The Misread Signal

The Signal Inversion Effect
How Authentic Cognition Mimics Deception: Evidence from Trial Testimony, Criminal Confessions,
and Global Belief Systems

Working Paper — Preprint — March 2026

Abstract
This paper presents converging evidence for the Signal Inversion Effect: a systematic pattern
whereby authentic cognitive and linguistic behaviours associated with truthfulness are misidentified
as indicators of deception by human observers. Across four studies we find: (1) disfluency is
significantly higher in truthful trial testimony than deceptive testimony (d = 0.60, p = .004), a
medium effect 6× larger than the median deception cue; (2) false confessions show massive linguistic
distancing, with impersonal pronoun contractions up to 12× higher and second-person references
7.6× higher than true confessions; (3) 91.3% of publicly believed deception cues are empirically
unrelated or inversely related to actual deception (21/23 cues inverted; binomial test p < .0001;
weighted inversion index = 0.81); and (4) human deception detection averages 54% accuracy (lie
detection specifically: 47%, below chance), while algorithmic classification using linguistic features
achieves 63.5–83%. Demeanour-based credibility assessment does not merely fail to detect
deception — it systematically penalises truthful speakers whose authentic cognitive effort produces
the signals misread as guilt.

Keywords: deception detection, credibility assessment, signal inversion, disfluency, false
confessions, belief-reality inversion, demeanour evidence

Introduction

Can humans reliably determine whether someone is telling the truth? Bond and DePaulo (2006), synthesising 206 studies involving 24,483 judges, found that people achieve an average accuracy of 54% — barely above chan