Anastaska 's Key Ideas from Detecting Deception
by Aldert Vrij, Pär Anders Granhag, Bruno Verschuere

It seems that people believe that the emotions they attribute to liars will be evident in their behaviour – a notion we can call the leakage hypothesis. In the psychological literature, this idea can be traced to Freud (1905, cited in Bond & DePaulo, 2006, p.

215), who wrote, ‘No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore’.

In more recent times, psychological theories of leakage have primarily been explored by Ekman and colleagues (Ekman, 2001; Ekman & Friesen, 1969; see also Porter, Ten Brinke, & Wallace, 2013; Ten Brinke & Porter, 2012).

It is possible that laypeople’s belief in the leakage of cues is grounded in naïve morality, much like the belief that liars experience negative emotions. More specifically, it could be rooted in a general belief in the fairness of the world.