Stephen B. Porter

Dr. Stephen Porter is a Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia Okanagan campus in Kelowna, where he serves as the Director of the Centre for the Advancement of Psychological Science & Law (CAPSL). After earning his Ph.D. in forensic psychology from UBC and working as a prison psychologist, he spent a decade as a professor at Dalhousie University before transferring to UBC Okanagan in 2009. As a registered forensic psychologist in British Columbia, he is frequently consulted by Canadian courts and has been qualified as an expert witness in areas including "dangerousness and risk for violence" and "memory and the factors involved in credibility assessments".

Porter's research on deception detection has focused extensively on high-stakes lies in forensic contexts. His most comprehensive study to date examined extremely high-stakes, real-life deception by meticulously analyzing televised footage of 78 individuals emotionally pleading for the return of missing relatives (with about half later convicted of killing the missing person), coding footage frame-by-frame for a total of 74,731 frames. His groundbreaking research on facial microexpressions analyzed over 104,550 frames in 697 expressions, finding that inconsistent emotional leakage occurred in 100% of participants at least once and lasted longer than the current definition of a microexpression suggests. He developed Dangerous Decisions Theory (DDT), a theoretical framework explaining how judges and jurors assess credibility in the courtroom, proposing that initial judgments of trustworthiness based on a defendant's face play a major role in initiating a series of 'dangerous' decisions concerning credibility. His early work on verbal indicators of deception (1996) found that only three Statement Validity Analysis clues—amount of detail reported, coherence, and admissions of lack of memory—significantly differentiated truthful and deceptive accounts.

Porter has provided deception detection training to more than 30 professional groups, including psychologists, psychiatrists, lawyers, judges, immigration boards, private investigators and journalists. He received the Canadian Psychological Association's award for distinguished contributions to education and training in 2015 for "excellence in undergraduate and graduate level teaching". He has been consulted by police in serious crime investigations and provides training in deception detection and psychopathy to law enforcement, mental health professional groups, government agencies, and trial judges. His work has been widely profiled, including in the New Yorker and the Globe and Mail.

Porter has published numerous scholarly articles on psychopathy and violent behaviour, deception detection, and forensic aspects of memory with funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). His work spans multiple disciplines in forensic psychology, including research on false memory, eyewitness testimony, psychopathy, and legal decision-making, making him a prominent figure at the intersection of psychology, law, and neuroscience.