Science behind 'Lie to Me' - Increasing Cognitive Load to Facilitate Lie Detection: The Benefit of Recalling an Event in Reverse Order

You may remember a particular episode where a person was asked to state what they claimed to do as their alibi in reverse order.

For more about the science of deception:
Increasing Cognitive Load to Facilitate Lie Detection: The Benefit of Recalling an Event in Reverse Order. Aldert Vrij , Samantha A. Mann, Ronald P. Fisher, Sharon Leal, Rebecca Milne and Ray Bull, Law and Human Behavior; Volume 32, Number 3 / June, 2008 [Journal Article]

Abstract: In two experiments, we tested the hypotheses that (a) the difference between liars and truth tellers will be greater when interviewees report their stories in reverse order than in chronological order, and (b) instructing interviewees to recall their stories in reverse order will facilitate detecting deception. In Experiment 1, 80 mock suspects told the truth or lied about a staged event and did or did not report their stories in reverse order. The reverse order interviews contained many more cues to deceit than the control interviews. In Experiment 2, 55 police officers watched a selection of the videotaped interviews of Experiment 1 and made veracity judgements. Requesting suspects to convey their stories in reverse order improved police observers’ ability to detect deception and did not result in a response bias.◦

Science behind 'Lie to Me' - Increasing Cognitive Load to Facilitate Lie Detection: The Benefit of Recalling an Event in Reverse Order