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'You caught 'em!' . . . or not? Feedback affects investigators' recollections of speech cues thought to signal honesty and deception
Abstract
Purpose. When eyewitnesses to crime receive feedback about their choice of a suspect from a line-up (or post-identification feedback), such information can substantially alter their recollections of the witnessing experience. This study examined whether feedback exerts similar effects on investigators’ recollections of a suspect's behaviours.
Methods. Participant-investigators received training on speech cues that they were told, when present in a speaker's account, signal either honesty or deception. After hearing a suspect's account of a theft, participants decided whether the suspect was lying or telling the truth. One-third of participants subsequently received immediate confirming feedback about their performance, while another third received disconfirming feedback. The remaining one-third of participants did not receive feedback about their decision. Finally, participants rated the frequencies of speech cues that they had been instructed to detect in the suspect's account.
Results. Disconfirming feedback significantly altered retrospective judgments about the characteristics of the suspect's account. Specifically, when told that the decision they made about the speaker's credibility was incorrect, participants judged the speaker as having exhibited fewer behaviours consistent with the credibility decision they had made, relative to those who either received no feedback or confirming feedback.
Conclusions. Biases in recollections of a suspect may have consequences in real-world interrogations wherein investigators assess credibility on the basis of numerous behavioural cues. Results are discussed in light of findings of post-identification feedback studies on eyewitnesses.
... Deceptive individuals provided irrelevant details to increase their credibility or conceal their involvement in a crime ─ as opposed to conveying actual events in a truthful manner (Adams and Harpster, 2008;Boydell et al., 2013). Extraneous information was a significant indicator of guilt. ...
Purpose
This paper reviews an array of psycholinguistic techniques that auditors can deploy to explore written and oral language for signs of deception. The review is drawn upon to propose some elements of a forward research agenda.
Design/methodology/approach
Relevant literature across several disciplines is identified through key word searches of major bibliographic databases.
Findings
The techniques highlighted have considerable potential for use by auditors to identify audit contexts which merit closer audit investigation. However, the techniques need further contextual empirical investigation in audit contexts. Seven specific propositions are presented for empirical testing.
Originality/value
This paper assembles literature on deceptive communication from a wide range of disciplines, and relates it to the audit context. Auditors’ attention is directed to potential linguistic signals of fraud risk, and opportunities for future research are suggested. The paper is consciousness-raising, has pedagogic purpose, and suggests critical elements for a future research agenda.
... Such cognitive limitations compromise both the interview itself and post-interview judgements regarding the likelihood of a suspect's guilt or innocence. Interviewers' memories of the number of cues expressed at interview can be distorted by incriminating or exculpating feedback later received (Boydell, Barone, & Read, 2013), and this may affect subsequent interactions with the suspect as well as decisions regarding their honesty. This illustrates the ease at which judgements of deception are contaminated. ...
As an accurate measure of true autobiographical memories, the Autobiographical Implicit Association Test (aIAT) was initially advocated as a promising lie detection tool to supplement investigative interviews. The validity of the test has subsequently been questioned due to its susceptibility to faking, however no strategies have been developed to make the aIAT more resistant to manipulation. The present research adopted a cognitive load approach to prevent or reveal faking. Subjects performed a secondary memorisation task alongside the aIAT to increase cognitive load. The ability to manipulate the test outcome was unaffected, however fakers showed significantly poorer recognition performance in the memorisation task and were slower overall compared to truth-tellers. Introducing a response deadline reduced the percentage of subjects who could fake the aIAT from 69% to 35%, however this was at the expense of closing the gap in recognition performance between the two groups. Both interventions were therefore individually, but not simultaneously successful. These findings provide preliminary evidence that the aIAT can be modified to impede faking and demonstrate that the cognitive load approach to deception detection can be successfully implemented in an objective lie detection measure. However, the modifications tested may be inappropriate for the practical application of the aIAT and ample research is required before the test could be recommended for use in legal proceedings.
... Of interest, research also suggests that people have an implicit understanding of the value of language. Students tend to rely more on language than other domains when making judgments of guilt (Boydell, Barone, & Read, 2013;Peace & Sinclair, 2012), and they are better at distinguishing true and false confessions from nuances in verbal rather than nonverbal behavior (Willén & Strömwall, 2012). Taken together, this research suggests that language is likely to play an important role in driving the unfolding interactions of interrogations. ...
