Examining Sender and Judge Variability in Honesty Assessments and Deception Detection Accuracy: Evidence for a Transparent Liar but No Evidence of Deception-General Ability

A round-robin experiment unpacked message veracity, sender believability (demeanor), judge truth-bias, sender transparency, and judge deception detection accuracy. Generally, more variance was observed in senders than in judges. The data were suggestive of the existence of an unusually transparent liar, but the data were not consistent with a deception-general ability. The results highlight the importance of considering variability in addition to central tendency and the importance of individual differences in senders in deception detection.