Bruno Verschuere

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• PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of Amsterdam

Does everybody lie? A dominant view is that lying is part of everyday social interaction. Recent research, however, has claimed, that robust individual differences exist, with most people reporting that they do not lie, and only a small minority reporting very frequent lying. In this study, we found most people to subjectively report little or no l...

Despite a wealth of research, the core features of psychopathy remain hotly debated. Using network analysis, an innovative and increasingly popular statistical tool, we mapped the network structure of psychopathy, as operationalized by the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 2003) in two large U.S. offender samples (nNIMH = 1559; nWisconsin...

The self-concept maintenance theory holds that many people will cheat in order to maximize self-profit, but only to the extent that they can do so while maintaining a positive self-concept. Mazar, Amir, and Ariely (2008, Experiment 1) gave participants an opportunity and incentive to cheat on a problem-solving task. Prior to that task, participants...

Decades of research have shown that people are poor at detecting deception. Understandably, people struggle with integrating the many putative cues to deception into an accurate veracity judgement. Heuristics simplify difficult decisions by ignoring most of the information and relying instead only on the most diagnostic cues. Here we conducted nine...

Background: Deception detection through analysing language is a promising avenue using both human judgments and automated machine learning judgments. For both forms of credibility assessment, automated adversarial attacks that rewrite deceptive statements to appear truthful pose a serious threat. Methods: We used a dataset of 243 truthful and 262 f...

People, including the police, are poor at detecting lies. The level of detail in a statement speaks to its credibility – truthful statements contain more details than false statements. Focusing solely on the level of detail in a statement, rather than considering multiple indicators, may improve lie detection ability

Honesty, defined as freedom from fraud or deception, is widely valued in many aspects of life, from personal relationships to professional settings. Yet acts of dishonesty remain widespread, including political and corporate scandals, misinformation, personal betrayal, and so on. Understanding honesty and the factors that influence it provides insi...

People are poor lie detectors, partly because they hold false beliefs about nonverbal cues to deception. Here, we investigated if guiding people to rely only on a message's detailedness (“take‐the‐best”) boosts their lie detection and to what extent such heuristic judgments are immune to nonverbal information. In three studies ( N s = 109, 88 and 1...

In this commentary, we examine the implications of the failed replication reported by Vaidis et al., which represents the largest multilab attempt to replicate the induced-compliance paradigm in cognitive-dissonance theory. We respond to commentaries on this study and discuss potential explanations for the null findings, including issues with the p...

Background. Forensic psychiatric patients often struggle to have their mental healthcare needs met, highlighting the need for approaches beyond traditional therapeutic models. Mobile health applications offer a promising solution, but research on their use in forensic psychiatric settings is limited. This scoping review explores the literature on m...

Purpose A large body of research indicates that bias is an inherent part of human information processing. This way, bias affects all disciplines that rely on human judgements, such as forensic psychological assessment, including criminal risk evaluation. Although there is a lack of empirical studies, scholars recommend considering case information...

Stereotype threat refers to the fear of being judged based on negative stereotypes about the performance of a certain group one identifies with. Numerous published studies have found that stereotype threat might lower mathematics test performance among women. However, many studies used suboptimal designs and analyses; the literature might be subjec...

Eyewitness identifications from lineups are prone to error. More indirect identification procedures, such as the reaction-time based Concealed Information Test (RT-CIT) could be a viable alternative to lineups. The RT-CIT uses response times to assess facial familiarity. Theory and initial evidence with autobiographical stimuli suggests that the ac...

Biases in favor of culturally prevalent social ingroups are ubiquitous, but random assignment to arbitrary experimentally created social groups is also sufficient to create ingroup biases (i.e., the minimal group effect; MGE). The extent to which ingroup bias arises from specific social contexts versus more general psychological tendencies remains...

Biases in favor of culturally prevalent social ingroups are ubiquitous, but random assignment to arbitrary experimentally created social groups is also sufficient to create ingroup biases (i.e., the minimal group effect; MGE). The extent to which ingroup bias arises from specific social contexts versus more general psychological tendencies remains...

When considering suspect statements, truthful statements contain more verifiable details compared to deceptive statements, supporting a core prediction of the Verifiability Approach (VA) to lie detection. However, this difference of verifiable details between truthful and deceptive statements is not always found. For example, the difference emerges...

