Damn lies or the truth?

How do we know whether a story is true or not? The question is as old as the history of storytelling itself. Researchers in the project want to develop a new tool capable of distinguishing between invented stories and self-experienced accounts.

The degree of truth in narratives is important for intelligence analysis and for law enforcement bodies, such as the police and the judiciary. Aids used to help determine whether a story is true or false include supporting evidence in the form of other statements, fingerprints and DNA, along with findings from psychological research about differences between fabricated and true stories.

It is already known that an increased cognitive load, for instance when a speaker/journalist needs to find a word, or put together a complicated sentence, increases the number of pauses, repetitions and hesitation, both in speech and in writing.

The researchers engaged in the project intend their new tool to be able to analyze language production processes in speech and writing. Their work is based on the assumption that increased cognitive load also occurs when a speaker/writer needs to make up their story while putting it into words, and that this increased load is reflected in language production patterns that differ between narratives based on the speaker/writer’s own experiences and those based on fictitious events.

The project aims equally to explore methods capable of supporting a true account, such as finding indicators that the veracity of a statement should be examined a little more closely.