DETECTING DECEPTION 209A NEW APPROACH TO UNCOVERING DECEPTIONDuring my last year at the FBI, I submitted my research and findings on
deception, including a review of the literature for the previous forty
years. This led to the FBI publication of an article entitled “A Four-Do-
main Model of Detecting Deception: An Alternative Paradigm for Inter-
viewing” (Navarro, 2003, 19–24). This paper presented a new model for
identifying dishonesty based on the concept of limbic arousal and our
displays of comfort and discomfort, or the comfort/discomfort domain. Sim-
ply put, I suggested that when we are telling the truth and have no wor-
ries, we tend to be more comfortable than when we are lying or concerned
about getting caught because we harbor “guilty knowledge.” The model
also shows how we tend to display more emphatic behaviors when we are
comfortable and truthful, and when we are uncomfortable, we don’t.
This model is currently being used worldwide. Although its purpose
was to train law enforcement officers to detect deception during criminal
investigations, it is applicable to any type of interpersonal interaction—at
work, at home, or anywhere in which differentiating dishonesty from
truth is important. As I present it to you here, you’ll be uniquely pre-
pared to understand it because of what you have learned in previous
chapters.
The Critical Role of the Comfort/Discomfort Equation
in Detecting DeceptionThose who are lying or are guilty and must carry the knowledge of their
lies and/or crimes with them find it difficult to achieve comfort, and
their tension and distress may be readily observed. Attempting to dis-
guise their guilt or deception places a very distressing cognitive load on
them as they struggle to fabricate answers to what would otherwise be
simple questions (DePaulo et al., 1985, 323–370).
The more comfortable a person is when speaking with us, the easier
it will be to detect the critical nonverbals of discomfort associated with