[sampleinajar]

They had participants carry a folder between two points, one contained papers and one contained money that they were told to conceal and hand off to a person wearing a hoodie and sunglasses. They compared the way the participant walked.

[ggggtez]

You missed the key part of the experiment: They basically completely changed the experimental setup between the two runs: The confederate changed how they were dressed, the item was on the floor instead of on the table, and, most importantly: they told the participant to hide what they were doing and otherwise act sketchy!

So yeah! No surprise! They told the participant to act sketchy, and they did! What did the participant do? They put their hands in their pocket and looked around a bunch more than normally. Why? Because they were basically told to! That's not "deceptive walking".

Where is the control for picking up the papers off the floor, or the money off the table? How do we know it's not just that people will walk differently when they are about to crouch down? Maybe that would be an interesting paper by itself, but instead the authors think that this type of research is capable of identifying "deception" with 93% accuracy? Absurd!

There is so much wrong with the experiment, that you could write a rebuttal of almost every decision they made.

[justanotherjoe]

You're not kidding. "In this procedure, the deceptive walk is induced by the experimenter during the briefing, the type of object, and the appearance of the confederate"

This is not deceptive walking, this is honest walking. They are honestly trying to broadcast the signal that they were told to broadcast.