Keywords

In a rapidly globalizing world, communication across cultures is increasingly more common. Given the inevitability of miscommunication or deception in some cross-cultural communication (Levine et al. 2016), it is beneficial to understand the culturally based norms, values, and communicative styles of conversational partners (Holliday 2016). However, the exact relationship between culture and deception is complex. Further, applying existing research on deception detection and culture is a fraught task due to the differences between cross-cultural deception and cultural ingroup deception strategies. Put more simply, people lie to different people for different reasons and in different ways (Taylor et al. 2017). As such, deception cannot be treated as though it happens uniformly both across and within cultures. Due to the high stakes inherent to deception detection faced by members of the military and others in international contexts where intercultural communication takes place, Yager et al. (2009) explain that misunderstandings, errors, and ignorance “can have disastrous consequences” (p. 1). And even in everyday life, understanding and being able to detect deception is both difficult and important in intercultural interactions. Recognizing the role of culture, the work in this volume takes up the call of Taylor et al. (2017) to study deception in a wide array of contexts to uncover important yet undiscovered cultural effects.

The Socio-cultural Attitudinal Network (SCAN) project described in this volume was conceived to fill a gap in our knowledge because most deception research has been done in a “cultural vacuum” (Castillo 2015). The vast majority of studies on verbal and nonverbal cues to deception or deception detection skill have been done in English-speaking, Western cultures. Very few studies examine cross-cultural differences in displays associated with deception or the detection of deception (i.e., comparing norms and behaviors of people who are situated in different cultures, such as cues used during deception by people in China versus people in Spain), and even fewer have examined intercultural interactions in which members from different cultures interact (e.g., when a person from China interacts with a person from Spain). Some studies argue that deception has vast similarities across cultures, such as in the Global Deception Research Team’s (2006) study that revealed the persistence of myths about eye gaze and other unreliable cues across cultures. There are two main perspectives on how detection of deception works across cultural contexts. One perspective, known as the specific discrimination perspective (Bond et al. 1990; Castillo 2015), indicates that differences in language and culture make deception detection difficult. On the other hand, the universal cue perspective suggests the possibility of a collection of indicators of deception which would be true across cultures (Al-Simadi 2000; Bond and Atoum 2000). Both these similarities and the accompanying emergent differences will be addressed in this chapter, dealing with the current state of deception detection scholarship within and across cultural contexts.

This chapter begins with a discussion of how culture is defined and the way in which this definition determines the context for what is and what is not considered to be deception. Next, it explores how culture has been studied previously in the context of deception and addresses variations in those analyses. After establishing the current state of research on deception detection by reviewing recent advances, this chapter next explores the role of cultural differences and similarities in modern theorizing about deception. Finally, we note the challenges inherent to bridging intercultural communication studies and deception detection research, outline both the pitfalls and best practices for this work, and illustrate how we have chosen to conduct our research.

How Have Researchers Operationalized Culture when Studying Deception?

Culture is a learned meaning system that consists of patterns of traditions, beliefs, values, norms, meanings, and symbols that are passed on from one generation to the next and are shared to varying degrees by interacting members of a community (Ting-Toomey et al. 2000). Although culture is viewed as a fairly stable characteristic of individuals and groups, Matsumoto et al. (1996) demonstrate that culture can be somewhat fluid with age, which reflects the ability of individuals to assimilate aspects of their nonnative cultural residences. Culture influences not only how verbal and nonverbal messages are produced, but also how they are perceived and interpreted, and with what consequences (Krys et al. 2016). Culture is immersive and cannot be entirely understood when disassociated from its proper context. McLuhan (1970) quips an old saying, “we don’t know who discovered water, but we are sure it wasn’t a fish!” (p. 2). This illustrates the way that culture surrounds us and provides the context through which all else is understood.

Given this complexity, operationalizing culture is a difficult task, which has been done in a variety of ways by different researchers. We will discuss below first how the relationship between individuals changes the nature of an interaction, as well as what can be extrapolated out from that interaction, and then identify different ways in which cultural designations are made.

