Siegfried L. Sporer

University of Giessen | JLU · Department of Psychology and Sports Science

Long before experimental psychology, religious writers, orators, and playwrights described examples of lie detection based on the verbal content of statements. Legal scholars collected evidence from individual cases and systematized them as “rules of evidence”. Some of these resemble content cues used in contemporary research, while others point to...

Court instructions and public perception endorse that eyewitness evidence provided by police should weight more heavily than laypeople's in court. Evidence is inconsistent. The current experiment provides a nuanced analysis of identification performance of police and laypeople at different levels of confidence. Laypeople and advanced police trainee...

Objectives We conducted a meta-analysis to assess whether the construction of facial composites affects witnesses’ lineup identification decisions.Methods We located 23 studies (56 effects, 2276 participants). We consider effects of constructing composites on (a) correct identifications, and (b) incorrect identifications, from target-present lineup...

The history of the psychology of eyewitness testimony cannot be adequately understood without taking the respective legal systems, that is inquisitorial versus adversarial system, into account. Across all periods, questions regarding the accuracy of testimony, its suggestibility, and intentional distortions in false accusations become apparent. We...

Zusammenfassung In einer Zusammenschau dreier in englischsprachigen Fachzeitschriften publizierten Studien wurden die tatsächliche und die wahrgenommene Richtigkeit von Identifizierungsaussagen älterer und junger Augenzeugen verglichen. Die Studien wurden in ein integratives Modell von Augenzeugenaussagen und deren Evaluation eingebettet, das zwisc...

Although little known, the theoretical and methodological roots of lie detection, in particular of the development of the so-called "lie detector", must be placed in central Europe, in particular in Germany, Austria, and later in Italy at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. Focusing on Austria and Italy, we trace this development from Hans Gross...

For more than a century, verbal content cues to deception have been investigated to assess the credibility of statements in judicial contexts. Among the many cues investigated, Criteria-based Content Analysis (CBCA) and criteria based on the reality monitoring (RM) approach have been most prominent. However, research with these cues used as ‘tools’...

The own-ethnicity effect (OEE) is a recognition deficit for faces of other ethnic groups compared to one’s own group. Thirty-two border patrol (i.e., police) officers at a major international airport expected to have high frequency contact with multiple other ethnic group faces were compared with 32 bank employees and 64 students. German participan...

Eyewitnesses often create face likenesses, which are published in the hope that potential suspects will be reported to the police. Witnesses exposed to another witness's composite, however, may be positively or negatively influenced by such composites.. A good likeness may facilitate identification, but a bad likeness that resembles an innocent sus...

While age-related changes in memory have been well documented, findings about jurors’ perceptions of older witnesses are conflicting. We investigated the effect of victim age (25 vs. 75 years old) and crime severity (victim injured vs. not injured) on mock jurors’ decisions in a robbery trial. Jury-eligible participants (120 women; 84 men) read a m...

Denault, V., Plusquellec, P., Jupe, L. M., St-Yves, M., Dunbar, N. E., Hartwig, M., … van Koppen, P. J. (2020). L’analyse de la communication non verbale: Les dangers de la pseudoscience en contextes de sécurité et de justice [The analysis of nonverbal communication: The dangers of pseudoscience in security and justice contexts]. Revue internationa...

For security and justice professionals (e.g., police officers, lawyers, judges), the thousands of peer-reviewed articles on nonverbal communication represent important sources of knowledge. However, despite the scope of the scientific work carried out on this subject, professionals can turn to programs, methods, and approaches that fail to reflect...

Para los profesionales de la seguridad y la justicia (policías, abogados, jueces), los miles de artículos revisados por pares sobre comunicación no verbal representan fuentes importantes de conocimiento. Sin embargo, a pesar del alcance del trabajo científico realizado sobre este tema, los profesionales pueden recurrir a programas, métodos y enfoqu...

Since the late 1980s evidence has been accumulating that confidence recorded at the time of identification is a reliable postdictor of eyewitness identification. Nonetheless, there may be noteworthy exceptions. In a re-analysis of a field study by Sauerland and Sporer (2009; N = 720; n = 436 choosers between 15 and 83 years old) we show that the po...

The present meta-analysis investigated the influence of age on face recognition. A total of 19 studies with 79 comparisons of younger and older participants were included. Analyses revealed small to moderate effects for hits, and large effects for false alarms and signal detection theory (SDT) measures. Younger participants outperformed older parti...

