Case File 236 · Investigation Psychology

Deflection vs Avoidance: What Is the Difference?

By Murder Book Editorial TeamPublished by Gungrounds, the studio making Murder BookPublished 3 October 2026Updated 3 October 2026

Deflection and avoidance are both ways of not dealing with a question head-on, but they work differently. Avoidance means staying off a topic — declining to go there, giving a non-answer, or falling silent. Deflection means actively redirecting the conversation somewhere else — changing the subject, answering with a question, joking, or turning attention onto another person. Put simply, avoidance is not going there; deflection is going elsewhere. Both are ordinary conversational behaviours with countless innocent explanations, and neither is a reliable sign of lying. Deception research consistently finds that behavioural cues are weak and that people are poor at telling lies from truths, so the honest way to read either move is as a signal that a topic is sensitive, not as proof of guilt.

Key takeaways

Avoidance keeps a conversation off a topic; deflection redirects it onto something else. Deflection is one of the main tools people use to avoid a subject.
Both behaviours have many innocent causes — privacy, discomfort, stress, not knowing the answer, or resenting the question.
Neither avoidance nor deflection is evidence of deception; research shows behavioural cues to lying are weak and observers average about 54% accuracy.
The direction of the move is the clearest way to tell them apart: avoidance closes the topic, deflection opens a different one.
The useful response to either is a calmer, more specific question, not a conclusion.

What is the core difference?

Think of a question as pointing at a target. Avoidance refuses the shot — the person keeps the conversation away from the target without substituting anything specific. Deflection takes a different shot entirely — the person aims the conversation at a new target.

Avoidance: "I'd rather not talk about that." / a shrug / a long silence / "I don't really remember."
Deflection: "Why does everyone keep asking me? What about where you were?" / a joke / a sudden change of subject.

The two often appear together. A person who wants to avoid a topic frequently deflects to get away from it, so the behaviours blur in real conversation. But the underlying moves are distinct, and separating them helps you describe what you actually observed rather than what you assume it means.

What is deflection, more precisely?

Deflection redirects. Steven McCornack's Information Manipulation Theory (1992) describes how people manage the information in a message along several lines drawn from the philosopher Paul Grice — including its relevance and its clarity. Deflection lives mainly in those two: steering toward something off-point, or keeping things vague. Crucially, the theory stresses that people can mislead using entirely truthful statements, so a deflection built from true remarks is still a redirection, not necessarily a lie.

Deflection also includes the family of responses sociologists Marvin Scott and Stanford Lyman called "accounts" (1968): excuses and justifications offered when behaviour is challenged. Shifting blame or minimising are particular directions a deflection can take. These are covered in shifting blame when questioned and what is deflection in a conversation.

What is avoidance, more precisely?

Avoidance keeps the conversation off a subject. It has been studied directly as strategic topic avoidance — a deliberate effort to manoeuvre away from embarrassing, vulnerable or private topics (Dailey and Palomares, 2004). Avoidance can be explicit ("I don't want to discuss it") or quiet (vagueness, "I don't remember", or silence). Jack Gibb's classic 1961 work on defensive communication helps explain why: when a conversation feels evaluative or controlling, people tend to pull back, and when it feels supportive, they open up. Avoidance, in other words, is often a response to the climate of the conversation, not a confession about its content.

Silence is a special case of avoidance that people frequently over-read. There are many reasons an innocent person might decline to answer, from exercising a legal right to simply feeling overwhelmed. This is discussed in is silence a sign of guilt and why an innocent person might refuse to answer.

Deflection vs avoidance: a side-by-side comparison

	Deflection	Avoidance
Core move	Redirects to a new topic	Stays off the topic
Typical forms	Changing the subject, counter-questions, humour, blame-shifting	Non-answers, vagueness, "I don't remember", silence
Conversation after	A different subject is now active	The subject is closed or stalled
Grice dimension (IMT)	Mainly relevance and clarity	Mainly quantity of information withheld
What it signals	A topic is sensitive and is being steered around	A topic is sensitive and is being kept out
What it does not prove	That the person is lying	That the person is lying

The right-hand lesson is the important one. In both columns, the bottom row is the same: neither behaviour proves deception.

Do deflection or avoidance mean someone is lying?

No. This is the firmest finding in the research. The 2003 meta-analysis of deception cues by Bella DePaulo and colleagues pooled 1,338 estimates across 158 behaviours and found most were weak or unrelated to lying. The 2006 meta-analysis by Charles Bond and Bella DePaulo, drawing on more than 24,000 judges, found people distinguish lies from truths about 54% of the time. A 2019 Annual Review of Psychology paper by Aldert Vrij, Maria Hartwig and Pär Anders Granhag concluded that behavioural cues to deceit are faint and that people are mediocre lie-catchers when they rely on them.

Both avoidance and deflection are especially easy to misread because they are strategic — a thoughtful, honest person may deflect a nosy question or avoid a painful one on purpose. Treating either as a sign of guilt risks the error of reading ordinary self-protection as deception. For how inconsistent behaviour gets over-interpreted in the same way, see is inconsistent behaviour evidence of deception.

Why does the difference matter in questioning?

Because the two call for slightly different follow-ups. If someone is avoiding a topic, the useful step is to lower the pressure and ask a narrow, concrete question that is easier to answer. If someone is deflecting, the useful step is to gently bring the conversation back: acknowledge the new topic, then return to the original one. Neither step treats the behaviour as evidence; both treat it as information about where the conversation is tense. Skilled interviewers focus on eliciting checkable detail rather than scoring body language, because detail can be corroborated and behaviour cannot.

How do deflection and avoidance feature in Murder Book?

Murder Book: The Art of Interrogation is an upcoming narrative interrogation game from Gungrounds, an independent studio in Zagreb, Croatia. It is built around conversation and observation rather than action: players weigh unreliable stories, avoidance, narrative gaps and contradictions. The press kit names Avoidance among the behaviours under examination, and development screenshots show casebook entries such as Stonewalling and Non-Response that sit close to these ideas.

The distinction on this page is the kind of judgement the game asks players to make with care. A suspect who steers away from a question has not confessed to anything; they have told you a topic is worth returning to. Behaviour is a reason to ask again and to look for independent evidence, never proof by itself. Cases are designed for focused 5–10-minute sessions, and Murder Book is in development for PC (Steam) and mobile, with release currently planned for the end of Q2 2027.