Deception researchers widely acknowledge that cues to deception-observable behaviors that may differ between truthful and deceptive messages-tend to be weak. Nevertheless, several deception cues have been reported with unusually large effect sizes, and some researchers have advocated the use of such cues as tools for detecting deceit and assessing credibility in practical contexts. By examining data from empirical deception-cue research and using a series of Monte Carlo simulations, I demonstrate that many estimated effect sizes of deception cues may be greatly inflated by publication bias, small numbers of estimates, and low power. Indeed, simulations indicate the informational value of the present deception literature is quite low, such that it is not possible to determine whether any given effect is real or a false positive. I warn against the hazards of relying on potentially illusory cues to deception and offer some recommendations for improving the state of the science of deception.

中文翻译：

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皮诺奇的教训：欺骗的线索可能被夸大了。

欺骗研究人员广泛承认，对真实行为和欺骗性消息之间可能存在差异的欺骗行为的暗示往往被认为是微不足道的。然而，据报道有几种欺骗线索具有异常大的效果，并且一些研究人员主张将这种线索用作在实际情况下检测欺骗和评估可信度的工具。通过检查来自经验欺骗线索研究的数据并使用一系列的蒙特卡洛模拟，我证明了欺骗线索的许多估计效果大小可能会因出版偏见，少量估计和低功耗而大大夸大。实际上，模拟表明当前欺骗文献的信息价值非常低，因此无法确定任何给定的效果是真实的还是假阳性的。