Together with my colleagues Paul Taylor and Stacey Conchie, I published a book chapter on Cross-Cultural Deception Detection. The chapter is part of the insightful and exciting book Detecting Deception: Current Challenges and Cognitive Approaches.

In this chapter, we describe how cultural background can influence people’s baseline behavior. As a result, people from different cultures may behave slightly differently, regardless of whether they’re being truthful or deceptive. Interestingly, so far no culture specific cues to deceit have been established. That means that there do not seem to be any behaviors that people from some cultures show when lying, but people from other countries do not. However, several studies have shown that the behavioral differences in baseline behavior between people from different cultures can actually increase the receiver’s suspicion, putting people in cross-cultural interviews at risk.