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The effect of credibility assessment techniques on consistency and subsequent memory for the truth

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Repeated interviews are common during an investigation, and perceived consistency between multiple statements is associated with an interviewee’s credibility. Furthermore, research has shown that the act of lying can affect a person’s memory for what truthfully occurred. The current study assessed the influence of lying on memory during initial and repeated interviews, as well as how an interviewer’s approach might affect between-statement consistency for true and false statements. Participants performed a scavenger hunt at two sets of buildings on a university campus and then were either dismissed or interviewed (with a Reverse Order instruction or a Structured Interview) about their activities. Participants chose one set to tell the truth about and then created a lie about activities in another area of campus that had not been visited. One week later, all participants provided a second free recall statement about their activities during the scavenger hunt, and then a final truthful description of both areas that were visited during the scavenger hunt. Truthfully rehearsed experiences were associated with more accurate recall of information learned during the scavenger hunt as well as more consistent and more detailed statements. The Structured Interview led to initially more detailed statements, but more inconsistencies in the form of omissions.
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Frontiers in Psychology 01 frontiersin.org
The eect of credibility
assessment techniques on
consistency and subsequent
memory for the truth
RachelE.Dianiska
1 and ChristianA.Meissner
2*
1 Department of Psychological Science, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, United States,
2 Department of Psychology, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, United States
Repeated interviews are common during an investigation, and perceived
consistency between multiple statements is associated with an interviewee’s
credibility. Furthermore, research has shown that the act of lying can aect a
person’s memory for what truthfully occurred. The current study assessed the
influence of lying on memory during initial and repeated interviews, as well as
how an interviewer’s approach might aect between-statement consistency for
true and false statements. Participants performed a scavenger hunt at two sets of
buildings on a university campus and then were either dismissed or interviewed
(with a Reverse Order instruction or a Structured Interview) about their activities.
Participants chose one set to tell the truth about and then created a lie about
activities in another area of campus that had not been visited. One week later,
all participants provided a second free recall statement about their activities
during the scavenger hunt, and then a final truthful description of both areas that
were visited during the scavenger hunt. Truthfully rehearsed experiences were
associated with more accurate recall of information learned during the scavenger
hunt as well as more consistent and more detailed statements. The Structured
Interview led to initially more detailed statements, but more inconsistencies in
the form of omissions.
KEYWORDS
lying, memory accuracy, consistency, credibility assessment, evidence-based
interviewing
1. Introduction
Investigators routinely conduct repeated interviews with the same suspect during an
investigation (Kassin etal., 2007). In this context, alterations to a statement, regardless of the
intention behind them, are oen used to question the reliability of a witness’s statement (Brewer
etal., 1999) and to identify a subject who may beproviding a false statement (Granhag and
Strömwall, 2001). Repeated interviews therein pose a quandary for both innocent and
guilty suspects.
Innocent suspects may choose to bestrategically forthcoming and cooperative with an
investigation when telling the truth (Hartwig etal., 2007; Granhag and Hartwig, 2008). When
interviewed again at a later time, inconsistencies might appear if the individual were to oer new
information that was not provided in a previous statement (i.e., a reminiscent detail), or if they
failed to recall information that was provided previously (i.e., a forgotten detail). ough
reminiscence and forgetting reect natural underlying cognitive processes that can arise as a
OPEN ACCESS
EDITED BY
Ivan Mangiulli,
University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy
REVIEWED BY
Richard S. John,
University of Southern California, UnitedStates
Kate Houston,
Texas A&M International University,
UnitedStates
*CORRESPONDENCE
Christian A. Meissner
cameissn@iastate.edu
RECEIVED 10 March 2023
ACCEPTED 22 May 2023
PUBLISHED 26 June 2023
CITATION
Dianiska RE and Meissner CA (2023) The eect
of credibility assessment techniques on
consistency and subsequent memory for the
truth.
Front. Psychol. 14:1184055.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1184055
COPYRIGHT
© 2023 Dianiska and Meissner. This is an open-
access article distributed under the terms of
the Creative Commons Attribution License
(CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction
in other forums is permitted, provided the
original author(s) and the copyright owner(s)
are credited and that the original publication in
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accepted academic practice. No use,
distribution or reproduction is permitted which
does not comply with these terms.
TYPE Original Research
PUBLISHED 26 June 2023
DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1184055
Dianiska and Meissner 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1184055
Frontiers in Psychology 02 frontiersin.org
result of repeated retrieval (Ballard, 1913), such inconsistencies can
lead an investigator to question a truth-teller’s credibility.
Guilty suspects, on the other hand, will need to remember a
previously provided false statement in order to maintain consistency
across interviews. False statements that a guilty suspect can provide
include false descriptions (or fabrications), and false denials of events
(e.g., simple denials or simulated amnesia; Otgaar and Baker, 2018).
In the former, a suspect may describe an event or an experience
dierently than how it actually occurred or describe an event that
never occurred. Lying, in this instance, requires the suspect to
confabulate details to create a plausible account. Alternatively, the
suspect may lie by falsely denying that an event occurred, despite the
fact that the event did take place. Psychological research has shown
that the type of false statement that is provided can carry implications
for one’s ability to remember that lie, and that the act of lying can
change a person’s memory for the truth (Otgaar and Baker, 2018;
Dianiska etal., 2019; Battista etal., 2020; Dianiska and Meissner,
2022). For example, denying or simulating amnesia can lead to more
errors of omission, while lying by describing can lead to more errors
of commission. As such, the manner in which a guilty suspect provides
a false statement could inuence not only their ability to appear
credible (i.e., consistent) on subsequent interviews, but also their
memory for what truthfully occurred.
