Although it is widely known that lying is common within the everyday social interactions (DePaulo et al., 1996), its prevalence and its adverse consequences in the business context are rarely discussed by scholars or business practitioners (Carlson and George, 2004). Few prior research studies have been conducted to explore organisational deception and the number of the studies concerned with the detection of workplace deception is even more limited.
Whilst a great array of scholarly papers investigated people’s (including laypersons as well as various occupational groups such as law enforcement personnel, U.S. Customs Inspectors, judges, psychiatrists) accuracy in discriminating lies from truth told by others in real time without the use of technology, there is a lacuna in such lie detection tests exploring the ability of businesspeople to detect lies from demeanour of others (DePaulo and Pfeifer, 1986; Kraut and Poe, 1980, Ekman and O’Sullivan, 1991; Bond and DePaulo, 2006; Vrij, 2008).
Nevertheless, the workplace is a social context in which deception seems to occur very frequently (Hart et al., 2006): the vast majority of job applicants lie during the hiring process to mislead their prospective employer (Wexler, 2006; Wood et al., 2007; Henle et al., 2019) and employees habitually engage in numerous other forms of deception throughout the course of their employment (Shulman, 2006). Indubitably, deception at the workplace causes tremendous financial losses to businesses (Hart et al., 2006) and corporate scandals from the past (e.g., accounting frauds within Enron, Arthur Andersen, TYCO) well-demonstrate that undetected lies at the workplace can even lead to the collapse of organisations (Hart et al., 2006; Fleming and Zyglidopoulos, 2008; Levine, 2014).
Therefore, the author has conducted lie detection experiments with ten Hungarian managers and ten Hungarian non-managerial level employees to investigate business practitioners’ skill in discerning between truths and lies told by others using nine video-recorded interviews of subjects who either lied or spoke honestly about their feelings aroused by a short film clip that they had watched. Additionally, to test the relationship between one’s ability to correctly identify micro facial expressions of emotions and their accuracy in detecting lies from behaviour, the author’s experiment included a micro expression identification task. The materials used for the experiment were taken by the author and each photograph and video have been analysed using the Facial Action Coding System (Ekman and Friesen, 1978) and the Six- Channel Analysis Realtime developed by Lansley (2017) to ensure that honest and deceptive behavioural sample videos differ markedly in terms the behavioural clues displayed by the subject and that the adequate facial muscles were activated on the subjects’ face in the photographs used for the micro expression identification task.
