Bella M. DePaulo

Bella M. DePaulo is a social psychologist who earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1979. She conducted much of her deception research while affiliated with the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia, and she is currently an Academic Affiliate in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the James McKeen Cattell Award and the Research Scientist Development Award.

DePaulo is recognized as one of the world's leading experts on the psychology of lying and deception detection, having authored more than 100 scholarly publications on deception and nonverbal communication. Her groundbreaking work on everyday lying revolutionized the field by documenting the frequency and nature of deception in daily life: in diary studies, college students reported telling 2 lies per day while community members told 1. Her meta-analytic research on deception detection demonstrated that people achieve an average of only 54% correct lie-truth judgments, revealing the difficulty humans have in detecting lies. Her 2003 meta-analysis on behavioral cues to deception, synthesizing findings from numerous studies, became one of the most cited works in the field. She also conducted influential research showing that the correlation between judges' accuracy at detecting deception and their confidence in their judgments is not significantly different from zero.

DePaulo has worked extensively with prominent deception researchers, particularly Charles F. Bond, Jr., with whom she co-authored major meta-analyses synthesizing research results from 206 documents and 24,483 judges. She has addressed diverse professional audiences including polygraphers (directing a seminar at the Advanced Studies Institute for Polygraphers) and was an invited participant in intelligence community workshops co-sponsored by the CIA, FBI, RAND Corporation, and the American Psychological Association. Her research has been widely covered in major media outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and national television networks.

While DePaulo's deception research represents a major contribution to forensic and psychological science, her work spans multiple areas of social psychology. She developed influential theoretical frameworks including a self-presentational perspective for understanding nonverbal communication in 1992, which has been applied to understanding deception processes. In recent years, she has shifted her primary focus to studying single life and challenging stereotypes about unmarried individuals, though her foundational work on lying and lie detection continues to be extensively cited in the credibility assessment literature.