The accuracy of an eyewitness statement depends to a large extent on the interviewing method used. Therefore, for several decades empirically tested interviewing techniques have been developed, in particular for vulnerable witnesses. In some cases witnesses may not tell the truth based on personally experienced events but give testimony about event...

In vast contrast to the multitude of lineup studies that report on the link between decision time, confidence, and identification accuracy, only a few studies looked at these associations for showups, with results varying widely across studies. We therefore set out to test the individual and combined value of decision time and post-decision confide...

CHAPTER 3 META-ANALYSIS SIEGFRIED L. SPORER AND LAWRENCE D. COHN Meta-analyses have become increasingly important in psychology and law to summarize research in the form of quantitative syntheses as a basis for policy making and for experts to present research findings in court. This chapter outlines the basic steps in conducting a meta-analysis, f...

This meta-analysis synthesizes research on interrater reliability of Criteria-Based Content Analysis (CBCA). CBCA is an important component of Statement Validity Assessment (SVA), a forensic procedure used in many countries to evaluate whether statements (e.g., of sexual abuse) are based on experienced or fabricated events. CBCA contains 19 verbal...

This study investigated persuasive effects of behavior cues on observers’ judgments of eyewitness identification decisions. Forty-eight positive identification statements (50% of which were objectively correct) were evaluated regarding witness likeability, trustworthiness, knowledge and impression of confidence. Moreover, ratings of different speec...

To explain fact finders' judgment accuracy when evaluating the accuracy of an identification decision we applied the Brunswikian lens model. Guided by this model we examined (a) which cues observers use to evaluate an identification decision and how they interpret them ("subjective utilities"); and (b) if these cues as perceived by observers are in...

In many crimes involving a weapon, witnesses report difficulties remembering the face of the perpetrator. In the current meta-analysis, we synthesized tests of the hypothesis that the presence of a weapon during commission of a crime negatively affects an eyewitness’s ability to later identify or describe the perpetrator (weapon focus effect: WFE)....

This meta-analysis examined whether training improves detection of deception. Overall, 30 studies (22 published and 8 unpublished; control-group design) resulted in a small to medium training effect for detection accuracy (k = 30, gu = 0.331) and for lie accuracy (k = 11, gu = 0.422), but not for truth accuracy (k = 11, gu = 0.060). If participants...

Recently, studies on deception and its detection have increased dramatically. Many of these studies rely on the “cognitive load approach” as the sole explanatory principle to understand deception. These studies have been exclusively on lies about negative actions (usually lies of suspects of [mock] crimes). Instead, we need to re-focus more general...

Are police officers better eyewitnesses than laypersons? We compared 96 experienced police officers and 96 laypersons regarding their memory for correct and false person, event, and crime scene details, as well as identification accuracy (using target-present or target-absent lineups). Police officers remembered more correct perpetrator details. La...

When witnesses report a crime, police usually ask for a description of the perpetrator. Several studies suggested that verbalising faces leads to a detriment in identification performance (verbal overshadowing effect [VOE]) but the effect has been difficult to replicate. Here, we sought to reverse the VOE by inducing context reinstatement as a syst...

This meta-analysis investigates linguistic cues to deception and whether these cues can be detected with computer programs. We integrated operational definitions for 79 cues from 44 studies where software had been used to identify linguistic deception cues. These cues were allocated to six research questions. As expected, the meta-analyses demonstr...

In 2 studies we evaluated the efficiency of training raters with a short version of the Aberdeen Report Judgment Scales (ARJS-STV-S) in assessing the truthfulness of transcribed accounts. Participants told both truthful and deceptive accounts of either illegal or immoral actions. In the truthful accounts, the participants described their own misdee...

Bei Personenidentifizierungen, bzw. dem Wiedererkennen von Gesichtern, liegt die Aufgabe darin, den Täter in einer späteren Wahlgegenüberstellung oder Lichtbildvorlage in einer größeren Anzahl von Personen/Gesichtern wiederzuerkennen. Mit voranschreitendem Alter scheint die Gedächtnisleistung nachzulassen, was auch das Wiedererkennen von Gesichtern...

This study aimed to establish the diagnostic value of multiple lineup decisions made for portrait, body, and profile lineups, including multiple target/suspect choices, rejections, foil choices, and don't know answers. A total of 192 participants identified a thief and a victim of theft from independent simultaneous target-present or target-absent...