First, it is important to consider the relationship between interlocuters in an interaction. Their ingroup/outgroup relationship is going to determine whether their interaction involves either (1) intracultural deception, wherein individuals from within the same cultural group engage in deception within their own context; (2) or intercultural deception, which involves individuals from different cultural groups engaging in deception within the same interaction. Deception can also be examined (3) cross-culturally when deceptive communication within a given culture is compared to another culture but members of each culture do not interact with one another. Because people behave differently in these different contexts, it cannot be assumed that the way in which an individual engages in deception in each context is going to be the same (Bradac et al. 1986). Demonstrating this, Whitty and Carville (2008) found that people lie differently with outgroup members than with ingroup members, specifically in that they use self-serving lies more with outgroup members. Individuals tell fewer lies to ingroup members and feel more uncomfortable when lying to them, as opposed to outgroup members (DePaulo and Kashy 1998).Much of the research frames the way that individuals engage in deception differently in intercultural contexts, with the primary focus centering around managing anxiety and uncertainty (Gudykunst 2005). Broadly speaking, this perspective posits that because intercultural contexts involve engaging with others who operate from a different worldview, individuals may feel uncertain about how to interpret messages from people outside their culture and then how to meet the cultural expectations of others during the interaction—which in turn causes anxiety. In the process of managing this anxiety, participants interact with outgroup members differently than they do with ingroup members (Giles 2016). Notably, acting differently in an intercultural context is not necessarily a conscious decision. Sarbaugh (1979) argues that the degree of heterogeneity between two groups determines the level of ‘interculturalness,’ and that individuals subconsciously analyze and respond to this heterogeneity (Newmark and Asante 1976). Respectfully and fluidly responding to these differences is a key component of intercultural communication competence (Hammer et al. 1978).

Within intercultural interaction, researchers must decide how to classify each individual into specific cultural designations using one of multiple distinct – and often non-orthogonal – criteria. In order to classify individuals into different cultural groups, there are two main strategies that are relevant for intercultural deception in this context. These include (1) classifying individuals based on nationality or ethnic group, or (2) measuring culture at the individual level according to psychometric cultural dimension scales. Each of these operationalizations carries with it a specific set of assumptions that affect how the data can be applied to study culture. These two operationalizations are discussed below.

However, before doing so it is important to note that the aforementioned dynamics (i.e., the inter/intra-cultural relationship and the choice of cultural operationalization) are not the only variables that shape the analysis of intercultural communication, but each combination of these variables has the possibility for unique constitutive rules which guide interaction that may not apply outside of their respective context. This makes cross-cultural comparisons challenging and makes it difficult to apply research findings that do not fit the same paradigm (Bond et al. 1990). Likewise, individuals demonstrate different motivations for lying in intra-group versus inter-group contexts (Dunbar et al. 2016).

Assigning cultural labels based on national identity

In studies of deception in which there is a cultural component, culture is most often operationalized in terms of nationality. For example, Bond et al. (1990) studied how American versus Jordanian students lie about a person they liked and a person they disliked. Castillo (2011) compared Colombian and Australian liars. Lee et al. (1997) compared attitudes toward lying by Canadian and Chinese children. Leal et al. (2018) recently compared British, Chinese, and Arab liars. A similar approach can also be used to compare different subcultural groups within the same national culture. In such a study, Vrij and Winkel (1991) examined behavioral differences between white and black citizens in the South American country of Suriname. Commonly, these studies only compare two or possibly three countries at a time, and often the countries are selected due to convenience for the researchers rather than for testing theory. Castillo (2015) reviews these studies, finding few overall patterns in deception studies that make between-country comparisons.

Measuring individual cultural dimensions as a cultural classification

A second approach found in the deception literature is to examine what is termed “cultural dimensions.” These include differences in demeanor (the way that people communicate with others) rooted in their cultural experiences. For example, Hall (1976) distinguished between “high-context” cultures and “low-context” cultures, which are defined by how explicitly and directly the people within these groups exchange information. People from a low-context culture will be more direct and verbal when conveying information because little clarifying information is available in the context itself, whereas in a high-context culture, many things are left unsaid and it is up to the receiver to infer the intended meaning from nonverbal and contextual cues (Leal et al. 2018).

Hofstede (1980) differentiated cultures along a series of dimensions such as individualism-collectivism, high- and low-uncertainty avoidance, masculinity-femininity, and high- and low-power distance. His approach is widely used in psychology, sociology, marketing, communication, and management studies (Soares et al. 2007). Hofstede’s original constructs have been refined to better reflect the subtleties of intercultural communication by social psychologists such as Triandis and Gelfland (Singelis et al. 1995; see Matsumoto et al. 1996, elaborating on using these dimensions to understand how culture impacts human interaction). Cultural dimensions can help to understand differences in the way that deception is both understood and interpreted in different cultures.