False descriptions and false denials dier in the extent to which
eortful, constructive mental processing is required. As a result, these
two types of lies tend to dierentially aect both accurate memory and
false memory (Vieira and Lane, 2013; Battista etal., 2020). Lies that
are told via false description are more likely to be correctly
remembered due to the constructive processes involved in generating
the descriptions (Riesthuis etal., 2020; Battista etal., 2021; Dianiska
and Meissner, 2022). Providing a brief false denial, on the other hand,
requires less eort to produce and is therefore more easily forgotten
(Otgaar and Baker, 2018; Dianiska etal., 2019). In addition to denials
being less eortful, poor memory for denials may also bedue to an
inhibitory mechanism (Anderson and Neely, 1996; Debey etal., 2015).
However, memory for false denials can improve when the denials are
repeated (Vieira and Lane, 2013; Dianiska and Meissner, 2022). Due
to the constructive processes involved in lying by describing, false
descriptions can paradoxically bemore likely to bemisremembered as
the truth should the act of generating a description as a lie (rather than
as a truth) beforgotten (Polage, 2012; Vieira and Lane, 2013). is
process is likely a result of source misattribution, where one mistakes
the origin of that description (Johnson etal., 1993). In this case, the
content of the lie is retained, but the reason for its generation (e.g., to
tell a lie) is not.
1.1. Memory, consistency, and perceived
credibility
Relying on consistency as an indicator of truthfulness can
negatively aect innocent suspects who seek to becooperative with an
interviewer. Truth-tellers’ statements will be grounded in their
memory for an event, and the reconstructive nature of memory
increases the likelihood of errors (Bartlett, 1932). Should an innocent
person provide an initially mistaken alibi statement due to faulty
memory and come to realize their error, any attempt to correct their
statement by providing contradictory information might lead to
suspicion as a result of that inconsistency (Crozier etal., 2017). As
such, unwarranted mistrust of an inconsistent (but innocent) alibi
provider could potentially redirect the course of an investigation away
from pursuing a dierent suspect. Investigators must consider not
only the presence and type of an inconsistency in a statement, but also
the role of memory recall inherent to producing that statement.
Although some statement-enhancing questioning techniques
strategically support and capitalize on an interviewee’s memory, the
impact of such tactics have not yet been fully assessed with respect to
possible misattributions of deception and guilt due to inconsistencies
across statements.
Regardless of guilt, the interaction between lying and memory has
implications for a suspect’s experience with the criminal justice
system. For instance, whether guilty suspects are able to maintain their
false narratives over time could have signicant downstream
consequences that lead to their conviction. On a subsequent interview,
the ability to remember (and repeat; Granhag and Strömwall, 1999)
what was said in an initial interview is extremely important given the
common perception that inconsistency is associated with deception
(Vredeveldt etal., 2014).
1.2. Consistency across repeated interviews
for truthful and deceptive accounts
ough inconsistencies are oen treated by laypeople and
professionals as indicators of deception, research suggests that it is the
type of inconsistency that is a more important indicator of deception,
rather than inconsistency itself (Fisher etal., 2013; Vredeveldt et al.,
2014). Across repeated interviews, engaging in varied retrieval can
contribute to the reminiscence of details not previously reported.
Gilbert and Fisher (2006) examined the eects of varied retrieval across
a repeated interview context on inconsistencies in the form of
contradictions, reminiscences, and omissions. Varying the retrieval cues
between two event recall opportunities increased the amount of
reminiscent information reported and decreased the number of items
that were omitted on the second event recall. e amount of consistent
and contradictory items that were recalled were similar. Gilbert and
Fisher also found that the accuracy of inconsistent-reminiscent and
inconsistent-omitted details was fairly high (87 and 93%, respectively).
Consistent details, however, were still associated with the highest
accuracy (95%). Few contradictory details were reported overall, but
when they were reported, they were associated with low accuracy (49%).
For guilty suspects, there are dierent types of (in)consistency that
can induce suspicion, including the perceived consistency within a
suspect’s statement and across multiple statements. Inconsistencies
can also arise between statements elicited from multiple suspects, or
between a suspect’s statement and the available evidence. Interviewers
can use strategic questioning approaches to encourage the production
of some inconsistencies to facilitate credibility assessment. Consistency
across statements has been suggested to beindicative of liars who have
rehearsed their statement (Vrij etal., 2009; Masip etal., 2016), liars
who underestimate the extent to which forgetting occurs (i.e., stability
bias; Harvey etal., 2017a,b), and/or liars who deliberately repeat the
same statement given previously to avoid being exposed (Granhag and
Strömwall, 1999). However, manipulating the way in which a suspect
provides a statement can prevent a liar from using a “repeat” strategy
to appear consistent.
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Liars are likely to beinconsistent when faced with varied retrieval,
such as when they must report an event dierently between multiple
interviews. For example, (Leins etal., 2012) asked liars and truth-
tellers to describe their activities in an initial interview either verbally,
by providing an initial free recall and then answering specic
questions from an interview, or pictorially, by producing a sketch
drawing of the task room and the location of as many items as possible.
Aer a 10-min delay, participants provided the interviewer with an
additional statement about their activities in the same or dierent
reporting method. Truth-tellers were more consistent than liars (when
only items that were contradictory were compared to items that were
consistent); however, liars were even less consistent when the retrieval
method diered between interviews.
1.3. Evidence-based interviewing
techniques and consistency
Researchers and practitioners have advocated for the use of
evidence-based interviewing techniques to increase cooperation and
disclosure of information in investigative interviewing (Vrij etal.,
2014; Vrij and Granhag, 2014; Meissner etal., 2017; Brandon etal.,
2018). Such interviewing tactics have been assessed as both tools to
improve the quality of an interviewee’s memory report as well as to
magnify dierences in verbal content between liars and truth-tellers
that aid lie detection (Vrij, 2015), particularly given that the most
successful training protocols for lie detection and credibility
assessment focus on such verbal content (see Hauch etal., 2016).
