Ronald Fisher

Florida International University | FIU · Department of Psychology

General Audience Summary Detecting lies about opinions can be important to detect for security reasons. The Devil’s Advocate Approach is aimed at detecting such lies: Interviewees are asked to explain the reasons why they have a certain opinion (eliciting-opinion request) and then asked to give reasons that go against their opinion (devil’s advocat...

People sometimes lie by omitting information. The information lie tellers then report could be entirely truthful. We examined whether the truthful information that lie tellers report in omission lies contains verbal cues indicating that the person is lying. We made a distinction between (i) essential information (events surrounding the omission) an...

Memory for prior contacts has several important applied implications, including contact tracing (for communicable diseases). Incomplete episodic memory reports, which occur across the developmental lifespan but are particularly relevant for children and older adults, may hamper such efforts. Prior research has shown that cognitively informed memory...

Researchers in legal psychology have conducted an abundance of tightlycontrolled, artificial laboratory studies in order to maximize internal validity.However, given the tradeoff between internal validity and ecological validity,the research often has low ecological validity, which discourages practitionersfrom adopting the scientific findings. We...

The verbal cues lie tellers spontaneously report during interviews are weak and unreliable (DePaulo et al., 20023; Vrij, Hartwig, & Granhag, 2019). Researchers therefore asked for interview protocols to be developed that would elicit such verbal cues (Vrij & Granhag, 2012). Ten years later several interview protocols have emerged (Vrij, Granhag et...

Previous research indicated that drawing is a strategic tool in investigations. However, little research has been conducted to determine how to introduce a sketch instruction into an investigative interview. The current experiment compared sketching and speaking separately (sketch-speak and speak-sketch conditions) with sketching and speaking synch...

Crimes and terror acts often entail people engaging repeatedly in one type of act (e.g., buying and selling weapons). However, research shows that it is often difficult to remember specific instances of repeated, similar acts. We examined 35 real-world investigations of terrorist acts in Israel in which informants were interviewed about repeated ev...

The field of psychology–law is extremely broad, encompassing a strikingly large range of topic areas in both applied psychology and experimental psychology. Despite the continued and rapid growth of the field, there is no current and comprehensive resource that provides coverage of the major topic areas in the psychology–law field. The Oxford Handb...

The field of psychology–law is extremely broad, encompassing a strikingly large range of topic areas in both applied psychology and experimental psychology. Despite the continued and rapid growth of the field, there is no current and comprehensive resource that provides coverage of the major topic areas in the psychology–law field. The Oxford Handb...

Practitioners ask whether verbal veracity cues are (i) diagnostic across populations and (i) resistant to countermeasures. We examined this by merging the three datasets reported by Vrij, Leal et al. (2020, 2022).Participants from Lebanon (n = 187), Mexico (n = 205) and South-Korea (n = 239) discussed a city-trip they had made (truth tellers, n = 3...

This article provides an overview of verbal lie detection research. This type of research began in the 1970s with examining the relationship between deception and specific words. We briefly review this initial research. In the late 1980s, Criteria-Based Content Analysis (CBCA) emerged, a veracity assessment tool containing a list of verbal criteria...

Interviewees sometimes deliberately omit reporting some information. Such omission lies differ from other lies because all the information interviewees present may be entirely truthful. Truth tellers and lie tellers carried out a mission. Truth tellers reported the entire mission truthfully. Lie tellers were also entirely truthful but left out one...

Adults’ claims of decades-old child maltreatment raise questions about how to obtain accurate memories about childhood events. In this study, adults who experienced a documented child maltreatment medical examination when they were 3 to 16 years old (Time 1) were interviewed 2 decades later (Time 2). The adults ( N = 115) were randomly assigned to...

In two experiments we examined whether lie tellers, after reading articles about the Model Statement interview tool and/or about the verbal cues complications, common knowledge details and self-handicapping strategies, can successfully use countermeasures by adjusting their statements so that they sound like truth tellers. We also examined whether...