Of Hoftstede’s dimensions, individualism-collectivism is probably the most studied in the context of deception. It relates to the degree to which individuals emphasize the needs and goals of the group over the needs and desires of individuals and relates to the degree of interconnectedness between group members. Collectivists are integrated into strong cohesive groups more than individualists (George et al. 2018). Kim et al. (2008) found that because collectivists value group harmony over individual needs, altering information in order to maintain group harmony is not always considered to be deceptive in collectivist societies. Thus, collectivists may experience less guilt or fear when lying than would individualists because it may be more acceptable to do so according to their cultural norms (Castillo 2015).

Other research finds that the cultural dimension of individualism/collectivism is related to trust in a way that could impact deception detection. Lowry et al. (2010) argue that collectivists’ greater interdependence, which stems from valuing group rather than individual goals, and tighter social networks lead to a mindset that favors the development of interpersonal trust. Compared to individualists, collectivists place greater weight on social norms and opinions in judging the trustworthiness of others. This in turn facilitates trust transference between group members. Based on this logic, Lowry and colleagues hypothesized, and their data confirmed, that interpersonal trust was higher in collectivistic than in individualistic groups. George et al. (2018) similarly hypothesized that collectivists have a stronger sense of loyalty, respect, and trust toward others than individualists, making them less suspicious and therefore less likely to pay attention to leaked deception cues while communicating with others. He argued further that individualists may be less trusting of others and more prone to suspicion, making them better detectors of deception. While George et al. did not find support for this hypothesis, their study used primarily individualistic judges, which leaves open the question of what role collectivism might play in deception detection.

Another cultural dimension that relates to deception is the concept of “face.” Ting-Toomey’s (1988) face-negotiation theory emphasizes three face concerns during the resolution of interpersonal conflicts. Self-face is the concern for one’s own image, for receiving approbation and for putting forth an impression of self that is socially favorable. Other-face is the concern for protecting another’s image and protecting that self-presentation from threat. Mutual-face is concern for both parties’ images and/or protecting the “image” of the relationship. The concept of face becomes especially problematic in situations with high uncertainty (such as embarrassment and conflict situations) when the situated identities of the communicators are called into question (Oetzel and Ting-Toomey 2003). Deception is one such situation because the parties are negotiating issues of trust and dependence in their interaction, and it might be highly face-threatening if one party does not believe the other. Oetzel and Ting-Toomey relate face to other cultural dimensions such as individualism-collectivism. Specifically, members of individualistic cultures tend to use more dominating conflict strategies, more substantive, outcome-oriented strategies, and fewer strategies for avoiding conflict than do members of collectivistic cultures, due to higher face concerns among members of collectivist groups.

Hofstede (1980) argued that national culture was the source of a considerable amount of common mental programming of citizens and thus used his dimensions to explore differences between the citizens of various countries (e.g., by designating people from Japan as “collectivist” and people from the U.S. “individualistic”). He argued that national cultural value systems are quite stable over time and can be carried forward from generation to generation. Several of the cross-cultural comparison studies in deception select countries that would be opposite on Hofstede’s dimensions (such as Canada-China and Columbia-Australia). However, in pluralistic societies such as the United States, or in societies where there are distinct cultural groups that differ from one another, measuring culture on an individual level rather than according to national identity allows for a more granular analysis.

Recognizing that Hofstede’s cultural dimensions are not based on mutually-exclusive traits which exist on opposite ends of a spectrum, others have adapted Hofstede’s early measures and revised them so that participants can indicate their identification with both collectivistic and individualistic traits (Singelis et al. 1995). Likewise, items based on horizontalism/verticalism are included in combination with the other dimensions so that different aspects of each construct can be applied, such as vertical collectivism (which values hierarchies within a group) compared to horizontal collectivism (which expects equality among the collective).

Although Hofstede’s work is viewed as seminal in the field (Holden 2004), some intercultural communication scholars have criticized Hofstede’s nation-level unit of analysis as unsuitable for examining cultural differences (McSweeney 2002). Objections include the fact that culture is likely a far more intricate construct than can be described with five dimensions, the dimensions themselves were originally conceptualized to create what are now understood to be false dichotomies between vague, culturally-loaded concepts such as masculinity and femininity (Jones 2007). Noting that scores on these dimensions could not accurately be considered static, Signorini et al. (2009) explain them to be oversimplifications (see also Yeh 1983 and Wu 2006 for methodological critiques). It should be noted that Hofstede (2002) consistently engaged with his critics, refining his measures and introducing new dimensions to address issues (Hofstede et al. 2010b). Due to the critiques, however, Orr and Hauser (2008) emphasize the importance of collecting supplemental data alongside measuring Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, such as including qualitative follow-up questions beyond the self-report cultural dimensions scale items, as well as measuring observed physical behaviors of people from different cultures during interpersonal interactions, both of which were integrated into our SCAN project.