Preprint of book chapter submitted for publication in the book ‘Legal and Forensic Psychology-What Is It and What It Is Not’, edited by Irena Boskovic.

In response to the replication crisis in psychology, the scientific community has advocated open science practices to promote transparency and reproducibility. Although existing reviews indicate inconsistent and generally low adoption of open science in psychology, a current-day, detailed analysis is lacking. Recognizing the significant impact of f...

In response to the replication crisis in psychology, the scientific community has advocated open science practices to promote transparency and reproducibility. Although existing reviews indicate inconsistent and generally low adoption of open science in psychology, a current-day, detailed analysis is lacking. Recognizing the significant impact of f...

There is much debate on the question about whether people are intuitively honest or intuitively dishonest. A recent social harm account was proposed to address this debate: dishonesty is intuitive when cheating inflicts harm on an abstract other while honesty is intuitive when cheating inflicts harm on a concrete other. This pre-registered and well...

The self-maintenance theory (Mazar et al., 2008) states that people only lie to the extent that they can justify lying, that way allowing to retain a positive moral self-image. For instance, people lie more when they can observe counterfactuals than when they cannot (Shalvi et al., 2011), presumably because it enables people to justify their lie. W...

The Reaction-Time Concealed Information Test (RT-CIT) is a cognitive deception detection task used to determine whether a suspect recognizes crime information. Despite having clear theoretical and applied impact, there is a paucity of studies assessing the impact of crime memory strength on the RT-CIT. We tested the impact of memory strength in the...

Cognitive and social factors can deteriorate eyewitness identification performance in children and older adults. An identification procedure that mitigates the effect of such factors could be beneficial for child and older adult witnesses. In a field experiment, we mapped identification performance in a large community sample (N = 1,239) across the...

Recently, Brennen and Magnussen (2023, Current Directions in Psychological Science , 32 , 395) reviewed several approaches to detection of deception that have been extensively researched for several decades. While this review is timely, it is overly pessimistic regarding the applicability of psychological research to criminal investigations, and at...

According to cognitive-dissonance theory, performing counterattitudinal behavior produces a state of dissonance that people are motivated to resolve, usually by changing their attitude to be in line with their behavior. One of the most popular experimental paradigms used to produce such attitude change is the induced-compliance paradigm. Despite it...

A large body of research indicates that bias is an inherent phenomenon of human information processing, also present in the psychological forensic assessment, for example, in credibility or criminal risk assessment. However, research on effective debiasing strategies is still in its infancy. Linear Sequential Unmasking-Expanded (LUS-E, Dror & Kukuc...

Participants in the Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) paradigm learn lists of words (e.g., bed, tired) associated with a nonpresented lure (i.e., sleep). In subsequent memory tests, individuals tend to report the nonlearned lures, that is, exhibiting false memories. Priorly, the DRM task has been criticized for not capturing the aversive nature of (cl...

General Audience Summary To examine whether a suspect of a crime has implicating crime knowledge, recognition of crime-related details can be detected using memory detection methods, such as the CIT. Traditionally, crime knowledge is detected with physiological measures, and studies exploring newer eye-tracking measures have produced a lower detect...

The concealed information test (CIT) presents various probe (familiar) items amidst irrelevant (unfamiliar) items. When the probe items appear, reaction time (RT) slows down. This RT-CIT effect has been accounted for by a conflict resulting from the need to deny familiarity of the familiar probes. The present pre-registered study (n = 292) examined...

The many benefits of online research and the recent emergence of open-source eye-tracking libraries have sparked an interest in transferring time-consuming and expensive eye-tracking studies from the lab to the web. In the current study, we validate online webcam-based eye-tracking by conceptually replicating three robust eye-tracking studies (the...

Does having access to nonverbal information facilitate or rather deteriorate deception detection accuracy? In study1, participants (N = 109) judged statements presented as video versus text on deception. In Study2, participants (N = 88) judging video statements with or without strongly biasing nonverbal behavior (i.e., truth tellers diverting their...

A number of psychological theories propose that deception involves more cognitive control than truth-telling. Over the last decades, event-related potentials (ERPs) have been used to unravel this question, but the findings are mixed. To address this controversy, two meta-analyses were conducted to quantify the results of existing studies reporting...