Lie catchers are often barely better than chance. In this experiment, we investigated the influence of manipulated perceived familiarity with a situation that measured participants’ ability to correctly classify lies and truths. As expected, participants in the high-familiarity condition showed substantially (21%) greater classification accuracy fo...

The present study explores how well teacher trainees can detect liars. Moreover, a new method was applied to investigate beliefs that teacher trainees hold about liars. The results indicate that, overall, teacher trainees were not better than chance in detecting true and invented stories. Generally, participants reported to have used only a few cue...

Research syntheses suggest that verbal content cues are more diagnostic than other cues in discriminating between truth and deception. In many studies on content cues, raters are trained to rate the presence of specific content cues, an inherently subjective process. This necessitates to demonstrate inter-coder reliability first. Depending on the s...

Research syntheses suggest that verbal cues are more diagnostic of deception than other cues. Recently, to avoid human judgmental biases, researchers have sought to find faster and more reliable methods to perform automatic content analyses of statements. However, diversity of methods and inconsistent findings do not present a clear picture of effe...

Four experiments investigated the influence of situational familiarity within a judgmental context on the process of credibility attribution. We predicted that high familiarity with a situation would lead to higher efficacy expectations for, and a more pronounced use of, verbal information when making judgments of credibility. Under low situational...

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While recent research has shown that the accuracy of positive identification decisions can be assessed via confidence and decision times, gauging lineup rejections has been less successful. The current study focused on 2 different aspects which are inherent in lineup rejections. First, we hypothesized that decision times and confidence ratings shou...

In a study with 365 teacher students, 447 teacher trainees, and 123 teachers, the ability to detect students’ deception was tested. Participants judged the credibility of videotaped students who were accused of academic dishonesty (having cheated in a test). Half of these messages were actually true (students had not cheated on the test) and half o...

In 4 experiments, the authors investigated the influence of situational familiarity with the judgmental context on the process of lie detection. They predicted that high familiarity with a situation leads to a more pronounced use of content cues when making judgments of veracity. Therefore, they expected higher classification accuracy of truths and...

People recognize faces from their own ethnic group more accurately than faces from other ethnic groups. White German (WG) and Turkish participants living in Germany performed an old/new recognition test with faces from several ethnic groups. The presence or absence of external features (hair, face contour) and retention interval (immediate versus 3...

Drawing on theoretical insights from basic psychological research, influences sourced in unanticipated or extra-legal aspects of criminal cases that can influence sentencing decisions are reviewed. Findings from empirical studies of observed disparities in sentencing decisions are summarized, including archival data, observational studies, field re...

Basic assumptions of dual-process theories are used to explain the process of credibility attribution. Three experiments test the assumption that high task involvement leads to intensive processing of content information, whereas low task involvement leads to the use of noncontent information like source cues when people make credibility judgments....

The combined postdictive value of postdecision confidence, decision time, and Remember-Know-Familiar (RKF) judgments as markers of identification accuracy was evaluated with 10 targets and 720 participants. In a pedestrian area, passers-by were asked for directions. Identifications were made from target-absent or target-present lineups. Fast (optim...

The usefulness of multiple lineups was tested in a field experiment with nine different targets. Six hundred and forty-eight passers-by were asked for directions in the pedestrian zone of a university town. Subsequently, they were approached by a different person and asked to identify the target from portrait, body, and profile lineups. Additionall...

After 100 years of research I look back at the beginnings of the psychology of eyewitness testimony to assess the ‘progress’ researchers have made. Specifically, I review the origins of (experimental) psychological research at the first three decades of the 20th century in Central Europe which quickly expanded around the world. Both eyewitness erro...

It has been argued that the accessibility of persuasion motives elicits distrust in a communicator's underlying motives and leads to decreased persuasion success. However, this research highlights the fact that salient and positive communicator characteristics (here physical attractiveness) can temper consumers' attributions of selfish motives and...

Verbal descriptions can sometimes impair (or “overshadow”) and other times facilitate subsequent attempts at perceptual identification of faces; however, understanding the relationship between these two tasks and the theoretical mechanisms that bridge this relationship has often proven difficult. Furthermore, studies that have attempted to assess t...

In order to test rival theoretical accounts of the verbal overshadowing effect, participants (N=144) either gave no description or provided written descriptions after viewing a crime on video. Half of the describers reread their target descriptions prior to attempting to identify the thief either in a target-absent or target-present lineup 1 week l...

