Can People Be Trained to Better Detect Deception? Instructor-Led vs. Web-Based Training

Research has long recognized that many biases and shortcomings of humans severely limit their ability to accurately detect deception, and this may lead to great risks in government or military operations. One possible method to improve humans’ deception detection ability is to train them to recognize cues of deception. To do this, we need to create effective training curricula and educational tools. This paper focuses on describing how we use existing research on deception detection to guide the design, development and evaluation of such a training curriculum. Research-authenticated cues of deception are selected, organized and presented as the core of the training curriculum. Real-life examples and analyses are created to illustrate the cues and provide learners detection practice with immediate feedback. Besides traditional instructor-led lecture-based training, we also implement this curriculum with a Web-based, learner-centered multimedia training system called Agent99 Trainer. Experiments are conducted to study the effectiveness of our training curriculum and to compare the two training implementations. The initial results show that our training curriculum significantly improves human deception detection accuracy and the Agent99 Trainer system provides training as effective as the instructor-led, lecture-based training.