Ewout H Meijer

• PhD
• Maastricht University

Lie detection procedures are typically aimed at determining guilt or innocence of a single suspect. Serious security threats, however, often involve groups, such as terrorist networks or criminal organizations. In this report, we describe a variant of the skin conductance-based Concealed Information Test (CIT) that allows for the extraction of crit...

Since the 2001 attacks on the twin towers, policies on security have changed drastically, bringing about an increased need for tools that allow for the detection of deception. Many of the solutions offered today, however, lack scientific underpinning. We recommend two important changes to improve the (cost) effectiveness of security policy. To begi...

Over the last decade, Europe has seen a marked increase in the use of the polygraph for the detection of deception. Belgium and Finland nowadays regularly use polygraph tests in criminal investigations, and the United Kingdom and the Netherlands have adopted its use in the treatment and monitoring of sex offenders. Still, the use of the polygraph f...

The Concealed Information Test (CIT) uses psychophysiological measures to determine the presence or absence of crime-related information in a suspect's memory. We conducted a meta-analysis on the validity of the CIT based on four physiological measures-skin conductance response (SCR), respiration line length (RLL), changes in heart rate (HR), and e...

The detection of deception has attracted increased attention among psychological researchers, legal scholars, and ethicists during the last decade. Much of this has been driven by the possibility of using neuroimaging techniques for lie detection. Yet, neuroimaging studies addressing deception detection are clouded by lack of conceptual clarity and...

The Concealed Information Test (CIT) aims to extract concealed crime‐related knowledge using physiological measures. In the present study, we propose a new variant of the CIT that contains a continuously moving stimulus. A total of 81 participants were either informed or not about the specific location of an upcoming terrorist attack. The CIT consi...

Drawing on our experiences conducting replications we describe the lessons we learned about replication studies and formulate recommendations for researchers, policy makers, and funders about the role of replication in science and how it should be supported and funded. We first identify a variety of benefits of doing replication studies. Next, we a...

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...

Drawing on our experiences conducting replications we describe the lessons we learnt about replication studies and formulate recommendations for researchers, policy makers, and funders about the role of replication in science and how it should be supported and funded. We first identify a variety of benefits of doing replication studies. Next, we ar...

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...

Tactics recommended for rapport‐building consist of verbal (e.g., finding common ground or shared experiences) and non‐verbal (e.g., affirmations, displaying empathy) behaviours. Most of the research on rapport, however, has examined it in in‐person contexts, where both verbal and non‐verbal behaviours are present. In this study, we were interested...

The Forced Choice Test (FCT) can be used to detect concealed crime knowledge, but it requires more evidence than typically available from a crime to be constructed. We propose a method to repeat individual pieces of evidence to achieve the necessary test length, hence widening the practical applicability. According to our method, FCT trials are cre...

In a comparable truth baseline (CTB) a knowingly truthful baseline statement is compared to a statement of interest, and deviations in verbal details possibly indicate deceit. In two experiments, we investigated whether a CTB can improve truth/lie discrimination when verbal details are coded by independent raters (Experiment 1) and when judged by n...

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...

Research has consistently shown people predominantly rely on undiagnostic nonverbal cues when detecting deceit, whereas verbal cues are more accurate. In three Experiments we investigated whether the simple instruction not to focus on nonverbal cues would make people focus more on diagnostic verbal cues and hence more accurate in detecting lies. Pa...

Baselining – comparing the statements of interest to a known truthful statement by the same individual – has been suggested to improve lie detection accuracy. A potential downside of baselining is that it might influence the characteristics of a subsequent statement, as was shown in previous studies. In our first experiment we examined this claim b...

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...

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...

Legal evaluations of brain imaging-based memory detection typically take into account the voluntary nature of the test. In this chapter, we will discuss to what extent the legal arguments change if memory detection could be administered in other states of consciousness, specifically in sleeping participants. It is argued that the biological trace—i...

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...

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...

