class, gender, or ethnicity. Wizards use these baselines
to evaluate the behavioral clues they have perceived.
On the other hand, no wizard uses all the available
deception clues, and no single wizard is 100% accu-
rate. Wizard accuracy, like that of most people, is
affected by emotional disruption (e.g., someone looks
like an ex-girlfriend) or lack of familiarity with a par-
ticular kind of lie.
A defining characteristic of almost all truth wizards
is the motivation to know whether someone is lying or
not, coupled with extensive experience in observing
many kinds of people and obtaining feedback about
their behavior. Most people are not highly motivated
to know the truth. In fact, most people have a truthful-
ness bias, a tendency to call a higher percentage of
people truthful than the base rate would suggest. But
some people, including most wizards, because of their
profession or because of events in their personal life,
report a drive to know the truth. They do not show the
cognitive laziness that most people exhibit when mak-
ing social judgments.
Wizards range in age from 25 to 75, although most
are middle aged. They include extroverts and intro-
verts, liberals and conservatives, believers and athe-
ists, heterosexuals and homosexuals, men and women,
and people of many ethnic groups. Some are intellec-
tuals with advanced degrees; others are high school
graduates.
Truth wizards were identified after testing thou-
sands of college students as well as professional
groups with an interest in accurate lie detection.
Among such unselected groups only one in a thousand
qualified as a wizard. The discovery of several highly
accurate groups (e.g., Secret Service agents, federal
judges) suggested that focused testing of such profes-
sions would produce a much higher percentage of
truth wizards. In such preselected targeted groups, the
yield of wizards ranged from 5% to 20%.
The ability to predict the professional groups
within which wizards are more likely to occur is one
demonstration of the construct validity of the identifi-
cation method used. Like all measurement methods,
however, this method has limitations. Few expert lie
detectors are equally good at detecting every kind of
lie, even with the small sample of lie types used in the
wizard research. In addition, there are many individu-
als who are good at lie detection in real life whose tal-
ent will not be assessed accurately by watching a
videotape of someone else’s interview. So a video-
tape-test method will be subject to false negatives. But
some people’s ability (including that of truth wizards)
can be measured accurately in this way. The construct
validity of the procedure used is bolstered by the pro-
fessional achievements of many of the wizards (some
of them have been featured in books and TV shows for
their lie detection abilities and “people sense”) as well
as the increasing efficiency in identifying the groups
in which they are located.
Intense examination of the processes used by truth
wizards in evaluating truthfulness has uncovered
behavioral and attributional clues that have not yet
been studied in other research on lie detection. The
methods of person perception used in real life by truth
wizards can be used to test the theories of interper-
sonal sensitivity and social cognition developed in the
laboratory and to develop better methods for training
lie detection professionals.
Maureen O’Sullivan
See alsoDetection of Deception: Cognitive Load; Detection
of Deception: Nonverbal Cues; Detection of Deception in
Adults; Detection of Deception in High-Stakes Liars;
Statement Validity Assessment (SVA)
Further Readings
Ekman, P. (2001). Telling lies(3rd ed.). New York: Norton.
Ekman, P., O’Sullivan, M., & Frank, M. (1999). A few can
catch a liar. Psychological Science, 10(3), 263–265.
O’Sullivan, M. (2003). The fundamental attribution error
in detecting deceit: The boy-who-cried-wolf effect.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,
29 (10), 1316–1327.
O’Sullivan, M. (2005). Emotional intelligence and detecting
deception. Why most people can’t “read” others, but a
few can. In R. Riggio & R. Feldman (Eds.),Applications
of nonverbal communication(pp. 215–253).Mahwah, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum.
O’Sullivan, M. (2007). Unicorns or Tiger Woods? Are expert
lie detectors myths or rarities? A response to: On lie
detection “wizards” by Bond and Uysal. Law and Human
Behavior, 31,117–123.
DETECTION OFDECEPTION INADULTS
Deception is defined, for the purposes of this entry, as
a successful or unsuccessful deliberate attempt to cre-
ate in another a belief that the sender of the message
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