This research examined the coordination of interrogator and suspects' verbal behavior in interrogations. Sixty-four police interrogations were examined at the aggregate and utterance level using a measure of verbal mimicry known as Language Style Matching. Analyses revealed an interaction between confession and the direction of language matching. Interrogations containing a confession were characterized by higher rates of the suspect matching the interrogators' language style than interrogations without a confession. A sequence analysis of utterance-level Language Style Matching revealed a divergence in the type of matching that occurred across outcome. There was a linear increase in interrogator-led matching for interrogations containing a confession and an increase in suspect-led matching for nonconfession interrogations. These findings suggest that police interrogations play out, in part, at the basic level of language coordination. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).
People viewed a security video and tried to identify the gunman from a photospread. The actual gunman was not in the photospread and all eyewitnesses made false identifications (n = 352). Following the identification, witnesses were given confirming feedback ("Good, you identified the actual suspect"), disconfirming feedback ("Actually, the suspect is number _"), or no feedback. The manipulations produced strong effects on the witnesses' retrospective reports of (a) their certainty, (b) the quality of view they had. (c) the clarity of their memory, (d) the speed with which they identified the person, and (e) several other measures. Eyewitnesses who were asked about their certainty prior to the feedback manipulation (Experiment 2) were less influenced, but large effects still emerged on some measures. The magnitude of the effect was as strong for those who denied that the feedback influenced them as it was for those who admitted to the influence.
The question of whether discernible differences exist between liars and truth tellers has interested professional lie detectors and laypersons for centuries. In this article we discuss whether people can detect lies when observing someone's nonverbal behavior or analyzing someone's speech. An article about detecting lies by observing nonverbal and verbal cues is overdue. Scientific journals regularly publish overviews of research articles regarding nonverbal and verbal cues to deception, but they offer no explicit guidance about what lie detectors should do and should avoid doing to catch liars. We will present such guidance in the present article. The article consists of two parts. The first section focuses on pitfalls to avoid and outlines the major factors that lead to failures in catching liars. Sixteen reasons are clustered into three categories: (a) a lack of motivation to detect lies (because accepting a fabrication might sometimes be more tolerable or pleasant than understanding the truth), (b) difficulties associated with lie detection, and (c) common errors made by lie detectors. We will argue that the absence of nonverbal and verbal cues uniquely related to deceit (akin Pinocchio's growing nose), the existence of typically small differences between truth tellers and liars, and the fact that liars actively try to appear credible contribute to making lie detection a difficult task. Other factors that add to difficulty is that lies are often embedded in truths, that lie detectors often do not receive adequate feedback about their judgments and therefore cannot learn from their mistakes, and that some methods to detect lies violate conversation rules and are therefore difficult to apply in real life. The final factor to be discussed in this category is that some people are just very good liars. The common errors lie detectors make that we have identified are examining the wrong cues (in part, because professionals are taught these wrong cues); placing too great an emphasis on nonverbal cues (in part, because training encourages such emphasis); tending to too-readily interpret certain behaviors, particularly signs of nervousness, as diagnostic of deception; placing too great an emphasis on simplistic rules of thumb; and neglecting inter- and intrapersonal differences. We also discuss two final errors: that many interview strategies advocated by police manuals can impair lie detection, and that professionals tend to overestimate their ability to detect deceit. The second section of this article discusses opportunities for maximizing one's chances of detecting lies and elaborates strategies for improving one's lie-detection skills. Within this section, we first provide five recommendations for avoiding the common errors in detecting lies that we identified earlier in the article. Next, we discuss a relatively recent wave of innovative lie-detection research that goes one step further and introduces novel interview styles aimed at eliciting and enhancing verbal and nonverbal differences between liars and truth tellers by exploiting their different psychological states. In this part of the article, we encourage lie detectors to use an information-gathering approach rather than an accusatory approach and to ask liars questions that they have not anticipated. We also encourage lie detectors to ask temporal questions-questions related to the particular time the interviewee claims to have been at a certain location-when a scripted answer (e.g., "I went to the gym") is expected. For attempts to detect lying about opinions, we introduce the devil's advocate approach, in which investigators first ask interviewees to argue in favor of their personal view and then ask them to argue against their personal view. The technique is based on the principle that it is easier for people to come up with arguments in favor than against their personal view. For situations in which investigators possess potentially incriminating information about a suspect, the "strategic use of evidence" technique is introduced. In this technique, interviewees are encouraged to discuss their activities, including those related to the incriminating information, while being unaware that the interviewer