Emerging research on how suspects perceive the physical environment during investigative interviews yields contrasting findings. While previous studies have suggested that a room made to be physically comfortable may be optimal for interviewing suspects, another study found it can instead lead to higher suspicion of the investigator’s intentions. T...

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...

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...

To make veracity judgements in individual cases, practitioners may rely on baselining. That is, they may evaluate a statement relative to a baseline statement that is known to be truthful. We investigated whether a within-statement verbal baseline comparison could enhance discriminatory accuracy. Participants (n = 148) read an alibi statement of a...

The literature on information elicitation in psycholegal settings has predominantly focused on the investigator–interviewee dynamic, with little attention to the environment in which the interview takes place. The present study compared the impact of two interview locations on the disclosure of crime‐related information and perceptions of rapport b...

To what extent stereotypical deceptive behaviours such as gaze aversion and fidgeting actually influence people's credibility judgements remain largely unknown. In this study, we directly manipulated the presence/absence of such behaviours to investigate this. Participants were shown four truthful videos in which we manipulated the presence of ster...

Research consistently shows that truthful accounts are richer in detail than deceptive accounts. It is unknown, however, how interviewees strategically regulate the information they provide when their accounts contain both truthful and deceptive information. This study examined how truths and lies interact, and whether interviewees’ self-reported s...

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...

The foremost goal of conducting an investigative interview is to obtain as much accurate information as possible. To achieve this, investigators employ a variety of interviewing techniques. Kelly et al. (Psychol Public Policy Law 19:165–178, 2013) proposed a taxonomy interviewing techniques, grouping them into six domains (i.e., Rapport and Relatio...

When given the opportunity, liars will embed their lies into otherwise truthful statements. In what way this embedding affects the quality of lies, however, remains largely unknown. This study investigated whether lies that are embedded into truthful stories are richer in detail and contain higher quality details compared to lies that are part of e...

The present study investigated whether measurable verbal differences occur when people vocalize their true and false intentions. To test potential differences, we used an experimental set-up where liars planned a criminal act (i.e., installing a virus on a network computer) and truth-tellers a non-criminal act (i.e., installing a new presentation p...

Meta-analytic findings indicate that the success of unmasking a deceptive interaction relies more on the performance of the liar than on that of the lie detector. Despite this finding, the lie characteristics and strategies of deception that enable good liars to evade detection are largely unknown. We conducted a survey (n = 194) to explore the ass...

We examined the effects of cognitive load on the strategy selection in the Forced Choice Test (FCT) when used to detect hidden crime knowledge. Examinees (N = 120) with and without concealed knowledge from a mock crime were subjected to a FCT either under standard circumstances or cognitive load. Cognitive load was implemented through time pressure...

The present experiment investigated to what extent providing participants with a model statement influences the ability of the verifiability approach to detect deception. Participants gave a true and false statement about a negative autobiographical event, with half of the participants receiving a detailed model statement just before giving their s...

Purpose.The quality of information obtained from investigative interviews largely relies on the quality of communication between the interviewee and interviewer. One aspect of the communication process that has yet to be well examined is the environment in which the interviews take place. The present study examined the influence of physical spaciou...

Since its introduction into the field of deception detection, the verbal channel has become a rapidly growing area of research. The basic assumption is that liars differ from truth tellers in their verbal behaviour, making it possible to classify them by inspecting their verbal accounts. However, as noted in conferences and in private communication...

The Forced Choice Test (FCT) can be used to detect malingered loss of memory or sensory deficits. In this test, examinees are presented with two stimuli, one correct and one incorrect, in regards to a specific event or a perceptual discrimination task. The task is to select the correct answer alternative, or guess if it is unknown. Genuine impairme...

Srull and Wyer (1979) demonstrated that exposing participants to more hostility-related stimuli caused them subsequently to interpret ambiguous behaviors as more hostile. In their Experiment 1, participants descrambled sets of words to form sentences. In one condition, 80% of the descrambled sentences described hostile behaviors, and in another con...

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...