Oetzel and Ting-Toomey (2003) argued for the inclusion of self-construal in measuring culture, by which they mean that researchers should measure the way that individuals conceive of themselves within a larger cultural framework. This is because individuals can vary from the predominant cultural framework of a nation or society, such as those from more interdependent sub-groups within an individualistic culture. “Essentially, cultural values have a direct effect on conflict behaviors and an indirect effect on conflict behaviors that is mediated through individual-level factors” (Oetzel and Ting-Toomey 2003, p. 603). Our SCAN project takes a two-layered approach to studying the influence of culture on deception. We examine differences in deception strategies and behaviors among the nationalities of our participants, but we also ask them to self-report their individual perceptions of their own cultural self-construal. All measures used in this project are outlined in Chap. 11 in this volume by Burgoon et al. (2021); (see also Burgoon et al. 2009), including scales that elaborated upon and expanded Hofstede’s initial cultural dimensions from Singelis et al. (1995).

Current Research in Understanding Deception Detection as a Cultural Construct

We begin with aspects of deception that transcend culture. Deception is present across all cultures and impacts every message processed. Although all people lie in some form and in some contexts (Levine et al. 1999; Serota et al. 2010), truth-telling occurs far more frequently in everyday interaction in most contexts (McCornack and Parks 1986). According to the “truth bias” perspective, most people are bad at deception detection simply because most people passively assume that others are telling the truth unless they have some reason for suspicion (Zuckerman et al. 1981). Building from this premise, Levine’s (2014) Truth-Default theory suggests that people tend to believe others, and that the truth bias is pro-social and adaptive: “the truth-default enables efficient communication and cooperation, and the presumption of honesty typically leads to correct belief states because most communication is honest most of the time” (Levine 2014, pp. 378–379). Street (2015) echoes these ideas with his adaptive lie detector theory (ALIED), which argues that the truth default or any truth bias is not a fault or a weakness on the part of lie detectors, but instead expectations of honesty are the result of informed and adaptive judgments in situations without significant useful context to judge veracity (see also DePaulo et al. 1996). Given that truth must be generally present for language to be functionally communicative (Grice 1975), assumptions of truth are simply a better guess in most situations than assumptions of dishonesty.

Research further suggests that the rate of deception is not evenly distributed across a given population (Serota et al. 2010; Serota and Levine 2015). Most people do not lie regularly or very often (Serota and Levine 2015) but there are some who do. When excluding “white” lies, there exist only a few prolific liars in any population who engage in deception frequently, but interestingly, they do so much that the number of their lies outpaces the number of truths told by most of the population (Levine 2014). Although the patterns for deception and deception detection described above apply to people across various cultures, research findings on people’s motives for deception, deception cues used to detect deception, and understanding the meaning of deception “tells” all reflect cultural differences, as described below.

Motivations for lying

Levine et al. (2016) conducted research to track the most common reasons for lying amongst people from different cultures, with the aim of identifying pan-cultural deception motives. Prior research found that lies may be told to benefit the self or others (see DePaulo et al. 1996). The study by Levine et al. (2016) found that participants from Egypt, Guatemala, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States all had similar reasons for lying, and that the core human motivation for deception appears to be a desire for personal gain or benefit. Lying for personal gain usually involves obtaining social capital through positive self-impressions or psychological gain (Levine et al. 2016). Other common reasons for why people lie include exercising power over others, maintaining personal privacy, or simple enjoyment (Choi et al. 2011), although it must be recognized that lies can be pro-social, allowing communicative partners to save face (DePaulo et al. 1996; Ekman 1997).

In a study investigating the impact of cultural identity on people’s motivations for engaging in deceptive communication, Kim et al. (2008) found that people from more interdependent or collectivistically-oriented groups showed higher overall motivation for lying for both self- and other-benefit. Other studies, however, suggest that people in collectivistic cultures are more likely to lie for others’ benefit than are people in individualistic cultures (Triandis et al. 2001). Park et al. (2018) recently found that Koreans were more accepting of lying for protecting a friend than were Americans. The collectivistic value of maintaining harmony among group members was suggested as a possible explanation for these findings. This explanation is supported by other research, including, for example, findings that Americans (individualists) are more likely to lie about issues that are personal, whereas Samoans (collectivists) are more comfortable lying to protect their family or group status (Aune and Waters 1994), and employees in the U.S. are more likely to deceive for personal gain compared to Israeli employees (Sim 2002).

