9319556 De Paulo ABSTRACT Several new motivational and cognitive explanations for people's inaccuracy at detecting deception are described, and tests of those explanations are proposed. A basic assumption guiding the research is that people are better at detecting deception than previous research suggests, and an accommodation motive is proposed to explain the less than optimal rates of detection. Specifically, it is hypothesized that people (women especially) read other people in the ways they think those people want to be read. The research includes laboratory and field studies that investigate whether accommodation really is the relevant motive; whether in reading others as they want to be read, people might be pleasing themselves as well as others, and whether people might be actively avoiding information that could help them determine when others are lying. These studies include manipulations of interpersonal contexts which may moderate accommodation, including the threat of being exploited, subordinate power positions, and the possibility of negative evaluations of self. The nature of the perceivers' personal relationships with others is also examined as a predictor of sensitivity to deceit. It is also hypothesized that people's success at detecting deception can be improved by feedback about the accuracy of their deceptiveness judgments and by manipulations that are motivationally rich but informationally vacuous. The research is important because it offers (a) a new answer to the question of why people are sometimes so inept at detecting deception, and (b) new promise for improving lie detection skill. The traditional answer to the question of why people are unskilled lie detectors is that they do not know which cues to look for. This may in fact be part of the answer. But another important part may be that people are sometimes motivated to overlook deception rather than detect it. This research will determine whether detection accuracy improves when people are appropriately motivated to detect deception. It will also determine whether people have implicit knowledge about deception that they ordinarily do not even realize they have. The studies investigating procedures for helping people to make use of their implicit knowledge hold promise for developing cost-efficient and time-efficient methods of improving people's lie-detection skills. ***