In forced‐choice tests (FCTs), examinees are typically presented with questions with two equally plausible answer alternatives, of which only one is correct. The rationale underlying this test is that guilty examinees tend to avoid relevant crime information, producing a nonrandom response pattern. The validity of FCTs is reduced when examinees are...

The foremost goal of an investigative interview is to obtain information from a suspect, witness, or source. Most of the literature on information disclosure during investigative interviews has focused on communication and the interpersonal dynamics between investigator and interviewee. Little attention has been given to the environment in which th...

Behavioural observation programmes are becoming increasingly popular at transportation hubs, sporting events, and other large crowd gatherings. Premise of these programmes is that malicious intention can be accurately deduced from observable behaviour. In a recent article published in this journal, Wijn et al. (2017, Legal and Criminological Psycho...

In this study, we investigated whether people who hold more correct beliefs about verbal cues to deception are also better lie detectors. We investigated police officers and undergraduates' beliefs about (i) cues to deception via an open-ended question and (ii) 17 specific verbal cues, after which participants were asked to judge the truthfulness o...

The Concealed Information Test (CIT) aims to detect the presence of crime-related information in memory. In two experiments, we examined the influence of stimulus emotionality on the outcomes of the CIT. In experiment 1, each participant was tested immediately or after one week, on a series of neutral and either negative arousing or negative non-ar...

In psychophysiological research, bootstrapping procedures are often used to classify individual participants. How many iterations are required for a reliable bootstrap test is not universally agreed upon. To investigate the number of iterations needed for a stable bootstrap estimate, we reanalyzed P300 data collected in concealed information test p...

Polygraph tests have been used to detect deception for almost a century. Yet for almost as long, the validity of these tests has been criticized. Over the last decade, the use of brain imaging – most notably fMRI - for the detection of deception has attracted increased attention. The expectation is that fMRI can overcome – at least some of - the sh...

The term dark triad refers to the constellation of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Over the past few years, the concept has gained momentum, with many researchers assuming that the dark triad is a prominent antecedent of transgressive and norm-violating behavior. Our purpose in this meta-analytic review was to evaluate (a) interrelat...

The Concealed Information Test (CIT) is a well-validated tool for physiological and behavioral detection of concealed knowledge. Two distinct theoretical frameworks have been proposed to explain the differential responses to the concealed critical items: orienting response theory versus arousal inhibition theory. klein Selle, Verschuere, Kindt, Mei...

The use of physiological signals to detect deception can be traced back almost a century. Historically, the polygraph has been used—and debated. This chapter discusses the merits of polygraph testing, and to what extent the introduction of measures of brain activity—most notably functional magnetic imaging (fMRI)—have solved the problems associated...

When passively attending to suspects, observers are poor at distinguishing lies from truths. Deception research has therefore shifted to examining interview styles aimed at eliciting and enhancing deception cues. Based upon a literature review and three empirical studies, ten Brinke et al. (2015) recommend increasing pressure on interviewees as it...

The present study investigated the beliefs of students and police officers about cues to deception. A total of 95 police officers and 104 undergraduate students filled out a questionnaire addressing beliefs about cues to deception. Twenty-eight verbal cues were included in the questionnaire, all extracted from verbal credibility assessment tools (i...

The Scientific Content Analysis (SCAN) is a verbal veracity assessment method that is currently used worldwide by investigative authorities. Yet, research investigating the accuracy of SCAN is scarce. The present study tested whether SCAN was able to accurately discriminate between true and fabricated statements. To this end, 117 participants were...

This study investigated the physiological, self-reported, and facial correlates of emotion regulation in psychopathy. Specifically, we compared psychopathic offenders (n = 42), nonpsychopathic offenders (n = 42), and nonoffender controls (n = 26) in their ability to inhibit and express emotion while watching affective films (fear, happy, and sad)....

Lying is typically more cognitively demanding than truth telling. Yet, recent cognitive models of lying propose that lying can be just as easy as truth telling, depending on contextual factors. In line with this idea, research has shown that the cognitive cost of deception decreases when people frequently respond deceptively, while it increases whe...