Examples include eye closure instructions (Perfect etal., 2008), mental
context reinstatement (Smith and Vela, 2001), recalling an event in
reverse temporal order (Vrij etal., 2008), and asking subjects to sketch
along with their statement (Deeb etal., 2022).
e primary goal of these techniques is to increase the amount of
information obtained from an interview without a commensurate
decrease in accuracy. Techniques that encourage a speaker to
elaborate, however, can sometimes lead to the provision of information
that may not betrue (or information that they might beunsure of;
Koriat and Goldsmith, 1996) due to an interviewee reporting incorrect
information (i.e., errors in describing a witnessed detail) or
confabulating novel details (i.e., errors in describing unwitnessed
details). Should an interviewee report such erroneous information on
a subsequent interview (or amend a prior statement to correct an
error), an interviewer could note a dierence between the two
statements and infer deception on the part of the subject. However, an
error that persists could become incorporated into the subject’s
memory for what truthfully occurred (e.g., self-generated
misinformation; Pickel, 2004), irreparably aecting their credibility if
the information is revealed to beinaccurate.
One tactic that has been evaluated as a credibility assessment tool
is a reverse-order recall instruction (Vrij etal., 2008; Evans etal., 2013).
Aer an interviewee has provided an initial free narrative, they are
asked to recall the event once more in reverse chronological order.
Recalling an event from multiple retrieval perspectives, in particular
one that is counter to an initial schema-guided retrieval attempt
(Geiselman and Callot, 1990), can allow for a previously inaccessible
memory trace to be accessed and therein increase the amount of
information reported. Asking for an event description in
reverse-order increases cognitive load more so for liars than truth-
tellers, thereby magnifying discernible verbal and nonverbal behaviors
between the two (Vrij etal., 2008; Evans etal., 2013). However, when
compared with a request for an open-ended narrative, recalling an
event in reverse-order can sometimes increase confabulations and
decrease overall statement accuracy (Dando etal., 2011). Errors that
are produced as a result of a reverse-order instruction could persist
across repeated interviews, leading to further consequences for
interviewees with respect to perceived inconsistency (Fisher
etal., 2013).
Interviewers’ use of reverse-order recall can induce
inconsistencies in both liars and truth-tellers (Gilbert and Fisher,
2006; Hudson et al., 2019). Hudson and colleagues examined
consistency between two statements provided in close succession to
each other. When a reverse-order recall instruction was
administered, both liars and truth-tellers provided more omissions
and fewer repetitions. Overall, truth-tellers provided more details
across the two interviews, and specically more reminiscent details
during a second interview than did liars. Liars, in contrast, made
signicantly more omissions when a reverse-order recall instruction
was administered during an interview, compared to when a
chronological order recall instruction was administered.
1.4. Present study
e purpose of the present study was to examine the potential for
evidence-based interviewing tactics to foster the generation of
inconsistencies across multiple interviews, as well as the potential
detrimental inuence of providing a false statement on memory for
the truth. We used a behavioral paradigm in which participants
completed a series of complex tasks prior to being interviewed about
them (see Figure 1). Participants experienced two distinct events
(scavenger hunt tasks in two areas of a university campus) and then
had the opportunity to choose which event they would rehearse
truthfully. ey then created a false description about activities about
a third event, a set of building that had not been visited. Participants
were then randomly assigned to beinitially interviewed using one of
two forensic interview protocols (a Structured Interview or a Reverse-
Order recall instruction), or to not complete an initial interview. Seven
days later, all participants returned for a second session, during which
time they were interviewed about their activities the week prior. In the
second interview, participants were provided an open-ended prompt
to freely recall each of the two events that they experienced in the rst
session, describing each event truthfully (or deceptively). Lastly,
participants provided a nal truthful description of the lied-about
event, as well as a nal account of the truthfully rehearsed event.
We examined how lying on a prior interview aects one’s memory
for what truthfully occurred, and how interviewing techniques might
aect the consistency of information reported across repeated
interviews. It was hypothesized that fewer correct details would
be recalled about a lied-about event during the nal all-truth
statement, compared to events that were rehearsed truthfully.
We further expected that truthfully-described events would
beassociated with an overall greater amount of detail, and associated
with greater consistency and/or inconsistencies in the form of
reminiscences. With respect to the Reverse Order instruction,
Dianiska and Meissner 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1184055
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wepredicted that this interviewing technique would lead to more
overall total statement detail, as well as more inconsistencies in the
form of omissions (i.e., details present in an initial statement, but not
repeated during the second).
2. Methods
2.1. Pre-registration
is study was pre-registered on OSF (https://doi.org/10.17605/
OSF.IO/AJ296) to include sample size, methods, primary hypotheses,
and planned analyses.
2.2. Participants
A total of 112 participants (56 female) were recruited from a large
Midwestern state university, and 105 completed the full experiment
(n = 7 dropped out between Session 1 and Session 2). Data from six
additional participants were excluded for not complying with
interview instructions for either Phase Ior Phase II interviews. us,
the nal sample included slightly uneven cells for Interview Absent
(n = 29), Reverse Order (n = 32), and Structured Interview (n = 38)
conditions. Participants age varied between 18 and 28 years of age
(M = 19.38, SD = 1.39).
Due to University closure in the Spring of 2020in response to the
COVID-19 virus, data collection ended prematurely. e target
sample of 144 research participants (n = 48 per group) specied in the
pre-registration would provide sucient power to detect a relatively
small within-between interaction eect size (f = 0.15) with power of
0.90 (Faul etal., 2009). is eect size was chosen based on prior work
demonstrating dierences in consistency for liars and truth-tellers
across repeated interviews (e.g., f = 0.31 in Leins etal., 2012) and
robust increases in total detail following strategic interviewing
techniques (e.g., f = 0.20 when comparing chronological recall and
reverse order recall in Hudson etal., 2019). To appropriately power an
interaction between Veracity and Interview Technique, a more
conservative eect size was used (f = 0.15) than has been observed in
prior work. Data analyzed and presented here represent those
collected prior to the university closure in March of 2020. Because of
ongoing institutional changes with respect to research procedures and
the permanent closure of areas of the university campus included in
the current study, the remaining participants needed to fulll the
proposed target sample were unable to becollected. Had the power
analysis been conducted to beless conservative (0.80), the current
sample size would have been sucient to detect the anticipated
eect size.
