Experience, Learning and the Detection of Deception

Deceptive communication or behavior can inflict loss, making it important to be able to distinguish these from trustworthy ones. This article pursues the hypothesis that repeated exposure or experience can cause learning and hence better detection of deception. We investigate using data from a TV game show. Decision makers in the show repeatedly faced situations where they had to correctly identify a person from within a group all claiming to be that individual. Increased experience reduced detection error in the sample. Analysis of the data suggested this correlation was driven by learning