possesses this information. The final technique we discuss is the "imposing cognitive load" approach. Here, the assumption is that lying is often more difficult than truth telling. Investigators could increase the differences in cognitive load that truth tellers and liars experience by introducing mentally taxing interventions that impose additional cognitive demand. If people normally require more cognitive resources to lie than to tell the truth, they will have fewer cognitive resources left over to address these mentally taxing interventions when lying than when truth telling. We discuss two ways to impose cognitive load on interviewees during interviews: asking them to tell their stories in reverse order and asking them to maintain eye contact with the interviewer. We conclude the article by outlining future research directions. We argue that research is needed that examines (a) the differences between truth tellers and liars when they discuss their future activities (intentions) rather than their past activities, (b) lies told by actual suspects in high-stakes situations rather than by university students in laboratory settings, and (c) lies told by a group of suspects (networks) rather than individuals. An additional line of fruitful and important research is to examine the strategies used by truth tellers and liars when they are interviewed. As we will argue in the present article, effective lie-detection interview techniques take advantage of the distinctive psychological processes of truth tellers and liars, and obtaining insight into these processes is thus vital for developing effective lie-detection interview tools.
Lineups and photospreads can be biased against a criminal suspect and there is a need to measure this bias. The mock witness method has been accepted by eyewitness scientists since the 1970s as the paradigm for generating the data on which various metrics of bias are based. We note the reasons that structural lineup bias can lead to mistaken identification and we discuss the statistical metrics that are proposed to measure the degree of bias. Using mock witness data, we show that estimates of bias can vary as a function of the question asked of the mock witnesses. In addition, we note various lineup biases that are not measured with the mock witness paradigm, such as procedural biases and problems with propitious heterogeneity. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Deception research has consistently shown that accuracy rates tend to be just over fifty percent when accuracy rates are averaged across truthful and deceptive messages and when an equal number of truths and lies are judged. Breaking accuracy rates down by truths and lies, however, leads to a radically different conclusion. Across three studies, a large and consistent veracity effect was evident. Truths are most often correctly identified as honest, but errors predominate when lies are judged. Truth accuracy is substantially greater than chance, but the detection of lies was often significantly below chance. Also, consistent with the veracity effect, altering the truth‐lie base rate affected accuracy. Accuracy was a positive linear function of the ratio of truthful messages to total messages. The results show that this veracity effect stems from a truth‐bias, and suggest that the single best predictor of detection accuracy may be the veracity of message being judged. The internal consistency and parallelism of overall accuracy scores are also questioned. These findings challenge widely held conclusions about human accuracy in deception detection.
This article reviews principles of effective training (Beebe, Mottet, & Roach, 2004), explicates the strengths and weaknesses of deception detection training research, and proposes a research agenda for deception detection training within the law enforcement context. Overall, deception detection training studies to-date fail to follow principles of effective training. Trainee needs are not assessed, training content is lacking, and the trainer and trainee engage in passive roles. A model is proposed with the aim of provid- ing a conceptual framework for thinking about deception detection training and estab- lishing a research agenda for future studies. In particular, it extends previously suggested changes to deception detection training research (Frank & Feeley, 2003), applies princi- ples of effective training methods (Beebe et al., 2004), and calls for a context-dependent (Flyvbjerg, 2001) shift in deception detection training studies. Law enforcement officers are confronted with making judgments of truth and deception on a daily basis. They decide on the veracity of claims about the whereabouts of suspects, who physically assaulted whom, if someone is using or selling drugs, among hundreds of other situations. The decisions law enforce- ment officers make regarding the truth of a suspect's statement have potentially tremendous consequences. Whether or not an of- ficer believes a victim's statement at a crime scene may dictate if
People viewed a security video and tried to identify the gunman from a photospread. The actual gunman was not in the photospread and all eyewitnesses made false identifications (
n = 352). Following the identification, witnesses were given confirming feedback ("Good, you identified the actual suspect"), disconfirming feedback ("Actually, the suspect is number __" ), or no feedback. The manipulations produced strong effects on the witnesses' retrospective reports of (a) their certainty, (b) the quality of view they had, (c) the clarity of their memory, (d) the speed with which they identified the person, and (e) several other measures. Eyewitnesses who were asked about their certainty prior to the feedback manipulation (Experiment 2) were less influenced, but large effects still emerged on some measures. The magnitude of the effect was as strong for those who denied that the feedback influenced them as it was for those who admitted to the influence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The researchers investigated the moderating role of self-efficacy on feedback acceptance. High-self-efficacy individuals who received repeated negative performance feedback exhibited decreased acceptance of the feedback, whereas those with low self-efficacy did not change in their acceptance. Feedback sign and feedback acceptance also had interactive effects on future self-efficacy. Those with high acceptance of positive and negative feedback after repeated trials exhibited self-efficacy levels consistent with that feedback. