Cues to deception and ability to detect lies as a function of police interview styles.

Abstract

In Experiment 1, we examined whether three interview styles used by the police, accusatory, information-gathering and behaviour analysis, reveal verbal cues to deceit, measured with the Criteria-Based Content Analysis (CBCA) and Reality Monitoring (RM) methods. A total of 120 mock suspects told the truth or lied about a staged event and were interviewed by a police officer employing one of these three interview styles. The results showed that accusatory interviews, which typically result in suspects making short denials, contained the fewest verbal cues to deceit. Moreover, RM distinguished between truth tellers and liars better than CBCA. Finally, manual RM coding resulted in more verbal cues to deception than automatic coding of the RM criteria utilising the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software programme. In Experiment 2, we examined the effects of the three police interview styles on the ability to detect deception. Sixty-eight police officers watched some of the videotaped interviews of Experiment 1 and made veracity and confidence judgements. Accuracy scores did not differ between the three interview styles; however, watching accusatory interviews resulted in more false accusations (accusing truth tellers of lying) than watching information-gathering interviews. Furthermore, only in accusatory interviews, judgements of mendacity were associated with higher confidence. We discuss the possible danger of conducting accusatory interviews.

Separating Facts from Fiction: Linguistic Models to Classify Suspicious and Trusted News Posts on Twitter

“…LIWC features have been successfully used for deception detection before (Hancock et al, 2007;Vrij et al, 2007;Mihalcea and Strapparava, 2009). For example, persuasive language cues in LIWC include statistics and factual data, rhetorical questions, imperative commands, personal pronouns, and emotional language.…”

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“…The main idea of LWIC coding is text classification according to truth conditions. LWIC has been extensively employed to study deception detection (Vrij et al, 2007, Hancock et al, 2007, Mihalcea and Strapparava, 2009). …”

Applying Deception Detection to True and False Confessions: A Novel Approach to Conducting Experiments in Legal Psychology

“…However, when investigators focus on speech-related or verbal cues, their deception detection accurate rates tend to increase in comparison to those simply observing visual behavior (Vrij, 2008a). Further, focusing on speech in interrogation would have a secondary effect of encouraging the suspect to talk, providing additional possible cues to deception, and giving the investigator a wider breadth of speech to examine (Vrij, Mann, Kristen, & Fisher, 2007).…”

“…In practice, deception detection researchers who aim to increase empirically-based police interrogational practices advise against the use of non-verbal or body language cues in favor of a focus on the speech of a suspect -the verbal and paralingustic cues that may be present (Vrij, 2008;Vrij, Mann, Kristen, & Fisher, 2007). Porter & ten Brinke (2010) provide a review of relevant literature on nonverbal, verbal, and paralinguistic cues to deception.…”