Extraneous Information
Definition
Information in a statement that the SCAN analyst judges to be beyond the stated scope of the question. SCAN treats such additions as potentially significant: people include irrelevant detail to distract or to over-establish innocence.
- Field
- SCAN statement analysis
- What it signals
- Potential deflection, over-justification, or distraction from the core account
- Analyst response
- Flagged for closer questioning, not treated as proof of deception alone
- Status
- Interpretive flag, not a validated deception indicator on its own
Common questions
Why would a truthful person also add extraneous detail?+
People vary in how literally they interpret a question, and some genuinely digress or over-explain out of anxiety or habit, so SCAN treats the flag as a prompt for follow-up questioning rather than a standalone deception marker.
Does SCAN have empirical validation for this cue?+
SCAN as a whole lacks the peer-reviewed validation studies that support techniques like Statement Validity Analysis, so extraneous information is best treated as an investigative lead rather than a scientifically proven indicator of deception.
Related terms
- Base Rate Problem
- The statistical challenge facing any deception-detection method: if only a minority of statements examined are actually deceptive, even a method that is...
- Ground Truth
- In deception-detection research, independently verified knowledge of whether a statement was truthful or deceptive, established through confession, DNA, or other objective means,...
- Lack of Conviction
- A SCAN category covering hedging phrases like 'I think', 'I believe', 'I don't remember', which Sapir proposes signal deception because a person...
- Pronoun Shift
- A SCAN indicator based on the claim that deceptive writers drop first-person pronouns or shift to third-person reference when describing events they...
- SCAN (Scientific Content Analysis)
- A proprietary statement-analysis method developed by Avinoam Sapir that claims to identify deceptive content in written statements through analysis of linguistic features...