The capacity to identify cheaters is essential for maintaining balanced social relationships, yet humans have been shown to be generally poor deception detectors. In fact, a plethora of empirical findings holds that individuals are only slightly better than chance when discerning lies from truths. Here, we report 5 experiments showing that judges' ability to detect deception greatly increases after periods of unconscious processing. Specifically, judges who were kept from consciously deliberating outperformed judges who were encouraged to do so or who made a decision immediately; moreover, unconscious thinkers' detection accuracy was significantly above chance level. The reported experiments further show that this improvement comes about because unconscious thinking processes allow for integrating the particularly rich information basis necessary for accurate lie detection. These findings suggest that the human mind is not unfit to distinguish between truth and deception but that this ability resides in previously overlooked processes.

In 4 experiments, the authors investigated the influence of situational familiarity with the judgmental context on the process of lie detection. They predicted that high familiarity with a situation leads to a more pronounced use of content cues when making judgments of veracity. Therefore, they expected higher classification accuracy of truths and lies under high familiarity. Under low situational familiarity, they expected that people achieve lower accuracy rates because they use more nonverbal cues for their veracity judgments. In all 4 experiments, participants with high situational familiarity achieved higher accuracy rates in classifying both truthful and deceptive messages than participants with low situational familiarity. Moreover, mediational analyses demonstrated that higher classification accuracy in the high-familiarity condition was associated with more use of verbal content cues and less use of nonverbal cues.

This study investigated the ability of more or less experienced employment interviewers and laypersons to detect deception in employment interviews. Although correct beliefs about indicators of deception led to higher deception detection accuracy, more experienced employment interviewers did not show more accurate beliefs about indicators of deception and did not perform better at detecting deception than less experienced interviewers and laypersons. Furthermore, more experienced interviewers showed a less-pronounced tendency of judging messages as true irrespective of their actual truthfulness (truth bias) than less experienced interviewers and laypersons. It is suggested that experience in employment interviewing does not automatically lead to higher deception detection abilities in employment interviews, but that correcting people's beliefs about indicators of deception can do so.

Lie catchers are often barely better than chance. In this experiment, we investigated the influence of manipulated perceived familiarity with a situation that measured participants’ ability to correctly classify lies and truths. As expected, participants in the high-familiarity condition showed substantially (21%) greater classification accuracy for both truths and lies than in the low-familiarity condition. Furthermore, as predicted, mediational analyses indicated that the higher classification accuracy rates in the high-familiarity conditions were due in part to a stronger reliance on content cues and less use of stereotypical nonverbal cues, compared to the low-familiarity condition. Participants in the high-familiarity condition were also more confident in their decision and better calibrated than participants who had been led to believe that they were unfamiliar with the situation. Analyses of confidence-accuracy calibration challenge previous findings of low correlations between confidence and accuracy.

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In two experiments, recent findings showing the detrimental role of regulatory depletion in decision making are extended to the field of deception detection. In both experiments, the state of ego depletion was induced by having judges inhibit versus non-inhibit a dominant response while transcribing a text. Subsequently they judged true or deceptive messages of different stimulus persons with regard to their truthfulness. In both experiments, ego-depleted judges scored significantly lower on detection accuracy than control judges. Signal detection measures showed that this effect was not due to differences in judgmental bias between the two conditions. In Experiment 2, it was shown that the lower detection accuracy in the state of ego depletion was due to a feeling of difficulty of relying on verbal content information. Practical implications of the current findings are discussed.

PurposeFor police officers, the ability to distinguish between truthful and deceptive statements in interrogations is essential. However, research shows that their classification accuracy is typically rather low. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ability to detect deception as a function of perceived experience, in a sample of German police officers and police trainees.Design/methodology/approachThe authors had the participants judge ten video recordings of a mock crime with respect to the displayed suspects’ truthfulness. Following the assumptions and findings of previous research, the authors expected their manipulation of perceived experience to increase detection accuracy, but expected objective experience not to be correlated with the ability to detect deception.FindingsAs expected, police officers and trainees in the experience condition achieved higher accuracy than control participants. On the objective self‐report measures of experience, no relationship with classification accuracy was found.Practical implicationsThe findings suggest that police officers’ objective experience does not perfectly translate into subjective experience. A subjective feeling of experience can be sufficient enough to increase detection accuracy, even if one is objectively inexperienced.Originality/valueThe manipulation proved to be a simple and efficient method of increasing judgmental accuracy in lie detection without increasing police officers’ actual knowledge or changing their beliefs about deception cues.

In order to handle the long living radioactive waste (spent nuclear fuel) SKB is planning to build a deep repository that requires no monitoring by future generations. The spent nuclear fuel will be encapsulated in copper canisters consisting of a graphite cast iron insert shielded by an outer 30-50 mm thick copper cylinder for corrosion protection. The most critical part of the encapsulation process is the sealing of the canister, which is done by welding the copper lid to the cylindrical part of the copper shell using -radiographic and ultrasonic testing -must be satisfactorily determined and combined to derive assumptions regarding the frequency of undetected welding defects for the ensemble of canisters as input for the risk assessment. This is done using the POD method according to the "Reliability Handbook MIL 1823" and its generalization to more complex defect situations in welds.friction stir welding and electron beam welding. The quality of the welding process and the reliability of the NDT system