Cross-Cultural Deception Detection

The cultural diversity of people encountered by front-line investigators has increased substantially over the last decade. Increasingly, investigators must try to resolve their suspicions by evaluating a person's behaviour through the lens of that person's social and cultural norms. In this chapter, we consider what is known about cross-cultural deception and deception detection. In the first section, we examine cultural differences in perceptions of deception and review evidence suggesting that the accuracy of deception judgements deteriorates when made across cultures. We examine the roots of this poor performance, showing how eight cultural norms lead to behaviours that appear suspicious to judges from other cultures. In the second section, we review evidence suggesting that verbal and non-verbal cues to deception vary across cultures. In particular, we show that the observed variation in cues is consistent with, and can be predicted by, what is known about cultural differences in fundamental interpersonal and cognitive processes. In our conclusion, we speculate about likely areas of development in this line of research.