Post-traumatic stress disorder is characterised by recurring memories of a traumatic experience despite deliberate attempts to forget (i.e., suppression). The Think/No-Think (TNT) task has been used widely in the laboratory to study suppression-induced forgetting. During the task, participants learn a series of cue-target word pairs. Subsequently,...

Progress in psychopathy research has been hampered by ongoing contention about its fundamental cause. The Impaired Integration theory of psychopathy provides an attention-based account of information integration abnormalities. We set out to evaluate the suggested mechanism via an innovative application of the well-established illusory conjunction p...

Post-traumatic stress disorder is characterised by recurring memories of a traumatic experience despite deliberate attempts to forget. The Think/No-Think (TNT) task has been used widely in the laboratory to study suppression-induced forgetting. Recent meta-analyses have reported small-to-moderate effect sizes in this paradigm. The current replicati...

Post-traumatic stress disorder is characterised by recurring memories of a traumatic experience despite deliberate attempts to forget. The Think/No-Think (TNT) task has been used widely in the laboratory to study suppression-induced forgetting. Recent meta-analyses have reported small-to-moderate effect sizes in this paradigm. The current replicati...

The low reproducibility rate in social sciences has produced hesitation among researchers in accepting published findings at their face value. Despite the advent of initiatives to increase transparency in research reporting, the field is still lacking tools to verify the credibility of research reports. In the present paper, we describe methodologi...

The response time-based Concealed Information Test (RT-CIT) is an established memory detection paradigm. Slower RTs to critical information (called ‘probes’) compared to control items (called ‘irrelevants’) reveal recognition. Different lines of research indicate that response conflict is a strong contributor to this RT difference. Previous studies...

The current study examined the eye tracking Concealed Information Test (CIT) in a mock crime scenario. Participants were instructed to either commit a mock crime on campus (guilty participants; n = 42), read an article about this mock crime (informed innocents; n = 45), or read an unrelated article (naïve innocent participants; n = 46). Afterward,...

Progress in psychopathy research has been hampered by ongoing contention about its fundamental cause. The Impaired Integration theory of psychopathy provides an attention-based account of information integration abnormalities. We set out to evaluate the suggested mechanism via an innovative application of the well-established illusory conjunction p...

When cognitive and educational tests are administered under time limits, tests may become speeded and this may affect the reliability and validity of the resulting test scores. Prior research has shown that time limits may create or enlarge gender gaps in cognitive and academic testing. On average, women complete fewer items than men when a test is...

Government agencies including border control have an interest to detect if someone provides false information about their nationality. While response time tasks have been proposed to be able to detect someone’s true nationality, there is the risk that they will often err, particularly in the face of information contamination (i.e. someone having th...

The failure to detect deception can have grave consequences in politics, relationships, and the court room (Mazar, Amir, & Ariely, 2008). Yet, people are poor lie detectors and perform barely better than chance (Bond & DePaulo, 2006). Understandably, people struggle with integrating the many putative cues to deception into an accurate veracity judg...

The International Affective Picture System (IAPS; Center for the Study of Emotion and Attention [CSEA], 1995) is a set of pictures that is widely used in experimental research on emotion and attention. In this study, the normative ratings of a subset of the IAPS were compared with the ratings from a Flemish sample. Eighty Flemish first-year psychol...

The response time-based Concealed Information Test (RT-CIT) is an established memory detection paradigm. Slower RTs to critical information (called 'probes') compared to control items (called 'irrelevants') reveal recognition. Different lines of research indicate that response conflict is a strong contributor to this RT-difference. Previous studies...

Post-traumatic stress disorder is characterised by recurring memories of a traumatic experience as well as the deliberate avoidance of those memories in order to forget. However, can intentional suppression really lead to forgetting? The Think/No-Think (TNT) task has been used widely in the laboratory to study suppression-induced forgetting. The id...

Post-traumatic stress disorder is characterised by recurring memories of a traumatic experience as well as the deliberate avoidance of those memories in order to forget. However, can intentional suppression really lead to forgetting? The Think/No-Think (TNT) task has been used widely in the laboratory to study suppression-induced forgetting. The id...

Eyewitness identification procedures rely heavily on explicit identification from lineups. Lineups have been criticized because they have a considerable error rate. We tested the potential of implicit identifications in a Concealed Information Test (CIT) as an alternative. Previous experiments have suggested that implicit identification procedures...