Three experiments were able to demonstrate the usefulness of dual-process models for the understanding of the process of credibility attribution. According to the assumptions of dual-process models, only high task involvement and high cognitive capacity leads to intensive processing of verbal and nonverbal information when making credibility judgme...

Miscarriages of justice frequently involve false identifications of a suspect by an eyewitness. Factors that influence identification performance can be classified into those at the perceptual phase (e.g., lightning conditions, distance), during the retention interval (e.g., length of delay, presence of a target description), and those at the lineu...

Post-decision confidence, decision time, and decision processes were evaluated concerning their usefulness for postdicting identification accuracy. One hundred and ninety-two participants witnessed a filmed theft and were tested with target-absent or target-present simultaneous lineups 1 week later. Post-decision confidence was positively associate...

Person descriptions by witnesses are an important part of police investigations. In most cases they precede a later person identification task. While some authors believe that verbalizing faces would lead to a detriment in identification performance (verbal overshadowing), the present study focused on potential benefits of reinstatement of context...

Numerous studies have demonstrated an out-group processing deficit for faces of other ethnic groups (“cross-race effect” or “own-race bias”). Most studies have employed Blacks, Asians, and Whites. This study employed a perceptual matching task to investigate the out-group processing deficit with 128 Turkish and 128 Austrian children between the age...

In many legal proceedings, fact finders scrutinize the demeanor of a defendant or witness, particularly his or her nonverbal behavior, for indicators of deception. This meta-analysis investigated directly observable nonverbal correlates of deception as a function of different moderator variables. Although lay people and professionals alike assume t...

The effect on the impact of a message of explicitly stating a desire to persuade can depend on the communicator's physical attractiveness. Experiment 1 confirmed this possibility. Attractive male and female salespersons induced more positive attitudes and stronger intentions to purchase a product when they explicitly stated their desire to influenc...

To examine personal and interpersonal reality monitoring, 240 participants wrote accounts of invented or self-experienced autobiographical events. Half the participants wrote about a distant event that happened before the age of 15 and half wrote about a recent event that happened after the age of 15. Using a yoked design, participants rated the qu...

This meta-analysis provides a quantitative synthesis of paraverbal indicators of deception as a function of different moderator variables. Of nine different speech behaviours analysed only two were reliably associated with deception in the weighted, and four in the analysis unweighted by sample size. Pitch, response latency and speech errors were p...

We examined the qualitative characteristics of genuine, imagined, and deceptive accounts of positive and negative childhood events. We investigated whether trained raters could discriminate between these accounts using the Memory Characteristics Questionnaire (MCQ; Johnson, Foley, Suengas, & Raye, 1988) and the Aberdeen Report Judgment Scales (ARJS...

One of the verbal approaches to the detection of deceit is based on research on human memory that tries to identify the characteristics that differentiate between internal and external memories (reality monitoring). This approach has attempted to extrapolate the contributions of reality monitoring (RM) research to the deception area. In this paper,...

Zusammenfassung: Wiederholt wurde gezeigt, dass Laien und ExpertInnen kaum uberzufallig haufig Lugen entdecken. Eine mogliche Erklarung besteht darin, dass stereotype Annahmen uber Lugenindikatoren nicht mit objektiven Indikatoren von Tauschung korrespondieren. Neuere Meta-Analysen wiesen nur geringe Zusammenhange zwischen non- und paraverbalen Ver...

Zusammenfassung: In zwei Experimenten wurden die Annahmen des Elaboration-Likelihood-Modells zum Einfluss der Urteilsrelevanz auf die Wahl der Verarbeitungsstrategie im Bereich der Glaubwürdigkeitsbeurteilung in Alltagssituationen überprüft. Experiment 1 konnte zeigen, dass Personen bei hoher Relevanz ihres Urteils die zentrale Route der Verarbeitu...

Research on eyewitness testimony has primarily focused on memory errors. In this chapter, the focus is not on eye-witness errors but on the application of Johnson and Raye's (1981) reality monitoring (RM) model to detection of deception. The central question is whether or not it is possible to discriminate truthful from deceptive statements on the...

Memory accuracy and confidence for details of an event were investigated as a function of three question forms (open-ended, true-false (T-F) and four-alternative-forced-choice (4-AFC) questions), type of content (action vs. descriptive details) and centrality of information (central vs. peripheral). Sixty-two undergraduates were shown a film of a r...