University of Portsmouth ranked top institute in the world for its lying and deception research

The university was awarded the accolade following a new paper which reviewed more than a century of studies.

It found Portsmouth university academics have published a total of 173 peer-reviewed journal articles relating to lying and deception research since 1900.

This number is five times more than the University of Arizona, which was named the second biggest contributor.

Professor Aldert Vrij, from the department of psychology at the University of Portsmouth, has been named the world’s most prolific author in the field of deception and deception detection.

Members of his long-standing research team Dr Samantha Mann and Dr Sharon Leal were ranked 4th and 5th.

Professor Vrij said: ‘I am very pleased with this achievement. It was accomplished as a result of working as a close team and with the support of colleagues in the department of psychology and the faculty of science and health.

‘Our main achievement has been to move the field away from arousal based nonverbal lie detection towards cognitive based verbal lie detection.’

Professor Vrij published 201 articles himself - his findings have also been cited 6,866 times by others in the field.

Dr Lucy Akehurst, Head of the department of psychology at the University of Portsmouth, added: ‘This is testament to the high regard in which Professor Vrij is held by his peers and the importance of his work in shaping and influencing the work of others.’

The aim of the paper, published in Applied Cognitive Psychology, is to raise awareness of the full scope of findings around lying and deception, to help the scientific community communicate these to practitioners, and further future research.

University of Portsmouth academics have undertaken a number of highly impactful projects in recent years. An article, published by Professor Vrij and his colleagues during the Covid pandemic in December 2021, found face masks improve a jury’s ability to differentiate between truth and lies during court proceedings.

In 2017, a meta-analysis showed that a lie detection method developed by the team - Cognitive Credibility Assessment - increases the ability to detect truths and lies from 57 per cent to 71 per cent.