Over the last 30 years deception researchers have changed their attention from observing nonverbal behaviour to analysing speech content. However, many practitioners we speak to are reluctant to make the change from nonverbal to verbal lie detection. In this article we present what practitioners believe is problematic about verbal lie detection: th...

Objectives To compare the efficacy of a psychologically-based contact tracing interview protocol to a control protocol that emulated current practices under both interviewer-led and self-led modalities. Methods This randomized controlled experiment utilized a 2 × 2 factorial design (Enhanced Cognitive protocol vs. Control protocol; Interviewer-led...

Often, a complainant’s testimony is the central element in proving a sexual assault case, because no other physical evidence exists. The chapter focuses on three behavioral characteristics that decision makers frequently rely upon to question the validity of a complainant’s memory: Omissions and inconsistencies in the complainant’s testimony, and t...

General Audience Summary Success in many criminal and non-criminal investigations depends on witnesses’ remembering and communicating information when interviewed. Investigators often do not consider cognitive processes, but instead, focus only on witnesses’ motivation to provide information. In the described study, we trained experienced Israeli i...

Information elicited from witnesses is critical to the fight against terrorism. We trained experienced Israeli intelligence investigators to use the Cognitive Interview (CI) technique to enhance witnesses’ reporting in real-world investigations of terrorism (e.g., stabbings). We examined 60 cases in which Jewish and Arab respondents (victims, witne...

Truth tellers sound more plausible than lie tellers. Plausibility ratings do not require much time or cognitive resources, but a disadvantage is that it is measured subjectively on Likert scales. The aim of the current paper was to understand if plausibility can be predicted by three other verbal veracity cues that can be measured objectively by co...

Cognitive Credibility Assessment (CCA) is a verbal lie detection tool consisting of several interview techniques. These techniques have been examined separately but never together. Reflecting the dynamic nature of CCA we combined several of the techniques (free recall followed by a model statement, followed by a reverse order instruction, and follo...

We examined how much information British and Arab truth tellers and lie tellers volunteer in an initial free narrative. Based on cultural differences in communication styles we predicted that British interviewees would report more details and more complications than Arab interviewees (culture main effect). We further predicted that truth tellers wo...

Background Lying through omitting information has been neglected in verbal lie detection research. The task is challenging: Can we decipher from the truthful information a lie teller provides that s/he is hiding something? We expected this to be the case because of lie tellers’ inclination to keep their stories simple. We predicted lie tellers to p...

In this article, we attempt to unravel the misconception about deception and nervous behavior. First we will cite research demonstrating that observers believe lie tellers display more nervous behaviors than truth tellers; that observers pay attention to nervous behaviors when they attempt to detect deception; and that lie tellers actually feel mor...

In a countermeasures experiment, we examined to what extent liars who learn about the Model Statement tool and about the proportion of complications (complications/complications + common knowledge details + self-handicapping strategies) can successfully adjust their responses so that they sound like truth tellers. Truth tellers discussed a trip the...

In none of the deception studies that used drawings to date, was the effect of sketching on both speech content and drawing content examined, making it unclear what the full potential is of the use of drawings as a lie detection tool. A total of 122 truth tellers and liars took part in the study who did or did not sketch while narrating their alleg...

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...

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...

Since interviewees typically say less when an interpreter is present, we examined whether this was caused by interpreters not interpreting everything interviewees says or by interviewees providing less information. We further examined (1) the effect of a model drawing on providing information and (2) the diagnostic value of total details and the pr...

The Cognitive Interview (CI) has been shown repeatedly to enhance witness recall of events. The current study examined two conspicuous holes in the CI literature: (a) whether the CI improves witness descriptions specifically of a perpetrator's appearance; and (b) whether CI-elicited perpetrator descriptions help investigators to find the perpetrato...

Research has indicated that police may not receive enough training in interviewing cooperative witnesses, specifically in use of the cognitive interview (CI). Practically, for the CI to be effective in real‐world investigations, police investigators must be trained by law enforcement trainers. We conducted a three‐phase experiment to examine the fe...