The Concealed Information Test (CIT) provides a valid tool for psychophysiological detection of concealed knowledge. However, its precise theoretical underpinnings remain a matter of debate. The differential physiological responses elicited by concealed, relevant items, relative to control items, were traditionally explained as reflecting an Orient...

The cognitive view on deception proposes that lying comes with a cognitive cost. This view is supported by the finding that lying typically takes longer than truth telling. Event-related potentials (ERPs) provide a means to unravel the cognitive processes underlying this cost. Using a mock-crime design, the current study (n=20) investigated the eff...

Palmatier and Rovner (2014) attempt to establish the construct validity of the Comparison Question Test (CQT) by citing extensive research ranging from modern neuroscience to memory and psychophysiology. In this comment we argue that merely citing studies on the preliminary process theory (PPT) of the orienting response (OR) or neuroimaging researc...

Of all deception detection tools, the polygraph has the longest tradition. Still, the use of the polygraph for the detection of deception has been debated in the scientific literature for almost as long as it exists. This chapter highlights the promises and perils of the use of the polygraph for the detection of deception. It first critically discu...

Lie detectors can be applied in a wide variety of settings. But this advantage comes with a considerable cost: False positives. The applicability of the Concealed Information Test (CIT) is More limited, yet when it can be applied, the risk of false accusations can be set a priori at a very low level. The CIT assesses the recognition of; critical in...

Verbal credibility assessment methods are frequently used in the criminal justice system to investigate the truthfulness of statements. Three of these methods are Criteria Based Content Analysis (CBCA), Reality Monitoring (RM), and Scientific Content Analysis (SCAN). The aim of this study is twofold. First, we investigated the diagnostic accuracy o...

Scientific Content Analysis (SCAN) is increasingly used by investigative authorities to evaluate the credibility of statements made by witnesses and suspects. SCAN, however, lacks a well-defined list of criteria, and does not involve a standardised scoring system. In the current study, we investigated which SCAN criteria are represented in actual s...

Evidence suggests that asymmetry in frontal electrical activity predicts responses to aversive experiences, such that higher left-sided activity might dampen responses to trauma reminders. We measured frontal asymmetry at rest and during viewing of a trauma film, and assessed startle responses to film-reminder images. To explore potential moderator...

Verbal credibility assessment encompasses several methods used to evaluate the credibility of statements by examining their content. In two experiments, we tested to what extent these methods are sensitive to contextual bias. Four statements were presented, although their context was manipulated by confronting raters with extra-domain information t...

Psychopathy is a disorder that is characterized by marked emotional deficiencies. Because previous studies suggest that an individual's sensitivity to bodily signals-or "interoceptive awareness"-is associated with various components of emotional functioning, the authors expected this capacity to be reduced in psychopathic individuals. Therefore, th...

In a recent issue of Cognitive Neurodynamics Farwell (Cogn Neurodyn 6:115-154, 2012) published a comprehensive tutorial review of the use of Event Related Brain Potentials (ERP) in the detection of concealed information. Farwell's review covered much of his own work employing his "brain fingerprinting" technology. All his work showed a 100 % accura...

Lie detection procedures typically aim at determining the guilt or innocence of a single suspect. The Concealed Information Test (CIT), for example, has been shown to be highly successful in detecting the presence or absence of crime-related information in a suspect’s memory. Many of today’s security threats, however, do not come from individuals,...

Emotional stimuli draw attention to such an extent that they hamper the processing of subsequent signals, a phenomenon termed emotion-induced blindness (EIB). As depersonalization is associated with self-reported attenuated emotional responses, the present study explored whether individuals scoring high on the Cambridge Depersonalization Scale (CDS...

A limited number of studies have shown that adults and adolescents with psychopathic traits suffer from emotional memory impairment. The present study examined whether this finding could be replicated in a sample of children between 8 and 12 years of age with callous-unemotional (CU) traits. Children with high CU traits (n=24) were compared with ch...