2.3. Design
A 3 (Initial Interview Technique: Absent, Reverse-Order,
Structured Interview) × 2 (Veracity: Lie, Truth) × 2 (Interview Time:
Phase I, Phase II) mixed design was used. Initial Interview Technique
was manipulated between-participants, while Veracity and Interview
Time were manipulated within-participants.
2.4. Procedure
Participants completed two sessions conducted 1 week apart (see
Figure1). e rst session comprised the Encoding Phase and the
Phase IInterview (for initially-interviewed conditions). Participants
visited four buildings (two pairs of buildings total) on the university
campus and completed a scavenger hunt for information within each
building. Aer completing the scavenger hunt, some participants were
interviewed about their activities (Reverse Order and Structured
Interview conditions) and some were dismissed from the session
(Absent condition). Before being interviewed, participants were
instructed that they would truthfully tell the interviewer about one
pair of buildings of their choice; they would not discuss the other pair
of buildings they visited, and instead were instructed to lie about a
specic set of buildings that were not visited during the experiment.
2.4.1. Encoding phase
Upon arrival to the session, participants received instructions and
provided informed consent to complete the experiment. Before
beginning the Encoding Phase, participants completed a brief survey
assessing their familiarity with six buildings on the University campus
on scale from 1 (I have never been there/Not familiar) to 7 (I know the
ins and outs of the building/Extremely familiar). During the Encoding
Phase, participants completed what they believed to be a study
assessing people’s memory for previously performed activities.
FIGURE1
Experiment procedure.
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Participants received instructions that they would begoing to dierent
buildings on the university campus and performing a scavenger hunt
at each one. Participants then navigated to two “areas” of campus (i.e.,
two buildings near each other) and completed a series of brief tasks at
each one. roughout the course of the Encoding Phase, participants
were tasked to remember six key pieces of information that they
learned in each area. ree versions of the scavenger hunt were
created, such that each pair of buildings was equally presented to
participants as the rst area or second area to which they navigated.
All tasks and instructions for the scavenger hunt can befound on the
OSF repository.
When participants arrived back to the lab, those in the Interview-
Absent condition were dismissed and asked to return 1 week later to
complete Phase II. ose in the Interview-Present conditions
(Reverse-Order, Structured Interview) received instructions for the
initial interview phase. Participants were told that they would
be interviewed about their actions aer leaving the lab. For the
interview, they were asked to tell the truth about one area of campus
(meaning one “pair” of buildings) and lie about another area of
campus. e participants could choose to tell the truth about either
the rst pair of buildings or the second pair of buildings that they
visited but were instructed that they must lie about another,
pre-specied set of buildings.
For the lied-about event, participants were instructed that they
would create a detailed, believable cover story. Participants were
provided with a worksheet with minimal information about the
buildings they were tasked with lying about (taken from the public
access building information available on the University’s Facilities
Planning and Management website; see OSF) and given 5–6 min to
write down details that could beprovided in their narratives. To
motivate participants to lie well during the task, participants were told
that their interviews would beevaluated by other people aer the
session has concluded, and the person who was judged to bemost
believable will win a $25 reward. Aer preparing for the interview, the
experimenter conrmed that the participant understood the
instructions for the interview task and then le the room to notify
the interviewer.
2.4.2. Phase Iinterview
e participants interviewed in Phase Iwere randomly assigned
to beinterviewed with a Reverse Order Instruction or a Structured
Interview. Interviews always began by asking for an initial open-ended
narrative of participants’ activities at the rst area of campus, and then
an open-ended narrative for the second area of campus.
In the Reverse Order condition, the interviewer followed up the
initial request by asking the participant interviewee to recall their
activities in the two areas once again in reverse chronological order,
beginning from the last temporal detail that they provide for each
area. In the Structured Interview condition, the interviewer followed
up the initial request by asking three probing questions about details
the participant had mentioned for each area of campus.
Aer the conclusion of the interview, participants completed a brief
post-interview questionnaire. In addition to demographic information,
participants reected on how well they remembered the tasks that they
had completed, what strategy they used to select which event to
truthfully describe, how motivated they were to beperceived as truthful,
if they did anything in particular to convince the interviewer that they
were telling the truth, how comfortable they are with lying in everyday
life, as well as global perceptions of the interviewer.
2.4.3. Phase II interview
One week later, all participants (Interview-Absent, Reverse-Order,
Structured Interview) returned to the lab to complete the Phase II
interview. At the beginning of the session, the experimenter informed
all participants that they would beinterviewed (for the rst time, for
Interview-Absent participants; or again, for Reverse-Order and
Structured Interview participants) about their activities during the
rst session of the experiment. Participants were asked to provide a
free recall narrative of the two areas of campus that they visited the
week prior. At this time, Interview-Absent conditions were given the
same lie-truth instructions and cover story preparation time as
participants who were interviewed in Phase I. All other participants
(Reverse-Order and Structured Interview participants) were
instructed to continue to respond truthfully or deceptively for each
area of campus as they had in Phase I. During the Phase II interview,
the interviewer requested only an open-ended narrative from
participants recalling as much information as possible about their
activities in both areas of campus.
2.4.4. Final all-truth interview
Aer describing the two areas of campus truthfully and
deceptively, the interviewer informed participants that it was known
they were told to lie about their activities in the previous session.
erefore, the participant’s nal experimental task was to describe
both events as they had actually occurred. In addition to providing a
third and nal statement about their truthfully rehearsed event,
participants were told to cease responding deceptively (about their
chosen, lied-about event) and to describe their activities in the second,
visited area truthfully and in as much detail as possible. is nal
truthful recall allowed us to assess the inuence of having previously
lied about an event on subsequent recall of the experienced details.