When cognitive and educational tests are administered under time limits, tests may become speeded and this may affect reliability and validity of the resulting test scores. Prior research has shown that time limits may create or enlarge gender gaps in cognitive and academic testing. On average, women complete fewer items than men when a test is adm...

General Audience Summary Law enforcement agencies, intelligence services, or even companies can encounter situations in which they would like to find out if a person knows something about an incident even though he or she claims not to. In situations like these, the response time-based Concealed Information Test (RT-CIT) could be applied. In this a...

Concealed Information Tests (CIT) are administered to verify whether suspects recognize certain features from a crime. Whenever it is presumed that innocent suspects were contaminated with critical information (e.g., the perpetrator had a knife), the examiner may ask more detailed questions (e.g., specific types of knives) to prevent false positive...

Could a simple rule of thumb help to find the truth? People struggle with integrating many putative cues to deception into an accurate veracity judgement. Heuristics simplify difficult decisions by ignoring most of the information and relying instead only on a few but highly diagnostic cues (’Use the best, ignore the rest’). We examined whether peo...

Concealed Information Tests (CIT) are administered to verify whether suspects recognize certain features from a crime. Whenever it is presumed that innocent suspects were contaminated with critical information (e.g., the perpetrator had a knife), the examiner may ask more detailed questions (e.g., specific types of knives) to prevent false positive...

One of the goals of the Centre for Policing and Security (CPS) is " organizing study days and study cycles at an academic level ". We argue that the "Training series SCAN (Analysis of written statements)" has no place in this noble endeavor. SCAN lacks a scientific basis and researchers from different countries conclude its use should be discourage...

Tearful crying is a ubiquitous and likely uniquely human phenomenon. Scholars have argued that emotional tears serve an attachment function: Tears are thought to act as a social glue by evoking social support intentions. Initial experimental studies supported this proposition across several methodologies, but these were conducted almost exclusively...

General Audience Summary To examine whether a suspect of a crime has implicating crime knowledge, recognition of crime-related details can be detected using memory detection methods, such as the Concealed Information Test (CIT). In a typical CIT, items are presented verbally, although memory research suggests that pictures may not only be better re...

Various scholars posit a distinction between primary and secondary psychopathy. Support for these two subtypes has been found in community, prison and forensic inpatient samples. The question remains whether the typology also holds in forensic outpatient samples. The aims of the study were threefold. First, because it is yet unknown, we wanted to...

The final version of this manuscript has been published in JARMAC: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2021.08.003 To detect if someone hides specific knowledge (called "probes"), the response time-based Concealed Information Test (RT-CIT) asks the examinee to classify items into two categories (targets/non-targets). Within the non-targets, slower RTs...

Purpose: Truthful statements are theorized to be richer in perceptual and contextual detail than deceptive statements. The level of detail can be coded by humans or computers, with human coding argued to be superior. Direct comparisons of human and automated coding, however, are rare.Methods: We applied automatic identification of details with the...

Politicians who lie are more likely to be reelected. That is what Janezic and Gallego (1) concluded. They asked 816 Spanish mayors to toss a coin, with only heads resulting in a desired personalized report of the study results. Mayors reported heads more often (68%) than expected by chance (50%), and reporting heads significantly predicted reelecti...

Background Deception detection is a prevalent problem for security practitioners. With a need for more large-scale approaches, automated methods using machine learning have gained traction. However, detection performance still implies considerable error rates. Findings from different domains suggest that hybrid human-machine integrations could offe...

The reaction time-based Concealed Information Test (RT-CIT) can be used to detect information a suspect wishes to conceal. While it is often argued that it is easily faked, empirical research on its vulnerability to faking is scarce. In three experiments, we tested whether receiving faking instructions enables guilty participants to fake an innocen...

Nahari, Vrij, and Fischer [(2014b), Applied Cognitive Psychology, 28, 122–128] found that, when participants were forewarned that their statements would be checked for verifiable details, truth tellers gave much more verifiable details than liars. In this direct replication (n = 72), participants wrote a statement claiming they had carried out thei...

The Verifiability Approach predicts that truth tellers will include details that can be verified by the interviewer, whereas liars will refrain from providing such details. A meta‐analysis revealed that truth tellers indeed provided more verifiable details (k = 28, d = 0.49, 95% CI [0.25; 0.74], BF10 = 93.28), and a higher proportion of verifiable...

