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Contents
- Abstract
- Early evidence disclosure
- Strategic use of evidence
- Lie-catchers’ strategies
- Previous research on training to detect deception
- Hypotheses
- Hypothesis 1
- Hypothesis 2
- Hypothesis 3
- Method
- Overview
- Design
- Suspects
- Procedure
- Interviewers
- The training
- Pre-interview instructions
- Suspects
- Interviewers
- The interviews
- Post-interview questionnaires
- Suspects
- Interviewers
- Analyses of the interviews
- Results
- Deception manipulation check
- Training check
- Disclosing the evidence before the suspect had the chance to provide a free recall
- Interviewing in line with the training
- Disclosing the evidence after the suspect had the chance to address it
- Suspects’ verbal behavior in relation to the evidence
- Mentioning evidence-related information in the free recall
- Degree of statement-evidence (in) consistency
- Relation between statement-evidence consistency and veracity judgments
- Accuracy in judging veracity
- Suspects’ perception of the interviews
- Summary of the results
- Discussion
- Interview analyses
- Interviewers’ strategies
- Suspects’ strategies
- Accuracy in judging veracity
- General discussion
- Limitations
- Conclusions
Figures and Tables
Abstract
Research on deception detection in legal contexts has neglected the question of how the use of evidence can affect deception detection accuracy. In this study, police trainees (N = 82) either were or were not trained in strategically using the evidence when interviewing lying or truth telling mock suspects (N = 82). The trainees’ strategies as well as liars’ and truth tellers’ counter-strategies were analyzed. Trained interviewers applied different strategies than did untrained. As a consequence of this, liars interviewed by trained interviewers were more inconsistent with the evidence compared to liars interviewed by untrained interviewers. Trained interviewers created and utilized the statement-evidence consistency cue, and obtained a considerably higher deception detection accuracy rate (85.4%) than untrained interviewers (56.1%).
The prominent finding from research on human deception detection is that people are mediocre at distinguishing between truthful and deceptive statements, with hit rates hovering just above the level of chance (Vrij, 2000). Research has further found this to hold true also for people working within the legal system, that is those who assess veracity professionally on a regular basis, such as police officers, judges and customs officers (e.g., Ekman & O’Sullivan, 1991; Ekman, O’Sullivan, & Frank, 1999;Köhnken, 1987; Vrij, 2004; Vrij & Mann, 2001a, 2001b).
It can be argued that the task...