We have been reliably informed by practitioners that police officers and intelligence officers across the world have started to use the Model Statement lie detection technique. In this article we introduce this technique. We describe why it works, report the empirical evidence that it works, and outline how to use it. Research examining the Model S...

Abstract: Lawyers use forceful questioning strategies during cross-examination to make witnesses appear to be less credible (they have a “weak” memory). Participants heard a 30-word list read one (poor encoding) or three times, (good encoding). At recall, participants were instructed to be very certain that the reported word was on the list, or we...

This is a Supplemental Disclosure Statement to the following published article: Willén, R. M., Granhag, P. A., Strömwall, L. A., & Fisher, R. P. (2015). Facilitating particularisation of repeated similar events with context-specific cues. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 56, 28-37. DOI: 10.1111/sjop.12180

We examined whether speech-related differences between truth tellers and liars are more profound when answering unexpected questions than when answering expected questions. We also examined whether the presence of an interpreter affected these results. In the experiment, 204 participants from the United States (Hispanic participants only), Russia,...

Witness reports are vital for solving crime, yet police and other investigators receive relatively little training on how to interview witnesses and victims. As a consequence, police interviewers often elicit less information from witnesses than is potentially available. We describe here an interview protocol, the Cognitive Interview (CI), based on...

General Audience Summary We tested the effect of sketching while providing a narrative on obtaining information from truth-tellers and liars in interpreter-absent and interpreter-present interviews. We hypothesized that sketching while narrating would lead to more new information than just narrating, particularly in truth-tellers. Sketching while n...

Proponents of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ in the United States have claimed that such methods are necessary for obtaining information from uncooperative terrorism subjects. In the present article, we offer an informed, academic perspective on such claims. Psychological theory and research shows that harsh interrogation methods are ineffecti...

We introduce ‘arousal based’ lie detection tools (the Behavior Analysis Interview, the Comparison Question polygraph Test, CQT) and ‘cognition based’ lie detection tools (imposing cognitive load, encouraging interviewees to say more, asking unexpected questions, Strategic Use of Evidence, Verifiability Approach and Concealed Information polygraph T...

This section of JARMAC includes a series of commentaries on articles published in the September, 2015, special issue of JARMAC: “Modeling and aiding intuition in organizational decision making” (Marewski & Hoffrage, 2015). The commentaries focus on research programs such as naturalistic decision making, heuristics-and-biases, ACT-R, and CLARION. Th...

Dishonesty is ubiquitous in our world. The news is frequently filled with high-profile cases of corporate fraud, large-scale corruption, lying politicians, and the hypocrisy of public figures. On a smaller scale, ordinary people often cheat, lie, misreport their taxes, and mislead others in their daily life. Despite such prevalence of cheating, cor...

Witness evidence often plays a vital role in the investigative process. This chapter focuses on the initial contact with the witness. We explore what type of information is typically sought at this first point of police contact and how the goals of eliciting information at an early stage of an investigation differ from the goals of subsequent inter...

IntroductionThis article provides a meta-analysis of a new, cognitive approach to (non-)verbal lie detection. This cognitive lie detection approach consists of three techniques: (1) imposing cognitive load, (2) encouraging interviewees to say more, and (3) asking unexpected questions.MethodA meta-analysis was carried out on studies using the cognit...

Forensic investigations are an attempt to recreate a criminal incident in order to understand the truth about what happened and who was involved. The goal of any successful investigation is for the police to apprehend the perpetrators and gather sufficient reliable evidence for legal proceedings. At the outset, witness evidence often directs the en...

We examined the effect of deliberate mimicry on eliciting (accurate) information and cues to deceit. Mimicry is considered to facilitate cooperation and compliance in truth tellers, whereas liars are constrained to provide detail. We therefore expected truth tellers to be more detailed than liars, particularly after being mimicked. A total of 165 p...