Tearful crying is a ubiquitous and likely uniquely human phenomenon. The persistence of this behavior throughout adulthood has fascinated and puzzled many researchers. Scholars have argued that emotional tears serve an attachment function: Tears are thought to act as a social glue by triggering social support intentions. Initial experimental studie...

The picture superiority effect is particularly relevant in the context of memory detection. In the current study, participants encoded crime-related details and concealed them in a Concealed Information Test (CIT). Items were encoded and tested verbally or pictorially. Both the pilot study (N=73) and the preregistered study (N=158) showed evidence...

The picture superiority effect is particularly relevant in the context of memory detection. In the current study, participants encoded crime-related details and concealed them in a Concealed Information Test (CIT). Items were encoded and tested verbally or pictorially. Both the pilot study (N=73) and the preregistered study (N=158) showed evidence...

The Verifiability Approach predicts that truth tellers will include details that can be verified by the interviewer, whereas liars will refrain from providing such details. A meta-analysis revealed that truth tellers indeed provided more verifiable details (k = 28, d = 0.49, 95% CI [0.25; 0.74], BF10 = 93.28), and a higher proportion of verifiable...

Despite the theoretical importance and applied potential of situation modification as an emotion regulation strategy, empirical research on how people change situations to regulate their emotions is scarce. Meanwhile, existing paradigms typically allowed participants to avoid the entire situation, thus confounding situation modification with situat...

The reaction time‐based Concealed Information Test (RT‐CIT) has been used to judge the veracity of an examinees claim to be naïve by using RTs to test for recognition of relevant details. Here, we explore the validity of the RT‐CIT to generate new knowledge about the incident – the searching CIT. In a mock terrorism study (n = 60) the RT‐CIT not on...

Shalvi, Eldar, and Bereby-Meyer (2012) found across two studies (each N = 72) that time-pressure increased cheating. These findings suggest that dishonesty comes naturally, while honesty requires overcoming the initial tendency to cheat. While statistically significant, a Bayesian reanalysis indicates that the original results had low evidential st...

Nahari, Vrij, and Fischer (2014) found that, when participants were forewarned that their statements would be checked for verifiable details, truth tellers gave much more verifiable details than liars (d = 1.14 [95% CI: 0.49; 1.78]). In this direct replication (n = 72), all participants wrote a statement claiming they had carried out their regular...

Wrongful conviction cases indicate that not all confessors are guilty. However, there is currently no validated method to assess the veracity of confessions. In this preregistered study, we evaluate whether a new application of the Concealed Information Test (CIT) is a potentially valid method to make a distinction between true and false admissions...

Wrongful conviction cases indicate that not all confessors are guilty. However, there is currently no validated method to assess the veracity of confessions. In this preregistered study, we evaluate whether a new application of the Concealed Information Test (CIT) is a potentially valid method to make a distinction between true and false admissions...

Background: Deception detection is a prevalent problem for security practitioners. With a need for more large-scale approaches, automated methods using machine learning have gained traction. However, detection performance still implies considerable error rates. Findings from other domains suggest that hybrid human-machine integrations could offer a...

Tearful crying is a ubiquitous and mainly human phenomenon. The persistence of this behavior throughout adulthood has fascinated and puzzled many researchers. Scholars have argued that emotional tears serve an attachment function: Tears are thought to act as a social glue that binds individuals together and triggers social support intentions. Initi...

Shalvi, Eldar, and Bereby-Meyer (2012) found across two studies ( N = 72 for each) that time pressure increased cheating. These findings suggest that dishonesty comes naturally, whereas honesty requires overcoming the initial tendency to cheat. Although the study’s results were statistically significant, a Bayesian reanalysis indicates that they ha...

Tearful crying is a ubiquitous and mainly human phenomenon. The persistence of this behavior throughout adulthood has fascinated and puzzled many researchers. Scholars have argued that emotional tears serve an attachment function: Tears are thought to act as a social glue that binds individuals together and triggers social support intentions. Initi...

The reaction time-based Concealed Information Test (RT-CIT) has been used to judge the veracity of an examinees claim to be naïve about an incident by testing his/her memory of relevant details. Here, we explore the validity of the RT-CIT to generate new knowledge about the incident – the searching CIT. In a mock terrorism study (n = 60) the search...