Lying within and between ingroups/outgroups

Although the reasons for lying are similar across many cultures, intercultural variation remains important for deception detection in interactions between members of different cultural groups. Nonverbal cues vary between cultures and allow for different heuristics to be used in deception detection. For example, while one of the most commonly-referenced signals for deception detection is eye gaze, which is often (although erroneously) used to determine how honest an individual is (Buller and Burgoon 1994; Global Deception Research Team 2006), Vrij et al. (1992) discovered that while the Dutch market-dominant minority in Suriname consider a lack of eye contact to be very suspicious, the Afro-Dutch in Suriname consider direct eye contact to be a breach of politeness norms. Consequently, individuals from different (sub)cultural groups must either adapt their nonverbal communication strategy or expect miscommunication resulting from intercultural differences. Interestingly, however, despite the near-universal use of eye gaze as an indicator to detect deception, eye gaze fails to provide accuracy in detecting deception across cultural contexts. Moreover, Bond et al. (1990) found that both Jordanians and Americans used different behaviors associated with eye gaze to determine whether an individual is lying or not, and that Jordanians displayed more eye contact than Americans during interactions regardless of whether they had been lying or not. Jack et al. (2012) found that eye gaze was the most significant indicator used for determining honesty for Chinese participants, and yet participants often used contradictory heuristics concerning eye gaze in their honesty evaluations. These cases illustrate that even though eye gaze is a common signal used for deception detection, cross-cultural differences in eye gaze behavior are “much greater than any differences associated with veracity” (Castillo 2015, p. 249).

Research also finds that people tend to treat outgroup members’ statements more skeptically than statements from ingroup members (Dunbar et al. 2016; Levine and McCornack 1992; Slessor et al. 2014; Whitty and Carville 2008). This likely stems from the more general phenomenon of intergroup bias, which suggests that people prefer those in their ingroup and find them to be more trustworthy than people from outgroups (Hewstone et al. 2002). That said, however, Bond and Atoum (2000) tested intergroup bias in a study of the lie detection abilities of Americans, Jordanians, and Indian nationals. Contrary to expectations, they found that speakers from another culture were not always seen as inherently more suspicious. This suggests that suspicion is more complex than simply a function of cultural differences between interaction partners. Most likely it is instead relative to the specific communicative behaviors displayed by a person from one culture in the context of intercultural interaction. Finally, most research that has examined deception detection across cultures has concluded that no one culture is more adept at detecting deception than others (see Choi et al. 2011; Griffin and Bender 2019; Lapinski and Levine 2000; Levine et al. 2016).

Improperly Using “Tells”

One problem inherent to deception research generally is an overemphasis on nonverbal cues that are unreliable for successful deception detection. Because of this, real-time deception in any interaction is usually accurately detected only slightly above chance at 54% (Aamodt and Custer 2006; Bond and DePaulo 2006; Sporer and Schwandt 2006, 2007). A meta-analysis of deception cues by DePaulo et al. (2003) found over 100 nonverbal cues to deception detection in 120 samples across a wide array of countries. Nonverbal cues can be vocal (e.g., speech hesitations, errors, rate, etc.) or visual (e.g., eye gaze, smile, hand movements, etc.). Moreover, while the meta-analysis reported eye gaze is the most commonly perceived nonverbal cue for deception detection, it found that eye gaze is not actually related to deception. Nonverbal cues can be unreliable as deception cues for a variety of reasons: individuals can adapt or modify their behavior during interactions, the motivation or type of lie can affect liar behavior, liars and truth-tellers experience similar stressors and therefore look similar while being questioned, and behaviors have different meanings for different people, both due to individual variation and to cultural differences between interactants. Indeed, intercultural communication brings to the forefront the problem of relying on nonverbal cues in deception detection, as certain patterns of behavior that are associated with dishonesty in one cultural context may not be perceived as suspicious behavior in a different culture (e.g., Vrij et al. 1992).

Properly Understanding “Tells”

While nonverbal cues may not work as simple universal “tells” for deception detection, such cues are far from useless when considered in their proper context. Ekman (2001) explains that “there is no sign of deceit itself—no gesture, facial expression, or muscle twitch that in and of itself means that a person is lying. There are only clues that the person is poorly prepared and clues of emotions that don’t fit the person’s line” or standard interaction style (p. 80). Such clues are indeed significant for detecting deception, but they must be understood in their own unique situated context. Correctly interpreting clues, for example, by placing them in their proper cultural context, shedding unhelpful biases, and eventually building a repertoire of accurate expectations with conversational partners allows for an individual to better detect deception (Frank and Feeley 2003).