At the conclusion of the Phase II interview, participants completed
a similar post-experiment questionnaire as in the earlier session.
ese questions reected overall memory for the tasks in Phase I,
strategy use, motivation, comfort with lying in everyday life, and
perceptions of the interviewer and the interview experience. Further,
they were asked to what extent they expected to beinterviewed again,
as well as the extent to which they expected the second half of the
interview (i.e., the Final All-Truth interview) and how dicult was it
to truthfully recall their activities from the rst session. Participants
who completed an initial interview were also asked the extent to which
they attempted to repeat everything they had said previously about
their activities during Phase I(i.e., to beconsistent) and to what extent
they attempted to provide new information about the rst and second
areas they visited. For the Interview-Absent participants, this
questionnaire contained the same questions as the post-Phase
Iinterview questionnaire. Finally, participants completed a cued-recall
test for the details that they were tasked to remember during Phase
I. Before being debriefed, participants were asked whether they had
rehearsed their story or discussed the experiment with anyone since
completing Phase I.
2.4.5. Coding of interview statements
Video recorded interviews for each phase (Phase I, Phase II,
All-Truth) were coded for subsequent analysis. For Phase Iinterviews,
trained research assistants coded details that were present during the
initial chronological narrative that were also repeated aer the reverse
order instruction or structured interview probes were administered,
as well as details that were added to participant statements aer the
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instruction or probing questions were implemented. A Total Phase
Iunique details measure was computed by summing: (i) consistent
pre- and post-tactic details, and (ii) new details post-tactic. For
participants who were not interviewed during Phase I, the same
coding scheme was applied for their Phase II interviews.
For all other participants, Phase II interviews were coded for
details that were: (i) repeated between Phase I and Phase II
(consistent details); (ii) contradictory to details provided during
Phase I (inconsistent-contradiction details); (iii) added during
Phase II but not reported during Phase I(inconsistent-reminiscent
details); and (iv) failed to beprovided during Phase II but were
provided at Phase I(inconsistent-omitted details). Statements from
participants who were interviewed in Phase Iand Phase II were
coded by two coders for the volume of information provided and
the consistency of details that were provided. Inter-rater reliability
was high (rs > 0.93 for each described area). Wecomputed the total
amount of detail provided at Phase Iand Phase II, as well as the
amount of consistent details, omitted details, and new details
reported across statements.
During the nal All-Truth interview, participants were instructed
to provide a nal truthful statement for both areas of campus they had
actually visited during Phase I. ese all-truthful statements were then
coded for the amount of detail provided for both areas of campus–one
that they had rehearsed truthfully in the earlier Phase Iand Phase II
interviews, and one that they had lied about by describing their
activities in an alternate area of campus. Weassessed accuracy with
respect to participants’ freely recalled statements, and with respect to
their performance on the cued recall test at the end of Phase II. If
participants mentioned a detail they were tasked to remember during
their all-truth narrative, the detail was coded as a “1” if it was present
and accurate in the statement (e.g., correctly recalling “1926” as the
year a fountain was installed). e same was true if participants
correctly answered the cued recall question on the nal test. A score
of “0” for a detail was given for inaccurate details (e.g., an incorrect
year), non-specic details (e.g., saying they were told to remember a
year, but not providing the year), or when the participant did not
mention or said they could not remember the item. Accurate details
per area thus ranged from 0 to 6 details, and from these a proportion
of accurate details was computed based on the number of details that
were mentioned (note: the pattern of results does not change when the
proportion of all potential key details are included, rather than just
those details mentioned correctly or incorrectly).
3. Results
All materials and data are hosted on OSF.1 Descriptive statistics
from each condition across all measures can befound in Table1. e
following results are distinguished by whether they were pre-registered
or exploratory. Werst assess the eects of the veracity of a statement
and the presence/type of interview tactic used to elicit an initial
narrative on participants’ ability to correctly recall information
learned during the scavenger hunt. Next, weexamine the eects of
statement veracity and the type of interview technique used on the
1 https://osf.io/atz5h/
amount of information provided during initial and subsequent
interviews, and then specically consistent or inconsistent details
provided therein. Finally, we explore dierences in the amount of
detail provided in participants’ initial recall statements of each event.
3.1. Pre-registered analyses
3.1.1. Correct recall on final all-truth interview
At the conclusion of Phase II, participants provided a nal,
truthful account of their activities involving both areas of campus that
they visited during the Encoding Phase. is interview allowed us to
assess the inuence of having previously recalled an event truthfully
vs. deceptively. A 3 (Initial Interview Technique: Absent, Reverse-
Order, Structured Interview) × 2 (Veracity: Lie, Truth) ANOVA was
conducted on the proportion of accurate details mentioned in
participants’ all-truth interview statements (see Figure 2). As
hypothesized, there was a signicant main eect of Veracity such that
memory for key details was more accurate for areas of campus that
participants had previously truthfully recalled (M = 0.46, SE = 0.03)
than areas of campus they had lied about (M = 0.33, SE = 0.03), F(1,
96) = 15.44, p < 0.001, d = 0.41 [0.21, 0.62]. Neither the main eect of
Interview Technique (F(2, 96) = 1.13, p = 0.33, η
p2
= 0.02) nor the
interaction between Initial Interview Technique and Veracity (F(2,
96) = 1.37, p = 0.26, η
p2
= 0.03) were signicant. Performance on the
cued recall test was similar and is reported on OSF.
