The inconsistent suspect: A systematic review of consistency in truth tellers and liars (original) (raw)

Detecting deception in suspects: Verbal cues as a function of interview strategy

Psychology Crime & Law, 2011

Research on deception has consistently shown that people are poor at detecting deception, partly due to lack of consistent cues to deception. This research focuses on eliciting verbal cues to deception when questioning suspects who deny crime and how such cues differ due to type of questioning. An experiment examined verbal differences between innocent and guilty mock suspects (N=96) as a function of veracity and interview style (Free recall, Probes, or Free recall plus Probes). Guilty (vs innocent) suspects omitted more crime-relevant information and their statements were more likely to contradict the evidence, showing that statement–evidence inconsistency was a cue to deception. This cue to deception was more pronounced when the interview contained probes. Lie-catchers (N=192) obtained an accuracy rate higher than chance (61.5%) for detecting deceptive denials. Implications for further research on verbal cues to deception are discussed.

THE LANGUAGE OF DECEIT: ARE THERE RELIABLE VERBAL CLUES TO DECEPTION IN THE INTERROGATION CONTEXT2

1994

In recent years, the need for enhanced methods of credibility assessment in criminal cases has become illuminated. Especially in cases of sexual assault, the words of the accused and complainant are often the sole evidence available to police. Consequently, researchers and practitioners have been searching for ways of differentiating truthful and deceptive accounts, focussing mainly on witnesses and victims.

Repeated interrogations–stretching the deception detection paradigm

Expert Evidence, 1999

In real life, suspects are often subjected to repeated interrogations. Psycho-legal research on deception has neglected this fact. To remedy this mismatch a series of studies was conducted mapping how repeated interrogations affect lie-catchers' judgemental processes, deception detection performance, and meta-assessments. In two experiments we found that lie-catchers given access to consecutive statements from one suspect did not perform better than lie-catchers given access to one statement only. In addition, access to repeated interrogations inflated the lie-catchers' confidence in the correctness of their veracity judgement, which had a detrimental effect on the accuracy-confidence relation. As the basis for assessing veracity was changed from one to several statements the lie-catchers, to a large extent, seemed to trust the 'consistency heuristic'. The assumption underlying this heuristic is that inconsistency implies deception and consistency implies truth. The data show that (a) people tend to disagree as to whether a particular set of consecutive statements is consistent or not, and (b) deceptive statements are at least equally consistent as truthful statements. In order to explain the latter finding a 'repeat vs. reconstruct' hypothesis was suggested, assuming that liars try to repeat their initial statement, whereas truth-tellers try to reconstruct a previously experienced event. The low predictive accuracy found for the 'consistency heuristic' strongly questions beliefs held by professional liecatchers, opinions expressed in the psycho-legal literature and recommendations found in applied interrogation manuals.

The Role of Consistency in Detecting Deception: The Superiority of Correspondence over Coherence

Communication Studies, 2018

Inconsistency is often considered an indication of deceit. The conceptualization of consistency used in deception research, however, has not made a clear distinction between two concepts long differentiated by philosophers: coherence and correspondence. The existing literature suggests that coherence is not generally useful for deception detection. Correspondence, however, appears to be quite useful. The present research developed a model of how correspondence is utilized to make judgments, and this article reports on four studies designed to elaborate on the model. The results suggest that judges attend strongly to correspondence and that they do so in an additive fashion. As noncorrespondent information accumulates, an increasingly smaller proportion of judges make truthful assessments of guilty suspects. This work provides a basic framework for examining how information is utilized to make deception judgments and forms the correspondence and coherence module of truth-default theory.

Analysing Deception in Written Witness Statements

Linguistic Evidence in Security, Law & Intelligence, 1(1) (2013)

Written witness statements are a unique source for the study of high-stakes textual deception. To date, however, there is no distinction in the way that they and other forms of verbal deception have been analysed, with written statements treated as extensions of transcribed versions of oral reports. Given the highly context-dependent nature of cues, it makes sense to take the characteristics of the medium into account when analysing for deceptive language. This study examines the characteristic features of witness narratives and proposes a new approach to search for deception cues. Narratives are treated as a progression of episodes over time, and deception as a progression of acts over time. This allows for the profiling of linguistic bundles in sequence, revealing the statements' internal gradient, and deceivers' choice of deceptive linguistic strategy. Study results suggest that, at least in the context of written witness statements, the weighting of individual features as deception cues is not static but depends on their interaction with other cues, and that detecting deceivers' use of linguistic strategy is an effective vehicle for identifying deception.

Lies, True Lies, and Conscious Deception

Police Quarterly, 2008

Police officers often tell lies; they act in ways that are deceptive, they manipulative people and situations, they coerce citizens, and are dishonest. They are taught, encouraged, and often rewarded for their deceptive practices. Officers often lie to suspects about witnesses and evidence, and they are deceitful when attempting to learn about criminal activity. Most of these actions are sanctioned, legal, and expected. Although they are allowed to be dishonest in certain circumstances, they are also required to be trustworthy, honest, and maintain the highest level of integrity. The purpose of this article is to explore situations when officers can be dishonest, some reasons that help us understand the dishonesty, and circumstances where lies may lead to unintended consequences such as false confessions. The authors conclude with a discussion of how police agencies can manage the lies that officers tell and the consequences for the officers, organizations, and the criminal justice ...

Verbal and Non-verbal Symptoms of Deception in the Eyes of Policemen and Psychologists

European Polygraph, 2019

The objective of the study was to test how selected respondents (psychologists and police officers) evaluate the diagnostic value of symptoms (cues) of deception listed in literature on the subject. To achieve that, 16 verbal and non-verbal (behavioural) symptoms listed in literature as most typical and most frequently accompanying deceit were ever located by 100 police officers and 101 psychologists (n=201). Their task was to group the symptoms according to the following categories: “often present”, “rarely present”, and “never present”. Both the groups of respondents claimed that in their work they have to frequently decide whether their interlocutors tell the truth or lie, and are convinced that they are capable of accurate detection of deception through their assessment of verbal and non-verbal (behavioural) symptoms accompanying lie. The latter belief is clearly refuted by the results of all known experimental studies. In fact, police officers and psychologists agreed that the ...

In Search of a Gold Standard in Studies of Deception

2012

Research syntheses suggest that verbal cues are more diagnostic of deception than other cues. Recently, to avoid human judgmental biases, researchers have sought to find faster and more reliable methods to perform automatic content analyses of statements. However, diversity of methods and inconsistent findings do not present a clear picture of effectiveness. We integrate and statistically synthesize this literature. Our meta-analyses revealed small, but significant effect-sizes on some linguistic categories. Liars use fewer exclusive words, self-and other-references, fewer time-related, but more space-related, negative and positive emotion words, and more motion verbs or negations than truth-tellers. References marked with an asterisk are included in the meta-analysis.