Laboratory research and field research have reliably shown that the cognitive interview (CI) enhances eyewitness recall in comparison with standard interview protocols in a criminal investigation context. To address some of the major criticisms of the existing CI literature, the current experiment compared the CI with the Federal Law Enforcement Tr...

Two experiments tested mnemonics for enhancing memory for family meeting occurrences and details. Experiment 1 tested a set of seven mnemonics to facilitate recollections of family meeting occurrences. Mnemonics helped respondents report 70% more event occurrences than were reported during unaided free recall. Experiment 2 tested (i) a revised set...

A common strategy in interviewing is to repeatedly focus on the same topics, for example by asking to recall an event first in chronological order and then in reverse order. We examined the effect of changing interviewers between the two questions or keeping the same interviewers throughout on cues to deception. Truth tellers may be most encouraged...

Ninety-five dental care patients participated in a quasi-experiment in which they were interviewed twice about dental visits they had made during the past ten years. Objective truth was established by analysing their dental records. The main purpose of the study was to investigate to what extent context-specific cues could facilitate particularisat...

Interviews are an important part of investigations, as the information obtained from interviewees generates leads and evidence. However, for several psychological reasons, even cooperative victims and witnesses do not spontaneously report all the information they know, and their accounts may incorporate errors. Further, suspects often deliberately...

Background The present experiment examined how the presence of an interpreter during investigative interviews affects eliciting information, cues to deceit and rapport.MethodA total of 60 native English speakers were interviewed in English and 183 non-native English speakers were interviewed in English (a foreign language) or through an interpreter...

Evidence-gathering begins at the scene of an incident. Available witnesses may be asked to provide an account of what happened, either in response to an open request for information or, in some regions, by completing a Self-Administered Interview (SAI©). In both cases, an investigative interview may be conducted at some later date. This study sough...

SUMMARY According to the verifiability approach, liars tend to provide details that cannot be checked by the investigator and awareness of this increases the investigator's ability to detect lies. In the present experiment, we replicated previous findings in a more realistic paradigm and examined the vulnerability of the verifiability approach to c...

Taking an immediate recall test prior to misinformation exposure can increase eyewitness suggestibility-a finding termed retrieval-enhanced suggestibility. Here, we examined whether retrieval-enhanced suggestibility would occur when participants were administered an immediate Cognitive Interview (CI). The CI is an investigative interviewing techniq...

When eyewitnesses and criminal suspects change their sworn testimony, their credibility is challenged, either because inconsistent testimony is a sign that people have poor memories or because they are deceptive and can't keep their story straight. As reviewed below, inconsistency is the most often cited reason for discrediting others (e.g., Brewer...

Interviewing witnesses In Hollywood movies and television programs, investigators solve crimes by conducting hi-tech analyses of spent bullets, blood stains, barely visible fingerprints and fingernails, and other such exotic sources; in reality, police solve crimes more mundanely, by interviewing cooperative witnesses and asking, “What happened?” H...

Subjects listened to paired comparisons that conformed to an underlying order or theme (cf. Potts, 1975). Immediately afterward or 30 min later, either temporal or thematic cues were given for recall of these items. Typical serial position effects were found only for temporally cued recall. By comparison, position along the underlying theme affecte...

Background. We examined the effect of a second interviewer's demeanour on cues to deception. We predicted that a supportive demeanour would be the most beneficial for eliciting verbal cues to deceit, as it would encourage truth tellers, but not liars, to say more. In addition, we examined the extent to which interviewees deliberately made eye conta...

We examined the effect of (i) a second interviewer's demeanour and (ii) asking expected and unexpected questions on cues to deception. We predicted that liars compared with truth tellers would provide more detail to expected questions and less detail to unexpected questions, particularly when the second interviewer is supportive. Liars prepare answ...

Deception research regarding insurance claims is rare but relevant given the financial loss in terms of fraud. In Study 1, a field study in a large multinational insurance fraud detection company, truth telling mock claimants (N = 19) and lying mock claimants (N = 21) were interviewed by insurance company telephone operators. These operators classi...