3.1.2. Phase Iand phase II total details
A 2 (Initial Interview Technique: Structured Interview, Reverse-
Order) × 2 (Veracity: Lie, Truth) × 2 (Interview Time: Phase I, Phase
II) ANOVA was conducted on the total number of details present in
participant’s statements. ere was a signicant main eect of Veracity,
F(1, 68) = 9.28, p = 0.003, d = 0.37 [0.13, 0.61]; Interview Time, F(1,
68) = 67.53, p < 0.001, d = 0.83 [0.55, 1.10]; and Interview Technique,
F(1, 68) = 11.62, p = 0.001, d = 0.82 [0.33, 1.31]. As expected, people
provided more details when truthfully describing their activities
(M = 28.10, SE = 1.62) than when creating false descriptions of their
activities (M = 25.26, SE = 1.69). Further, participants provided more
detailed statements during Phase I(M = 30.67, SE = 1.90) compared to
Phase II (M = 22.69, SE = 1.37). However, participants provided more
detailed statements when they were interviewed with a Structured
Interview script (M = 32.08, SE = 2.14) compared with a Reverse Order
instruction (M = 21.28, SE = 2.33), as wepredicted. Importantly, the
main eects of Interview Time and Initial Interview Technique were
qualied by a signicant interaction, F(1, 68) = 44.09, p < 0.001,
η
p2
= 0.39. While there was a signicant decrease in the amount of
information recalled from Phase Ito Phase II for both conditions, this
dierence was much greater in the Structured Interview condition
(t(37) = 8.24, p < 0.001, d = 1.34 [0.89, 1.77]) than in the Reverse Order
condition (t(31) = 3.95, p < 0.001, d = 0.70 [0.31, 1.08]). No other main
eects or interactions were signicant, Fs < 0.25, p’s > 0.62.
3.1.3. Between-statement-consistency
A 2 (Initial Interview Technique: Reverse-Order, Structured
Interview) × 2 (Veracity: Lie, Truth) mixed ANOVA was conducted
on the number of details consistently provided between Phase Iand
Phase II (see Figure 3, solid gray and black bars). ere was a
signicant main eect of Veracity, F(1, 68) = 11.37, p < 0.001, d = 0.41
Dianiska and Meissner 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1184055
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[0.16, 0.65]). People provided more consistent details between Phase
I and Phase II when describing their truthfully rehearsed event
(M = 19.59, SE = 1.20) than when describing their lied-about event
(M = 16.91, SE = 1.18). However, there was no main eect of Interview
Technique (F(1, 68) = 0.73, p = 0.40, η
p2
= 0.01, nor an interaction
between Veracity and Interview Technique (F(1, 68) = 0.06, p = 0.96,
ηp2 < 0.01).
With respect to inconsistency, we examined dierences in
omissions and new details separately via 2 (Initial Interview Technique:
Reverse-Order, Structured Interview) × 2 (Veracity: Lie, Truth) mixed
ANOVAs on the number of omitted details (see Figure3, patterned
bars) and the number of new details added in Phase II (see Figure3,
open bars). ere was a main eect of Interview Technique on the
number of details omitted from Phase II statements, F(1, 68) = 47.27,
p < 0.001, d = 1.65 [1.10, 2.19]. Participants omitted more details from
Phase II statements aer being interviewed with a Structured
Interview in Phase I(M = 20.16, SE = 2.00) relative to those interviewed
with a Reverse Order instruction in Phase I(M = 4.84, SE = 0.51).
However, there was no main eect of Veracity (F(1, 68) < 0.01, p = 0.93,
η
p2
< 0.01, nor an interaction between Veracity and Interview
Technique, F(1, 68) = 0.10, p = 0.75, η
p2
< 0.01. With respect to new
details provided during Phase II, there was only a main eect of
Interview Technique (F(1, 68) = 10.10, p < 0.01, d = 0.76 [0.27, 1.25]).
Participants interviewed with a Structured Interview added more
details in their Phase II statements (M = 5.74, SE = 0.62) than did
participants interviewed with a Reverse Order instruction (M = 3.31,
SE = 0.40). Neither the main eect of Veracity (F(1, 68) = 0.80, p = 0.37,
FIGURE2
Proportion of key details correctly recalled the final all-truth
interview.
TABLE1 Descriptive statistics for all measures.
Initial interview absent Reverse-order Structured interview
Mean SE Mean SE Mean SE
Phase II–Final recall accuracy
Prev Lie 0.33 0.06 0.39 0.06 0.26 0.04
Pr ev Tr uth 0.40 0.06 0.51 0.06 0.46 0.05
Phase II–Cued recall accuracy
Prev Lie 0.58 0.04 0.65 0.05 0.54 0.04
Pr ev Tr uth 0.66 0.05 0.71 0.04 0.69 0.03
Phase II–Consistency
Lie 20.57 1.11 13.83 1.00
Tru th 23.27 1.18 16.48 1.07
Phase II–Omissions
Lie 10.30 1.24 15.62 1.12
Tru th 8.68 1.12 16.88 1.02
Phase II–reminiscence
Lie 3.92 0.65 4.86 0.59
Tru th 5.06 0.54 4.64 0.49
Phase I–Total detail
Lie 20.88 2.05 37.87 3.47
Tru th 23.22 2.13 40.71 2.91
Phase II–Total detail
Lie 21.00 1.80 18.88 1.96 23.42 1.99
Tru th 25.31 2.07 22.16 2.23 26.32 1.93
Final all-Truth–Total detail
Prev Lie 13.96 0.90 14.84 1.02 14.92 0.94
Pr ev Tr uth 14.37 1.06 15.38 0.93 14.17 0.93
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d = 0.11 [0.13, 0.34]), nor an interaction between the two (F(1,
67) = 1.74, p = 0.19, ηp2 = 0.03.
3.2. Exploratory analysis
In addition to pre-registered analyses, we also explored how
participants not interviewed at Phase I(Initial Interview-Absent)
compared to participants who did receive an interview in Phase Iwith
respect to dierences in the amount of detail provided for the rst
time an area of campus was discussed (see Figure4). For participants
who received an initial interview, weexamined whether the total
amount of detail diered for their initial truthful statement (during
the Phase Iinterview) relative to their truthful statement about the
unrehearsed area of campus that they visited (during the Final
All-Truth interview). For participants who were not interviewed
during Phase I, wecompared the amount of detail in their initial
truthful statement (during the Phase II interview) to their truthful
statement about the area of campus they visited that they did not
rehearse previously (during the Final All-Truth interview).
Pairwise analyses were conducted to compare the amount of detail
provided for the initial narrative about the previously lied-about event
relative to the initial narrative about the previous truthfully rehearsed
event for participants in each interview condition. Participants
provided signicantly more details when initially recalling their
truthful event compared to when they truthfully recalled the event
that they previously lied about in the Interview Absent condition
(t(26) = 6.80, p < 0.001, d = 1.31 [0.78, 1.82]), in the Reverse Order
condition (t(31) = 4.40, p < 0.001, d = 0.78 [0.38, 1.17]), and in the
Structured Interview condition (t(36) = 9.55, p < 0.001, d = 1.57
[1.08, 2.05]).