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This study examined investigators' perceptions of the reliability of incriminating and exonerating evidence of different types. Police trainees in the role of investigators read the background of a homicide case and then received a piece of evidence that either confirmed or disconfirmed their prior suspicion against the suspect. Despite identical objective characteristics of the evidence, participants rated the disconfirming (vs. confirming) evidence as less reliable and generated more arguments to question its reliability. This asymmetrical scepticism was stronger for participants judging witness evidence, compared to DNA and photo evidence, supporting the hypothesis that different types of evidence vary in ‘elasticity’—the extent to which subjective interpretations can be justified. Interestingly, the observed effects were not limited to the specific evidence in the case, but also affected the ratings of the type of evidence in general, suggesting that reliability criteria for witness information are highly malleable and sensitive to contextual influences. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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 positively, message duration negatively related to deception. As most effect sizes were found to be heterogeneous, analyses of moderator variables revealed that many of the observed relationships varied as a function of content, preparation, motivation, sanctioning of the lie, experimental design and operationalization. Of different theoretical approaches reviewed, a working memory model of lie production may best account for the findings. Because of the small effect sizes, and the heterogeneity in findings, practitioners must be cautioned to use such indicators in assessing the truthfulness of reports but nonetheless practical implications for different types of situations are outlined. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Feedback administered to eyewitnesses after they make a line-up identification dramatically distorts a wide range of retrospective judgements (e.g. G. L. Wells & A. L. Bradfield, 1998 Journal of Applied Psychology, 83(3), 360–376.). This paper presents a meta-analysis of extant research on post-identification feedback, including 20 experimental tests with over 2400 participant-witnesses. The effect of confirming feedback (i.e. ‘Good, you identified the suspect’) was robust. Large effect sizes were obtained for most dependent measures, including the key measures of retrospective certainty, view and attention. Smaller effect sizes were obtained for so-called objective measures (e.g. length of time the culprit was in view) and comparisons between disconfirming feedback and control conditions. This meta-analysis demonstrates the reliability and robustness of the post-identification feedback effect. It reinforces recommendations for double-blind testing, recording of eyewitness reports immediately after an identification is made, and reconsideration by court systems of variables currently recommended for consideration in eyewitness evaluations. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Research shows that police officers are no more accurate than non-officers in discerning between truthful and deceptive statements, but more biased than non-officers to judge statements as deceptive. This was labeled by Meissner and Kassin (2002) as the investigator bias effect. A likely explanation could be that, since officers are normally involved in situations where questioning the truthfulness of the interviewee is essential, they could develop a generalized communicative suspicion (GCS). Levine and McCornack's (1991) GCS scale was adapted to the Spanish context and used to compare the GCS ratings of 152 undergraduates, 88 experienced officers, and 89 police recruits. Experienced officers’ GCS scores were significantly higher than those of the other groups, which did not differ from each other. This suggests that socialization within the police force increases the officers’ suspicion, leading them to make deceptiveness judgments.
Detecting deception is an inherently difficult task, but one that plays a critical role for law enforcement investigators in the interrogation room. In general, research has failed to indicate that performance in this domain is improved by training or prior experience. A signal detection framework is applied to the paradigm to better conceptualize the influence of these two factors. We found that although neither factor influenced discrimination accuracy, there was an effect on response bias such that training and prior experience appeared to increase the likelihood of responding "deceit" as opposed to "truth." This "investigator bias" was observed both in a review of the literature and in this study of North American law enforcement investigators who took part in a forensically based deception-detection task. Possible theoretical mechanisms and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
Do people behave differently when they are lying compared with when they are telling the truth? The combined results of 1,338 estimates of 158 cues to deception are reported. Results show that in some ways, liars are less forthcoming than truth tellers, and they tell less compelling tales. They also make a more negative impression and are more tense. Their stories include fewer ordinary imperfections and unusual contents. However, many behaviors showed no discernible links, or only weak links, to deceit. Cues to deception were more pronounced when people were motivated to succeed, especially when the motivations were identity relevant rather than monetary or material. Cues to deception were also stronger when lies were about transgressions.