Background We examined the hypothesis that liars will report their activities strategically and will, if possible, avoid mentioning details that can be verified by the investigator. MethodA total of 38 participants wrote a statement in which they told the truth or lied about their activities during a recent 30-minute period. Two coders counted the...

In two experiments, we tested the hypotheses that (i) the difference between lying and truth telling will be greater when respondents report their stories in reverse order than in chronological order, and (ii) instructing respondents to recall their stories in reverse order will facilitate detecting deception. In Experiment 1, 31 professionals told...

Two studies investigated whether an early recall opportunity, in the form of a self-administered interview (SAI), reduced forgetting and protected against the negative consequences of post-event misinformation. In both studies, participants viewed a simulated crime on DVD after which half immediately recorded their statement by using the SAI, where...

The present experiment examined the role of cognitive flexibility in the consistency of truth tellers' and liars' reports. We expected liars to be less flexible (less able to report an experience in different ways) and hence less consistent than truth tellers when asked to describe an event in different ways (e.g. verbally and pictorially). In the...

In the present experiment 17 truth tellers and 16 liars were asked to verbally describe and sketch their workplace. We measured (i) the amount of detail included in the verbal description/sketch; (ii) the plausibility of the verbal description/sketch; (iii) the number of people verbally described/sketched; and (iv) the level of detail in which thes...

Considerable research shows that scientifically based interviewing techniques (e.g. the Cognitive Interview) increase the quality and quantity of witness recall compared to typical police interviewing guidelines. In an effort to improve witness evidence, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) recommended guidelines for conducting witness interview...

Purpose. Most past research on detecting deception has relied on the assumption that liars often fabricate a story to account for their whereabouts, whereas truth tellers simply recall an autobiographical memory. However, little research has examined whether liars, when free to choose the topic of their own reports, will actually choose to fabricat...

Purpose – Industrial incident investigations determine what caused an adverse workplace event so that preventative measures can be instituted and reduce the risk of such incidents happening again. Investigators gather evidence from multiple sources in an investigation and one such source is the people in, or around, the industrial incident. The pur...

The Self-Administered Interview (SAI©) is a tool designed to elicit a comprehensive initial account from witnesses at the scene of an incident or shortly thereafter to inoculate against the loss of information associated with delayed interview. Drawing on the principles of the Cognitive Interview (CI), the SAI© provides witnesses with a series of i...

Although memory deteriorates over time, people may be able to maintain high accuracy by metacognitively monitoring the quality of their memories and strategically controlling their memory reports. We test two mechanisms of metacognitive control: Exercising a report option (withholding uncertain responses) and adjusting response precision (providing...

We examined a common, but understudied phenomenon: Assessing interviewees' truthfulness when they attempt to conceal their knowledge about another person. We argue that this should be mentally taxing because truthful answers are activated automatically, and hence, need to be suppressed when liars conceal their knowledge. Participants were shown thr...

Purpose. Consistency as a cue to detecting deception was tested in two experiments using sketch drawing and verbal reports in repeated interviews. Liars were expected to be less consistent than truth‐tellers. Methods. In Expt 1, 80 undergraduate students reported truthfully or deceptively about an alleged lunch date – they sketched the layout of th...

Police interviews of witnesses are critical for solving crimes, yet police are poorly trained and often make mistakes when interviewing witnesses who are cooperative. To overcome this limitation, researchers have developed the cognitive interview (CI), which incorporates principles of cognitive and social psychology in a face-to-face interview form...

We tested the accuracy of thermal imaging as a lie detection tool in airport screening. Fifty-one passengers in an international airport departure hall told the truth or lied about their forthcoming trip in an interview. Their skin temperature was recorded via a thermal imaging camera. Liars' skin temperature rose significantly during the interview...