To explore this, Vrij (2015) advocates a cognitive approach to deception detection, which asserts that lying requires too much cognitive effort for the deceiver to engage in the conversation with complete fluidity. (For a review of the cognitive approach and prominent voices engaged in this research, see Sporer 2016.) However, recognizing fluidity in others is a particularly difficult skill for outgroup members. Research shows greater success in gauging how fluent a person is if the person is from the same culture (Chen et al. 2002; Hřebíčková and Graf 2013). Thus, cultural competence is an important factor for detecting deception in this approach, as the violation or adherence to cultural norms is opaque to those who are unfamiliar with the cultural context of their conversational partners. Moreover, lying involves generating new imagined possibilities that are close enough to reality to be believed, but do not quite match reality in accordance to the deceiver’s goals (Spence 2004), a task which is likely much more difficult cross-culturally. For example, in intercultural communication generally, the repertoire of appropriate strategies for verbal and nonverbal behavior may differ between cultural groups, which means that intercultural deceivers must not simply control their own behavior to appear trustworthy; they must control it in a way that is understood as trustworthy to their interaction partner who may come with a different set of behavioral expectations for truthful communication. Likewise, deception detectors must interpret their partner’s behaviors with relevant knowledge of deceptive strategies used in that person’s culture in mind. This makes properly understanding deception “tells” in intercultural communication contexts more difficult.

Challenges in Interpreting, Applying, and Integrating Research on Culture and Deception

Deception and deception detection are multidisciplinary areas of focus, spanning a variety of fields, including, for example: communication studies, psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, ethics, law, criminology and forensic science, psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience, counseling, literature, linguistics, business, management, journalism, advertising, public relations, marketing, and political science (Docan-Morgan 2019). As with any interdisciplinary task, coordination among scholars from these groups inevitably involves mismatched lexicons, field-specific jargon, and disparate histories and loaded meanings behind concepts. This does not mean that these different communities cannot productively collaborate, but care must be taken so that conceptual clarity is not lost in translation.

In studying the role of culture in deception, these challenges are exacerbated by the fact that culture is often the secondary topic of interest for researchers, generally seen as moderating the way in which deception occurs. And, as discussed earlier, culture is seldom a simple or precise variable that can be easily isolated or manipulated between groups in a study. As another example, Kim et al. (2008) tested the effects of culture on deceptive motives for participants from Hong Kong versus the United States. The authors argue that the difference they observed between the two groups is explained by the way that collectivists “are willing to stray from the truth if not telling the truth serves to promote harmonious relationships” (p. 42). However, when Levine et al. (2016) examined pan-cultural motives for deception, they found that politeness norms accounted for less than 10% of the variance between the types of lies in collectivist versus individualist societies. Levine et al.’s research did, however, indicate that even if the motives for deception span across cultures, “the situations in which those motives become salient and obstructed by the truth are culturally variable” (p. 4). This brings to the forefront the question of whether there is agreement between participants from different cultures as to what constitutes deception. Some noted constructs that can change the social acceptability and cognizance of what is and is not considered to be lying include the relationship between the deceiver-deceived, the intention of the deceiver, and the cultural context of deception (Seiter et al. 2002).

Misapplying findings cross-culturally

Further misunderstanding can occur because often in deception detection research, there is not a clear distinction made between studying the way that individuals behave with members of their own cultural group and how they act in intercultural settings. This is pertinent because if the way that individuals engage in deception is motivated by values specific to their culture (e.g., protecting others’ face), they may not engage in the same deceptive strategies when interacting with members of a different cultural group. In theory, more honest communication should happen between cultural ingroup members than between people from culturally distinct groups (Fitch 2010). And lying is found to be more common between people from different cultural groups (Knight 1998). This finding has been replicated multiple times in deception literature for over 30 years. As examples, Coleman and Kay (1981) illustrated how English speakers are more likely to be honest with those they consider to be from their ingroup than people from an outgroup, which laid the groundwork for later research illustrating a division between deception strategies based on cultural affiliation (Sweetser 1987). Both Ecuadorians and European-Americans demonstrated the same bias (Mealy et al. 2007), as did university students in the United States (Dunbar et al. 2016). Notably, this effect is more prominent for individuals with collectivistic tendencies (Fu et al. 2008). Given evidence that cultural tendencies towards collectivism/individualism function differently to affect deception towards ingroup versus towards outgroup members, research examining cultural perspectives on deception must take care to keep intracultural and intercultural deception norms distinct.

