How about handwriting for lie detection?
Seema Singh -
Friday, August 28, 2009 12:06 PM
I don't know about you but I've had mates in school and college who used to dabble in "handwriting analysis" and would often show-off by critiquing the way we dotted our "i's" or crossed our "t's", whether our "l's" were slanting or straight, whether the loop in "h" was constricted or rounded... it just went on.
I thought most of those comments were from common sense rather than from any scientific study. After all, isn't it commonsensical to tell a person with a neat hand -- you are organized and think logically?
But lay people as well as experts have been trying to crack the code of handwriting characteristics, but the field has largely gone the way of pseudoscience. Now, putting computerized tools to this, researchers are discovering that it's possible to measure the physical properties of a person's handwriting, which are difficult to consciously control. For instance: the duration of time that one holds the pen on the paper versus in the air, the length, height and width of each writing stroke, the pressure implemented on the writing surface.
Israeli researchers from the University of Haifa report this in the November issue of Applied Cognitive Psychology. Gil Luria and Sara Rosenblum have found that these handwriting characteristics differ when an individual is in the process of writing deceptive sentences as opposed to truthful sentences.
So, can it be as good (or as bad) as polygraph? People working in this area argue that the handwriting tool has the potential to replace, or work in tandem with polygraph (verbal-based) to ensure greater accuracy and objectivity in deception detection, especially because polygraph is considered intrusive, and sometimes inconclusive.
The group has presented some papers at international conferences. More details about that here.
But I wonder with the computer becoming ubiquitous, leading to visible changes to our handwriting (at least mine has gone for a toss), how accurate can handwriting study be? Maybe computers themselves have the answer for this -- can detect the distortion their keyboard has brought to the original hand? What do you think?