4. Discussion
Given the frequency with which investigators repeatedly interview
criminal suspects, the current research assessed whether a suspect’s
choice to lie in an initial interview has consequences for memory
accuracy and consistency on a subsequent interview. Here,
weexamined whether lying aects a suspect’s memory with respect to
accuracy, as well as how credibility assessment interview techniques
(such as the Reverse Order instruction) inuence between-statement
consistency. Our ndings suggest that relative to lying, telling the
truth led to better memory for encoded material and more consistent
statements across interviews separated by a one-week delay. Further,
those interviewed with a Structured Interview were more likely to
omit details between two interview statements.
Experiences that participants had truthfully reported in an initial
interview were associated with greater detail and were more accurately
recalled when compared with those that were initially lied about.
FIGURE3
Number of details that were consistent or inconsistent between Phase Iand Phase II interviews.
FIGURE4
Number of details initially truthfully recalled per event area.
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Regardless of whether or how they were interviewed during the initial
session, participants provided more spontaneous accurate details in
the nal truthful interview when they had been previously truthfully
interviewed compared to when they had previously lied about the
experience. is aligns with previous ndings (e.g., Battista etal.,
2020; Dianiska and Meissner, 2022), and demonstrates that lying is
detrimental to subsequent recall of the truth.
Here, the act of lying required participants to not only refrain
from describing one area they visited, but also to create a false
description of an area they had not visited. e mnemonic eect of
lying seen here may thus bedue to a relative lack of rehearsal, as
suggested by the MAD framework (Otgaar and Baker, 2018). When
participants provided false descriptions about an unvisited area of
campus, they did so at the expense of not rehearsing an area of campus
that was visited during the scavenger hunt. As a result, people
provided less information about the unrehearsed (i.e., lied-about) area
of campus when they were later asked to truthfully recall their
experience (see Riesthuis etal., 2022b). e fact that the unrehearsed
experience was associated with less detail could also be due to a
spontaneous inhibition strategy that people may use to facilitate their
lie-telling. at is, relative to areas that were truthfully rehearsed, in
order to eectively produce a false description of an unexperienced
event, people may have attempted to intentionally inhibit information
about their activities in the unrehearsed area.
e content of people’s statements, both initially and in subsequent
interviews, may serve to discriminate lies from truths. In the present
experiment, truthfully provided statements about prior experiences
were more detailed than experiences that were lied about. is was the
case for statements obtained during both initial (Phase I) and delayed
(Phase II) interviews. Consistent with prior research it is clear that the
level of detail provided about an event can serve as an indicator of
veracity (e.g., Evans etal., 2013). However, in the present study, people
provided less detail on the Phase II interview for both truthful and
deceptive statements aer a one-week delay. at is, when providing
their deceptive statements, people did not demonstrate the “stability
bias” (i.e., similar detail across interviews for lied-about events) that
has been observed by others with lengthier delays (i.e., three weeks;
Harvey etal., 2017a,b). It may bethe case that, at longer delays, the
level of detail is a more eective indicator of whether a person is lying
or telling the truth.
e nature of these details, such as whether they are consistent
across time points, may also beimportant for the discrimination of
lies and truths. Consistency and inconsistency across repeated
interviews were considered with respect to four main types of
information: repeated, omitted, reminiscent, and contradictory.
Opportunities for repeated recall oer truth-tellers an occasion to
appear inconsistent, should they provide new information in a
subsequent statement. e addition of information that is reminiscent
(and therefore inconsistent) may bemore likely when people are cued
to provide a second statement with a dierent cue than was used to
elicit a prior statement (Gilbert and Fisher, 2006). Liars, on the other
hand, may be perceived as suspicious should their statements
be inconsistent across interviews and therefore may strategically
attempt to maintain their narratives over time. Here, truthfully
described activities were associated with a greater proportion of
consistent details than were experiences that people lied about.
Asking participants to recall their activities in reverse
chronological order actually improved between-statement consistency.
Specically, people in the Reverse Order condition omitted fewer
details between Phase Iand Phase II interviews, compared to people
who were asked follow-up probing questions in the Structured
Interview condition. Although we expected that participants
interviewed with a Reverse Order technique would provide more
detailed initial narratives, it was the “tell me more” probing questions
in the Structured Interview that led to greater reported details–
however, many of these details were subsequently omitted in the Phase
II interview. ough accuracy for the details added following these
probes could not beassessed for all statements (though other work
suggests they may be less accurate than unprompted details;
Kontogianni etal., 2020), it is likely that these additional details were
peripheral to the primary tasks. For instance, some of these details
reected individuals that they saw (but presumably did not interact
with; e.g., “there was a guy with big black glasses” and “I almost ran
into a girl”), while others reected their personal thought processes or
observations during the task (e.g., “it was loud in there” and “I was too
lazy to scan [a QR code on a yer in Campus Area A] with my
phone”). erefore, one possibility is that the additional probes in the
Structured Interview condition may have prompted less important or
less memorable details in the initial interview, leading participants to
fail to provide these details during a subsequent interview.
In contrast to expectations, participants were similarly detailed
during their Phase II interviews regardless of whether they had been
initially interviewed or not. is may bedue to participants in the
Interview-Absent conditions receiving their cover story information
and preparation time immediately preceding their interviews at Phase
II. However, this preparation time was needed to equate the
instructions to those received by initially interviewed participants.
