Determination of the Trainability of Deception Detection Cues

The Air Force and the rest of the Department of Defense rely on valid information to make National Security decisions. The veracity of the information used to make those decisions can dramatically affect which course of action our military will take. Therefore, it is important that our leaders be able to recognize if they are being deceived. This study examines the results of training five categories of deception cues to 190 Air Force Officers. The officers were tested to determine their baseline deception detection abilities, then trained on the deception cues, Arousal, Emotion, Cognitive Effort, Communicator Tactics, and Memory Processes, then retested to determine how much information they retained. The results of this study show that there is a return on the investment in training deception detection for at least four of the deception cues.