Het gebruik van de leugendetector is – ook in Nederland – aan een opmars bezig. Zo voert het in Markelo gevestigde bedrijf Legal Connections voor een kleine 600 euro met behulp van de professionele leugendetector een gedegen wetenschappelijk en betrouwbaar onderzoek uit. En dit onderzoek gebeurt niet door de minste: Onze universitair geschoolde pys...

A longstanding question in false memory research is whether children's implanted false memories represent actual memory traces or merely result from compliance. The current study examined this question using a response latency based deception task. Forty-five 8-year-old children received narratives about a true (first day at school) and false event...

Purpose. The concealed information test (CIT) is a polygraph test that assesses recognition of critical (e. g., crime) information. Laboratory studies showing stronger heart rate deceleration to concealed compared to control information indicate that the orienting response (OR) accounts for responding in the CIT. An important restriction to these f...

Overview: In this chapter, we will formulate guidelines on how to develop a good CIT. These guidelines are based upon empirical data from CIT research as well as on theory on memory and orienting. We will outline how best to formulate questions and answer alternatives, how to conduct, score, and report the outcomes of the test. If these guidelines...

This volume, focusing on memory detection, provides a comprehensive and updated review of the Concealed Information Test (CIT) from almost all aspects: the measures used for detecting concealed knowledge (behavioral, autonomic, and brain-related measures); the underlying theories that may account for the effects observed in the CIT; its usage in fo...

Traditional techniques for detecting deception, such as the 'lie-detector test' (or polygraph), are based upon the idea that lying is associated with stress. However, it is possible that people telling the truth will experience stress, whereas not all liars will. Because of this, the validity of such methods is questionable. As an alternative, a kn...

Bij hun opsporingswerk maken politie-mensen steeds vaker gebruik van verbale analysemethoden. Daarbij kijkt de rechercheur naar allerlei ken-merken van het verhaal dat de ver-dachte of getuige verteltt om zo de ge-loofwaardigheid ervan te kunnen peilen. Neem de verdachte die zegt: 'ik kwam op mijn werk en daarna was het geld weg.' Volgens zo'n meth...

Brain imaging studies suggest that truth telling constitutes the default of the human brain and that lying involves intentional suppression of the predominant truth response. By manipulating the truth proportion in the Sheffield lie test, we investigated whether the dominance of the truth response is malleable. Results showed that frequent truth te...

Lie detection procedures are typically aimed at determining whether a suspect is lying about a crime committed in the past. Recent threats of terrorism, however, have shifted attention away from solving old cases to preventing future crimes. In the experiment reported in this paper, we investigate whether a specific lie detection test, the Conceale...

We explored whether children's suggestion-induced omission errors are caused by memory erasure. Seventy-five children were instructed to remove three pieces of clothing from a puppet. Next, they were confronted with evidence falsely suggesting that one of the items had not been removed. During two subsequent interviews separated by one week, childr...

In two experiments, we investigated the role of mere recognition in a P300 based CIT. Mere recognition was isolated by having participants respond based on an irrelevant dimension of the stimuli. In Experiment 1 stimuli consisted of familiar and unfamiliar faces, with a dot placed on the left or the right cheek. Participants responded according to...

Symptom Validity Testing (SVT) has been proposed as a method to assess the veracity of claims of amnesia. Performance below chance levels on a forced choice task is indicative of malingering. Previous research has shown that the Symptom Validity Test is a promising challenge test: at levels of high specificity, it may detect approximately half of t...

Reducing recidivism is a central goal in the treatment of sex offenders. In Europe, there is an increased interest in using the polygraph ("lie detector") as a tool in the treatment and risk assessment of convicted sex offenders. This interest originated from optimistic reports by American clinicians who argued that polygraph testing in the treatme...

The P300 component of the ERP has often been suggested as a viable alternative to skin conductance response (SCR) in a concealed information test (CIT). Little is known, however, about the association between these two measures. In a mock crime study we simultaneously recorded skin conductance response (SCR) and midline EEG, while stimuli were pres...