Nexi the Social Robot Helps Uncover Deception

To accurately distinguish honest from deceptive communication, NSF researchers have developed specific questioning strategies as well as technologies to detect lies using nonverbal cues.

Weeding out honest statements from deceptive ones is central to many societal contexts, notably democracy, a just legal system, national security and economic decision making.

To explore behavioral and nonverbal approaches to detect deceptive communication in economic exchanges, teams from MIT, Cornell and Northeastern University used a social robot named Nexi (built by MIT). In their experiments, they isolated expressions, gestures and other nonverbal cues that directly affect trust in economic decisions.

Previous deception research has consistently found that individuals are only slightly better than 50/50 at detecting deception. A research team at Michigan State University used a database of more than 300 videotaped honest and deceptive interviews to develop a "Truth Default Theory," which concludes that using particular questioning strategies can increase a questioner's ability to reveal a deceiver's lies.