Beliefs about deception in Australia

Research addressing beliefs about deception has been mostly conducted with North American and European participants. However, deception belief consequences are not continent-bound. In legal proceedings, when jurors are responsible for assessing witness credibility, beliefs about deception can distort the outcome of jury trials, which are integral to Australia's criminal justice system. Research on beliefs about deception in Australia are scarce. Therefore, this article aims to address this gap by replicating the second study of The Global Deception Research Team with Australian participants. Five hundred and twenty-eight Australian participants responded to the 10-question questionnaire from the second study, with 84.7% stating they could usually tell when someone is lying to them. However, 75.6% also acknowledged that it is more difficult to tell when someone from a different cultural background is lying. Most Australian participants relied on three nonverbal cues to detect lying: increased posture shifting, increased self-touching and scratching and decreased eye contact. We discuss the implications of the results for research on lie detection in Australia and for research on deception outside North America and Europe.