Dr Rachel Taylor
Link to contact details and teaching CV
My main area of interest is deception and the detection of deception. My PhD examined differences between experts (those whose jobs involve some experience of deception) and laypeople and was carried out with UK prison and police officers. However, since obtaining my PhD in 2001, I have focussed on three main areas:
1) Beliefs about the cues to deception
Previous research (e.g. Akehurst, Kohnken, Vrij and Bull, 1996) has shown that people have remarkably consistent beliefs about what the cues to deception are. However, we have been looking at the ways in which these vary across different situations. I first began this research with Prof Aldert Vrij (University of Portsmouth) and have continued this with a number of students and research assistants over the last few years. Since then, we have seen some variations in people’s beliefs depending on whether the deception situation is a high or a low stake one.
Most recently, I have been exploring the possibility of using a qualitative interview procedure to elicit more complete and flexible responses from participants. This research was funded by the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology and the findings were presented at the European Association of Psychology and Law Conference in Vilnius in 2005 (presentation here) and the British Psychological Society Social Section Conference in Edinburgh in the same year They are currently being written up for publication.
Publications arising from this research
Taylor R. and Hick R.F. (2007). Believed cues to deception: Judgements in self-generated serious and trivial situations. Legal and Criminological Psychology, 12, 321-331.
Taylor R. and Hill-Davies C. (2004). Parents and non-parents beliefs about the cues to deception in children. Psychology, Crime and Law, 10, 455-464.
Lakhani M. and Taylor R. (2003). Beliefs about the cues to deception in high and low stake situations. Psychology, Crime and Law, 9, 357-368.
Vrij A., and Taylor R. (2003). Police officers’ and students beliefs about telling and detecting trivial and serious lies. International Journal of Police Science and Management, 5, 41-49.
Taylor, R. & Vrij, A. (2000). The effects of varying stake and cognitive complexity on beliefs about the cues to deception. International Journal of Police Science and Management, 3, 111-123.
2) Variations in actual cues to deception
This is a relatively new strand of research for me, with pilot work having been funded in 2005-6 by the Nuffield Foundation. In brief, I am interested in the way that behavioural patterns over time might be associated with deception and truth-telling. This requires a new, micro-analytic means of measuring deceptive behaviour and comparing it to truthful behaviour and stands in complete contrast to most other research on actual cues to deception which focuses on absolute values across a whole segment rather than within-segment differences. Currently the analysis for this project is still ongoing however an interesting set of results emerged as an aside from the data. As part of the procedure, we asked senders and receivers to give us information about their decision-making processes after the interviews had been completed. These data dovetailed nicely with the initial qualitative findings from the above study and were presented at the Division of Forensic Psychology and European Association of Psychology and Law 2006 Annual Conferences at Preston and Liverpool respectively (DFP Presentation here)
Publications arising from this research:
Taylor R. and Nash P. (2006). Decision-making during deceptive interactions: Sender and receiver perspectives. In L. Goodwin (Ed). Psychological Correlates of Criminality. London: IA-IP Press.
3) Deception across the lifespan
Currently, I am engaged in a programme of research in collaboration with Professor Ian Stuart-Hamilton [link to Ian’s research portal page] to examine deception in older adults. At the moment, we are extending a diary study with older adults to determine rates and types of lies told in everyday interaction, however soon hope to make a bid to investigate the processes further.
If you are aged over 60 and would like to receive more information about participating in this study, please contact Dr Rachel Taylor here