The quantity of processing view of motivated reasoning predicts that individuals are more likely to spontaneously question the validity of unfavorable than favorable feedback even when the objective likelihood of the feedback is equivalent. Participants were videotaped self-administering a bogus medical test revealing either a favorable or an unfavorable result. In Studies 1 and 2, unfavorable result participants required more time to accept the validity of the test result and were more likely to spontaneously recheck its validity than were favorable result participants. However, unfavorable results also were perceived as less expected than were favorable results, even though the information supplied about their objective likelihood was identical. Study 3 showed that participants evaluating another student's results perceived favorable and unfavorable outcomes as equally likely, suggesting that the subjective likelihood of positive and negative feedback is also subject to motivational influence.
The authors report a meta-analysis of individual differences in detecting deception, confining attention to occasions when people judge strangers' veracity in real-time with no special aids. The authors have developed a statistical technique to correct nominal individual differences for differences introduced by random measurement error. Although researchers have suggested that people differ in the ability to detect lies, psychometric analyses of 247 samples reveal that these ability differences are minute. In terms of the percentage of lies detected, measurement-corrected standard deviations in judge ability are less than 1%. In accuracy, judges range no more widely than would be expected by chance, and the best judges are no more accurate than a stochastic mechanism would produce. When judging deception, people differ less in ability than in the inclination to regard others' statements as truthful. People also differ from one another as lie- and truth-tellers. They vary in the detectability of their lies. Moreover, some people are more credible than others whether lying or truth-telling. Results reveal that the outcome of a deception judgment depends more on the liar's credibility than any other individual difference.
People are generally poor at detecting deceit when observing someone’s behaviour or listening to their speech. In this chapter I will discuss the major factors (pitfalls) that lead to failures in catching liars: the sixteen reasons I will present are clustered into three categories: (i) a lack of motivation to detect lies; (ii) difficulties associated with lie detection; and (iii) common errors made by lie detectors. Discussing pitfalls provides insight into how lie detectors can improve their performance (for example, by recognising common biases and avoiding common judgment errors). The second section of this chapter discusses 11 ways (opportunities) to improve lie detection skills. Within this section, I first provide five recommendations for avoiding common errors in detecting lies. Next, I discuss recent lie detection research that introduces novel interview styles aimed at eliciting and enhancing verbal and nonverbal differences between liars and truth tellers. The recommendations are relevant in various settings, from the individual level (e.g., “Is my partner really working late?”) to the societal level (e.g., “Can we trust this suspect when he claims that he is not the serial rapist the police are searching for?”).
This essay extends the recent work of Levine, Park, and McCornack (1999) on the veracity effect in deception detection. The probabilistic nature of a receiver's accuracy in detecting deception is explained, and a receiver's detection of deception is analyzed in terms of set theory and conditional probability. Detection accuracy is defined as intersections of sets, and formulas are presented for truth accuracy, lie accuracy, and total accuracy in deception detection experiments. In each case, accuracy is shown to be a function of the relevant conditional probability and the truth-lie base rate. These formulas are applied to the Levine et al. results, and the implications for deception research are discussed.
With the exclusion of some specific circumstances, police officers typically pay more attention to nonverbal behavior than verbal behavior when they attempt to detect deceit. One of the reasons for this is that they believe that suspects are less able to control their nonverbal than verbal behavior and, consequently, nonverbal cues to deception are more likely to leak through. The author states that this assumption is not necessarily valid; deception research has revealed that many verbal cues are more diagnostic cues to deceit than nonverbal cues. Paying attention to nonverbal cues results in being less accurate in truth/lie discrimination, particularly when only visual nonverbal cues are taken into account. Also, paying attention to visual nonverbal cues leads to a stronger lie bias (i.e., indicating that someone is lying). The author recommends a change in police practice and argues that for lie detection purposes it may be better to listen carefully to what suspects say.
