Essay:Detecting BS

For phenomena which can't be reproduced on demand, such as UFOs, ghosts, and bigfoot sightings, the main body of information about them comes from eyewitness accounts. However, because the internet loves a good spook, a majority of the stories which can be found are some form of creepypasta. These tend to take the form of supposed first person accounts of strange phenomena and one must be careful to check for telltale signs of a made up story. The purpose of this essay is to detail the best methods for distilling truth from bullshit.

Word of mouth

The more a story is told by word of mouth, the less trustworthy it can be considered - in general, anything more than 2 levels of indirection can be considered worthless. Every time someone retells a story without the originator to correct them, details are bound to be exaggerated, left out, or fabricated altogether. This also erodes the signifiers of a fake story which would be necessary to determine if the original was ever worth anything to begin with. It's best to just never consider a story unless it's set in the first or second person - either the teller is the experiencer, or it's someone they know personally. Otherwise, this level of detachment makes it impossible to tell if there's any emotional investment.

Verbal structure

Truthful people make frequent use of the pronoun "I" to describe their actions while deceptive people use language that minimizes references to themselves.

• Passive voice: "The safe was left unlocked" rather than "I left the safe unlocked."
• Third-person you: "You know, you try to identify all the outstanding checks and deposits in transit, but sometimes when you're really busy you just post the differences to the suspense account."
• Omission or action misattribution: "I picked up the gun to clean it. Moved it to the left hand to get the cleaning rod. Something bumped the trigger. The gun went off, hitting my wife."

Truthful stories are usually told in the past tense whereas false stories usually refer to past events as if they were present. Describing past events using the present tense suggests that people are rehearsing the events in their mind. Pay extra attention to shifts to inappropriate present tense.

Outright lies carry the risk of detection. Before answering a question with a lie, a deceptive person will usually try to avoid answering the question at all. One common method of dodging questions is to respond with a question. Subjects will avoid questions by filling their statements with expressions of uncertainty, weak modifiers, and vague expressions. Vague statements and expressions of uncertainty allow a deceptive person leeway to modify his or her assertions at a later date without directly contradicting the original statement.

• Noncommittal verbs: think, believe, guess, suppose, figure, assume, perhaps
• Equivocating modifiers: sort of, almost, mainly, perhaps, maybe, about, might approximately, could
• Vague qualifiers: you might say, more or less

Deceptive writers try very hard to convince their readers that what they say is true. They're much more likely to sprinkle in expressions such as: "I swear," "on my honor," "as God is my witness," "cross my heart." Truthful witnesses are more confident that the facts will prove the veracity of their statements and feel less need to back their statements with oaths.

People sometimes allude to actions without explicitly stating that they actually performed them. Truthful statements usually contain specific, even irrelevant details, because they're retrieving these events from long-term memory. Those who fabricate a story, however, tend to keep their statements simple and brief to minimize the risk of self-contradiction. It's very difficult to make up detailed descriptions of fictitious events. Wendell Rudacille, the author of "Identifying Lies in Disguise" (Kendall/Hunt, 1994), refers to seemingly inconsequential details as "tangential verbal data" and considers their presence to be prime indicators that subjects are telling the truth.

Mean Length of Utterance

The average number of words per sentence is called the "mean length of utterance" (MLU). The MLU equals the total number of words in a statement divided by the number of sentences: Total number of words / Total number of sentences = MLU

Most people tend to speak in sentences of between 10 and 15 words (ACFE Self-Study CPE Course, "Analyzing Written Statements for Deception and Fraud," 2009). When people feel anxious about an issue, they tend to speak in sentences that are either significantly longer or significantly shorter than the norm. Investigators should pay particular attention to sentences whose length differs significantly from the subject's MLU.

Unnecessary superlatives

People who insist on peppering their speech with them might be trying to bolster their argument or distract you.

Narrative

A narrative consists of three parts: prologue, climax, and aftermath. Prologues tend to be shortest, and climaxes make up the majority. If one of these is suspiciously long or short, there may be some misdirection.

Book-ending

When writing a story from scratch, it's very hard to resist the urge to "book-end" a story, gleaning a message from events or tying up the loose ends even if that leaves some mysteries. Life is very rarely as clean as a fabricated story - events happen seemingly without cause and disappear just as suddenly without explanation. Stories which have no clear meaning or narrative structure are more likely to be true.

Chronology

True stories drawn from real memories aren't typically narrated in chronological order; that's not the way the brain organizes them. The more dramatic the story, the less chronologic its structure because emotions guide the formation of memories. The more powerful an event, the more likely you're going to say it first, filling in details later.

Prologue

A truthful story will usually take up less than a third of the story and contain the least number of details. Fabricated stories will linger here longer because they're less fantastical, more believable, and may even contain true events to avoid the mental friction of lying.

Epilogue

The climax may pass quickly, leaving the epilogue as the most emotion-laden, as the witness has time to relax and reflect on the events. Usually, a liar won't provide an epilogue at all, or will attempt to book-end it instead of talking about how it personally affected them.

Sources

• Clikeman, Paul (Feb 2012). The 10 Tell-Tale Signs of Deception. 

• Meyer, Pamela (Nov 12, 2012). True or False? Pay Attention to a Story's Structure and Detect Whether It's Made Up.