Challenge of deception detection contrasted with truth-teller identification

When distinguishing between truth and deception, the task of determining credibility (i.e., truth) is just as important as detecting deception. In real-world settings, detecting deception involves more than identifying dishonest statements as false. People are faced with a variety of interactions in day-to-day life in which they may encounter deception, and importantly, the task of successfully detecting deception involves both correctly identifying liars and not misidentifying truth-tellers. This is complicated by the fact that culturally-specific cues for distrusting deceivers and trusting truth-tellers are not found at binary extremes – for example, even if an individual believes that gaze aversion signals deception, unbroken eye contact does not necessarily inspire confidence. Truth-tellers do not enact the inverse of deceiver behavior, nor vice versa. Moreover, the signals that allow an individual to determine that someone is trustworthy vary widely across study samples, and there is little consensus about these signals across cultural groups (Hofstede et al. 2010a), but research in this field has been far from comprehensive and continues to grow to fill in these gaps.

For example, in the U.S., police officers are trained to assess credibility based on consistency of statements, contradictions, and level of detail in a subject’s verbal responses (Campbell et al. 2015). Elsewhere, more emphasis is given to nonverbal behaviors when judging credibility. For example, whereas smiling in western industrialized societies engenders trust, in societies where corruption is high, smiling works against trust (Krys et al. 2016). Ozono et al. (2010) found that while Japanese participants were more likely to rate strong eye gaze as trustworthy, American participants pay more attention to how much a person smiles. Another study found that Japanese businesspeople emphasized a positive correlation between trustworthiness and level of embeddedness in the group (Nishishiba and Ritchie 2000). Although research generally finds that collectivism motivates increased trust for ingroup members, this is not always the case. Birkás et al. (2014) found that Hungarian participants were more likely to trust other Hungarians than foreigners, while the opposite pattern was common in participants from East and South Asia. Other research finds that trust of members of outgroups increases with greater exposure to those groups (Carney et al. 2007; Heery and Valani 2010; ten Brinke et al. 2014). Put simply, this work suggests that the more an individual has been exposed to people from other cultures, the less likely they are to fall back on oversimplified trust heuristics which are more reliable for judging ingroup members than judging members of outgroups.

These findings indicate that the ways in which trust is built or diminished vary widely across cultural groups. And even if there are some relatively universal heuristics used across cultures, such as those related to eye gaze (Global Deception Research Team 2006), norms surrounding politeness or power distance that are distinct to different cultural groups introduce so much variance that cross-cultural comparisons are easily confounded. Due to these problems, when attempting to engage in intercultural deception detection, an individual must not only discern which statements are lies, they must also (a) be familiar with and (b) apply foreign heuristics to recognize how an individual demonstrates trustworthiness relative to that person’s cultural norms.

Challenge of culturally-relative interpretations of truth

While truth is often discussed as a singular and objective concept that different people can agree upon (i.e., there is one real truth), multiple perspectives on truth can and do coexist (see Marwick and Lewis 2017; Zelizer 2009). Across different groups, there exist different beliefs about what truth is, as well as differing qualifications for what constitutes a lie. Given that different groups can disagree about what is and is not true, detecting deception across cultures requires calibration to different cultural epistemologies. Reorienting to disparate cultural ways of knowing is challenging, especially for people from “tight” cultures who expect “peoples’ values, norms, and behavior [to be] similar to each other” (Uz 2014, p. 319) versus people from “loose” cultures who have a higher tolerance for deviant behavior (Gelfand et al. 2011).

Looking cross-culturally, the concept of truth is itself fundamentally different in different parts of the world (Jameson 1992; Sweetser 1987), as is the concept of what constitutes a lie (Dor 2017). Lee et al. (2001) found that almost all (87%) of the Canadian participants in their study considered a pro-social deceptive statement to be a lie, whereas only half (52%) of their Chinese participants considered the same statement to be dishonest. Preferences for low- and high-context communication are also significant for determining truth-telling versus deception. Park and Ahn (2007) found that high-context communication was preferred by Korean participants, and only 35% of them found an ambiguous statement to be deceptive, whereas 70% of American participants in their study considered the same statement to be a lie. These examples illustrate the subjectivity of truth as a construct and that people from different cultural groups can subscribe to different notions of truth in the same situation.