Lying and lie detection are the two components that, together, make up the exchange called as the “communication of deception.” Deception is an act that is intended to foster in another person a belief or understanding that the deceiver considers false. This chapter presents a primarily psychological point of view and a relatively microanalysis of the verbal and nonverbal exchange between the deceiver and the lie detector. The chapter discusses the definition of deception. It describes the deceiver's perspective in lie-detection, including the strategies of deception and behaviors associated with lie-telling. The lie-detector's perspective is also discussed in the chapter, and it has described behaviors associated with the judgments of deception and strategies of lie detection. The chapter discusses the outcomes of the deceptive communication process—that is, the accuracy of lie detection—and explores methodological issues, channel effects in the detection of deception, and other factors affecting the accuracy of lie detection.
Can we train people to detect deception? It is the contention of this article that communication scholars should learn how to train law enforcement professionals on how to detect high stake lies, like those faced by police, judges, customs officials, immigration officials, and so forth. It is proposed that in order to know whether we can train or should bother to train people to detect deception, each training study must meet 6 challenges: (1) relevance, (2) high stakes, (3) proper training, (4) proper testing, (5) generalizability across situations, and (6) generalizability over time. Our quantitative review of the literature suggests that training does significantly raise lie detection accuracy rates. Meta-analytic findings indicate a mean effect size of r = .20 across 20 (11 published studies) paired comparisons of lie detection training versus the control group (i.e., those without some type of training). It should be noted that the majority of the studies that attempt to train lie detectors fall short on many of the above challenges. Current research in lie detection training may actually underestimate the ability to train lie detectors due to the stimulus materials employed in most experiments.
How do people make decisions? How do they sift through the information without drowning in a sea of alternatives? And what are the factors that lead them in a certain direction?
This book offers some tentative answers. It is a book intended for nonspecialists who would like an introduction to psychological research on judgment and decision making. The focus is on experimental findings rather than psychological theory, surprising conclusions rather than intuitions, and descriptive prose rather than mathematics. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Research on the detection of deception, via non-verbal cues, has shown that people's ability to successfully discriminate between truth and deception is only slightly better than chance level. One of the reasons for these disappointing findings possibly lies in people's inappropriate beliefs regarding ‘lying behaviour’. A 64-item questionnaire originally used in Germany, which targets participants' beliefs regarding truthful and deceptive behaviour, was used. The present study differed from previous research in three ways: (i) instead of a student population, police officers and lay people were sampled, (ii) both people's beliefs regarding others' deceptive behaviour and their beliefs regarding their own deceptive behaviour were examined, and (iii) both non-verbal cues to, and content characteristics of, deceptive statements were examined. Results were consistent with previous studies, which found significant differences between people's beliefs regarding deceptive behaviour and experimental observations of actual deceptive behaviour. Further, police officers held as many false beliefs as did lay people and finally, participants were more accurate in their beliefs regarding their own deceptive behaviour than they were in their beliefs regarding others' behaviour.
In potentially deceptive situations, people rely on mental shortcuts to help process information. These heuristic judgments are often biased and result in inaccurate assessments of sender veracity. Four such biases-truth bias, visual bias, demeanor bias, and expectancy violation bias-were examined in a judgment experiment that varied nonverbal cue availability and deception. Observers saw a complete videotaped interview (full access to visual, vocal, and verbal cues), heard the complete interview (vocal and verbal access), or read a transcript (verbal access) of a truthful or deceptive suspect being questioned about a mock theft and then rated the interviewee on information, behavior, and image management and truthfulness. Results supported the presence of all four biases, which were most evident when interviewees were deceptive and observers had access to all visual, vocal, and verbal modalities. Deceivers' messages were judged as increasingly complete, honest, clear, and relevant; their behavior as more involved and dominant; and their overall demeanor as more credible, with the addition of nonverbal cues. Deceivers were actually judged as more credible than truthtellers in the audiovisual modality, whereas best discrimination and detection accuracy occurred in the audio condition. Results have implications for what factors influence judgments of a sender's credibility and accuracy in distinguishing truth from deception, especially under conditions where senders are producing messages interactively.
In the first part of this article, I briefly review research findings that show that professional lie catchers, such as police officers, are generally rather poor at distinguishing between truths and lies. I believe that there are many reasons contributing towards this poor ability, and give an overview of these reasons in the second part of this article. I also believe that professionals could become better lie detectors and explain how in the final part of this article.
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