Active questioning: Effective tool to find out truth during interrogations

A new research has revealed that active question method is an effective tool of finding out the truth while interrogating people.

Researchers at Korea University, Michigan State University, and Texas State University -San Marcos found that using active questioning of individuals yielded near-perfect results, 97.8 percent, in detecting deception.

Timothy Levine said that this research suggested that effective questioning was critical to deception detection and asking bad questions could actually make people worse than chance at lie detection but, fairly minor changes in the questions could really improve accuracy, even in brief interviews, so this has huge implications for intelligence and law enforcement.

The findings have led researchers to develop a new theory, Truth Default Theory. The idea was that when humans communicate with other humans, they tend to operate on a default presumption that what the other person says was basically honest.

Levine further added that the presumption of honesty was highly adaptive, as it enables efficient communication, and this presumption of honesty makes sense because most communication are honest most of the time; however, the presumption of honesty makes humans vulnerable to occasional deceit.

It was also mentioned that there are times and situations when people abandon this presumption of honesty, and the theory describes when people are expected to suspect a lie or conclude that a lies was told, and the conditions under which people make truth and lie judgments correctly and incorrectly.

The study is published in Human Communication Research.