4.1. Limitations and applied implications
ough it may bepossible for truth-tellers to beinconsistent in
their repeated recall of an event, our ndings suggest that the type of
memory cuing aorded during the initial recall episode may
beimportant. Contrary to our expectations, people did not provide
more reminiscent details during the Phase II interview when truthfully
describing their activities. However, this was likely due to the Phase II
interview involving a simple free recall prompt rather than the use of
memory-enhancing or varied retrieval approaches. As a result, any
reminiscence would have been spontaneous (or self-cued). e use of
a memory-enhancing technique, like the Cognitive Interview, has
been shown to facilitate the reporting of new details in delayed recall
(Odinot etal., 2013; Hope etal., 2014).
Both of the interviewing techniques used to elicit narratives in this
study are considered “best practice.” e current research did not
assess the eect of these best practice techniques in comparison to
customary accusatorial tactics, such as those trained in the Reid
technique (Inbau etal., 2011; see Meissner etal., 2015). Tactics that
are characteristic of the Reid technique include shutting down denials,
confronting the suspect with evidence of their guilt, and suggesting
scenarios or theories of the crime. In future work, it may beuseful to
contrast the eects of lying on memory when best practice interview
techniques are compared to such guilt-presumptive techniques.
Despite the benet to some interview outcomes when “best
practice” techniques are used (e.g., the diagnosticity of a confession;
see Meissner etal., 2012, for a review), such techniques allow a subject
to “tell their story” in a way that permits both denials as well as
deceptive narratives. In a similar manner, approaches like the
Dianiska and Meissner 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1184055
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Cognitive Interview can lead to small increases in incorrect details
being provided by the subject–though such interviews also lead to
large increases in correct details, thereby mitigating the eect on a
person’s overall accuracy (Memon etal., 2010). Could the provision of
deceptive or incorrect information harm subsequent recall? e
current data suggest that people who have previously lied are at a
disadvantage should they decide at a later point to be truthful and
forthcoming with an interviewer. Wefound that participants provided
signicantly less detail when they had previously lied about the event.
What remains to beexamined, however, is whether that harm might
bepartially or fully ameliorated if memory-enhancing techniques are
used to elicit information in a later interview.
To motivate participants to lie convincingly during the
experiment, weused a nancial incentive based on others’ perceptions
of their statement. ough participants rated their motivation to
beperceived as truthful well above the midpoint of the scale (M = 5.43,
SD = 0.99; on a scale from 1, not at all, to 7, completely), oering a
monetary reward for believability might not have adequately
motivated someone to lie as they might in an interview. As such,
future work should investigate the eects of lying on memory when
there is a stronger motivation to lie, such as to avoid punishment or
embarrassment (e.g., Riesthuis etal., 2022a).
Finally, given the recent emphasis on increasing the ecological
validity of deception experiments (Romeo etal., 2019; Dianiska and
Meissner, 2022), participants in the present experiment were
permitted to choose when to lie and when to tell the truth. Prior to
being interviewed, all participants were tasked with choosing one area
to tell the truth about and were then given an area of campus to create
a lie about their activities. While the paradigm used in the present
experiment oers more ecological validity than other lab-based
paradigms, it does so at the expense of being able to assess participant’s
statement accuracy. Given the variability in participants’ episodic
experiences during the scavenger hunt (e.g., encountering dierent
people and obstacles along the way), wecould not assess accuracy.
Future studies might involve the inclusion of a confederate or the use
of a body camera in the experimental task that would allow for a more
natural, yet veriable, encoding task.
4.2. Conclusion
Taken together, the current ndings add further evidence that the
act of lying has downstream consequences for the accurate recall of
truthfully experienced events. at is, lying about one’s experiences
led to both less accurate memory for those experiences and less
consistent statements. e current data suggest that the act of lying
has a detrimental eect on memory for what truthfully occurred.
Further, an interviewers’ choice of tactic can signicantly inuence the
amount and quality of information provided. e use of a credibility
assessment technique, such as the Reverse Order instruction,
facilitated between-statement consistency by reducing omissions. In
the absence of such a tactic, an interviewers’ selection of follow-up
topics might, perhaps unintentionally, impede their ability to rely on
consistency and the level of detail of a subjects statement as cues
to credibility.
Data availability statement
e datasets presented in this study can be found in online
repositories. e names of the repository/repositories and accession
number(s) can befound at: https://osf.io/atz5h/.
Ethics statement
e studies involving human participants were reviewed and
approved by Iowa State University Institutional Review Board (IRB).
e patients/participants provided their written informed consent to
participate in this study.
Author contributions
RD conceived the original idea and designed the study
withcontributions from CM, programmed, ran the experiment
and analyzed the data, and wrote the primary drafts of the
manuscript. CM assisted in analyses and interpretation of the
data and provided feedback, and suggested revisions to the
manuscript. All authors approved the submitted version of
the manuscript.
Conflict of interest
e authors declare that the research was conducted in the
absence of any commercial or nancial relationships that could
beconstrued as a potential conict of interest.
Publisher’s note
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the
authors and do not necessarily represent those of their aliated
organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the
reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or
claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or
endorsed by the publisher.
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... When determining whether a person's account is credible and reliable, that is, whether the witness is telling the truth and providing an accurate account of the events, decision-makers consider inconsistencies or contradictions of witnesses' own statements (Burrows & Powell, 2014;Dianiska & Meissner, 2023), with those of other witnesses, and with external evidence (Brewer et al., 1999;. A complainant's account may also be regarded as inconsistent when additional information or fresh abuse allegations are reported at a later stage of the investigation (Burrows & Powell, 2014;Gilbert & Fisher, 2006;Goodman-Delahunty & Nolan, 2024). ...
... Inconsistencies are a feature of normal memory, not necessarily an indicator of the accuracy or inaccuracy of an account (Fisher et al., 2009;Oeberst, 2012). It is important to distinguish recall consistency for the core or central elements of an event versus peripheral details: core elements are remembered better and likely to remain consistent, peripheral details are not unusually inconsistent, especially after a delay (Dianiska & Meissner, 2023;Fisher et al., 2009). Although multiple forensic interviews with the same complainant/s can elicit further information (Block et al., 2013), they increase the likelihood of inconsistencies in reports between interviews, and in some instances, of recantations (Williams et al., 2022). ...
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