identify lies,” the researchers concluded.
Even though the research has not yet produced a device for mass production, the knowledge about the perceptible differences in truthful versus deceptive writing gained from the study can be useful to investigators who suspect fraud and would like a subtle test to use without alarming or offending clients.
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