From the perspective of someone who expects truth to be singular, the notion of multiple orientations towards truth can be perplexing. However, it is important to note that for individuals from the opposite framework, the notion of a single truth is similarly foreign. Describing doing business across the U.S./Mexican border, Condon (1985) recalls being told:

You Americans, when you think of a banana, you think of only one kind of fruit. But when you come to Mexico and visit a market, you see that are so many kinds. Some are big and solid and used for cooking, like potatoes. You never heard of such a thing. Others are tiny as your thumb and sweeter than candy. You never imagined such a thing. And I’ll tell you, my friend, here in Mexico we have as many kinds of truth as there are kinds of bananas. You don’t know what you’ve been missing. (p. 43)

This quote illustrates an important application of cultural tightness/looseness, which involves recognizing that different epistemologies about truth can coexist (Gelfand 2012). Modern Confucian epistemology likewise places less importance on distinguishing individual claims as being “true” than it does on how proper, beneficial, or appropriate a claim is (Hall 2001; Hansen 1992). For individuals from groups with these ideologies (and many other ideologies as well), truth is inherently associated with a sense of group harmony and responsible stewardship over others. As such, this cultural worldview posits that a self-serving factual statement can be less true than a lie that benefits the collective group. Recognizing the importance of this flexibility, Agar (1994) describes the skills necessary for intercultural communication, recounting that “what we expect and how we define ‘the truth’ or ‘a lie’ is a cultural matter” (p. 228).

Contributions of the SCAN Project

Our work in the SCAN project aims to follow identified best practices to avoid some of the challenges of cross- and inter-cultural deception research described above. Following the recommendations of Berry (1980) for evaluating how intercultural research is done, our research employed an emic/etic approach to studying culture. The phrases emic and etic are borrowed from linguistics, where phonemics describe the sounds used in a specific language, while phonetics constitute all sounds made across languages. Applying this understanding to deception research that examines culture, it is essential to break out of one’s own individual emic perspective to gain insight into other groups. As such, cross-cultural researchers are encouraged to recognize how other groups’ emic perspectives constitute a valuable piece of etic knowledge. For example, although our work makes comparisons across cultural groups, we allow individual participants to define for themselves what deception is and to use their own notions of trustworthiness in our analyses. Our perspective thus also follows Gudykunst’s (2001) orientation of conducting theoretically-based etic research that incorporates emic issues where appropriate. We also measured and controlled for individual-level variables that could explain differences we might observe across the cultural groups we studied, such as level of English proficiency and prior knowledge of the game (see van de Vijver and Leung 2000 for a discussion of important control variables).

This project moreover uses a variety of methods to study deception across cultural groups. Qualitative open-ended questions were asked of participants about the cues they rely on to detect deception, validated self-report measures were used throughout the game to gauge participants’ perceptions of the other players, and both audio and video data is being analyzed to identify behavioral and vocalic trends during game play. This strategy allows for triangulation between different types of data to better understand the research findings. For example, by comparing liars and truth-tellers across the globe using self-report and computational analyses of participants’ verbal and nonverbal behavior, alongside having ground-truth knowledge of exactly when a participant is lying or truth-telling, we will be able to evaluate the importance of (or lack thereof) hypothesized deception cues such as eye gaze, pitch, turns at talk, or fluidity across different populations, and thus provide support for competing theories on deceptive behaviors within and across cultures, such as the specific discrimination versus the universal cue perspectives on deception detection.

Conclusion

This chapter demonstrates the complexities of deception and its detection both within and across cultures. Specifically, it sought to illuminate complexities in operationalizing culture in the context of researching deception, in understanding the multitude of roles that culture can play in deception and its detection, for example, in influencing people’s motivations for lying in general, for how deception is enacted and detected between members of ingroups and outgroups, and people’s use of and ability to understand cues that enable them to lie or to detect lying successfully. It further elucidated challenges for researchers when using a cultural lens to study deception, including the fact that people from different cultures often do not agree on what constitutes deception in the first place, taking care not to overgeneralize findings from intra- to inter-cultural communication contexts (or vice-versa), and placing appropriate focus on identifying both liars and truth-tellers within deceptive interaction contexts. Ultimately, it is our hope that the SCAN project, which includes verbal and nonverbal data from six countries spanning five distinct global regions (Asia, North America, Middle East, Africa, and Pacific Islands) will provide the field with one of the most comprehensive views of deception and deception detection available in the literature to date.