We tested the accuracy of Scientific Content Analysis (SCAN), a verbal lie detection tool that is used world-wide by federal law enforcement and military agencies. Sixty-one participants were requested to write down the truth, an outright lie or a concealment lie about activities they had just completed. The statements were coded with SCAN and with...

This study examined whether showing jurors a video of the witness's initial attempts to describe and identify the perpetrator would facilitate jurors' ability to discriminate between accurate and inaccurate witnesses. Mock jurors observed a simulated trial in which the key witness testified under direct examination and cross-examination. The jurors...

Police officers receive little or no training to conduct interviews with cooperative witnesses, and as a result they conduct interviews poorly, eliciting less information than is available and providing little support to assist victims overcome psychological problems that may have arisen from the crime. We analyze the components of a typical police...

We examined the efficacy of a new approach to detect truths and lies in expressing opinions: the Devil's Advocate approach. Interviewees are first asked an opinion eliciting question that asks participants to argue in favour of their personal view. This is followed by a Devil's Advocate question that asks participants to argue against their persona...

In two experiments, we tested the hypotheses that (a) the differences in nonverbal and verbal behaviour between liars and truth tellers will be greater when interviewees are instructed to maintain eye contact with the interviewer than when no instruction is given, and (b) instructing interviewees to maintain eye contact with the interviewer will fa...

Police interviews of witnesses are critical for solving crimes, yet police are poorly trained and often make mistakes when interviewing witnesses who are cooperative. To overcome this limitation, researchers have developed the cognitive interview (CI), which incorporates principles of cognitive and social psychology in a face-to-face interview form...

Detecting deception on concern-based techniques yields woefully poor performance. Therefore, we proposed another approach to discriminate between liars and truth tellers on the basis of analyses showing that lying can be more mentally taxing than truth telling. The aim is to magnify the differences between liars and truth tellers in situations in w...

Ten minutes after witnessing a bank robbery, Ms. Barnes is interviewed by the first police officer on the scene. She describes the robber as a white male, clean-shaven, medium height, husky, wearing sunglasses and a baseball hat. Three months later, Ms. Barnes is deposed by the defense attorney, and she is asked again to describe the robber. This t...

Professionals typically use verbal, nonverbal or physiological lie detection tools (Vrij, 2008). There are several drawbacks associated with such tools. First, many tools are complicated to use and it can take several months to train someone properly in their use (Vrij, 2008). Second, the actual application of such tools can be time consuming. For...

Given the crucial role of eyewitness evidence, statements should be obtained as soon as possible after an incident. This is not always achieved due to demands on police resources. Two studies trace the development of a new tool, the Self-Administered Interview (SAI), designed to elicit a comprehensive initial statement. In Study 1, SAI participants...

We present two lie detection approaches based on cognitive theory. The first approach, ‘measuring cognitive load’, assumes that the mere act of lying generates observable signs of cognitive load. This is the traditional cognitive lie detection approach formulated by Zuckerman, DePaulo, & Rosenthal (1981). The second approach, ‘imposing cognitive lo...

In the present experiment, police officers attempted to detect truths and lies told by suspects in their police interviews in three different ways: They either saw the suspects (visual condition), only heard the suspects (audio condition) or both saw and heard the suspects (control condition). Research has demonstrated that vocal and speech-related...

A single study tested the hypothesis that simulated practice interviews for investigative interviewers of children are more effective when the role of the child respondent is played by trained actors (i.e., postgraduate psychology students) than untrained fellow participants (i.e., child protection workers). The interviewers included 50 child prote...

We hypothesised that the responses of pairs of liars would correspond less with each other than would responses of pairs of truth tellers, but only when the responses are given to unanticipated questions. Liars and truth tellers were interviewed individually about having had lunch together in a restaurant. The interviewer asked typical opening ques...

Previous research has shown that suspects in real-life interviews do not display stereotypical signs of nervous behaviours, even though they may be experiencing high detection anxiety. We hypothesised that these suspects may have experienced cognitive load when lying and that this cognitive load reduced their tonic arousal, which suppressed signs o...

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