Impressions That Arouse an Auditor's Suspicion of Lying in an Interview

Abstract

This study models the process by which auditors draw a suspicion of lying from an interviewee's behavior and tests the model with perceptions and beliefs collected from 147 auditors after they observed an interview. An understanding of the way auditors become suspicious of lying may lead to improvements in their deception-detection training. The proposed structural model includes impressions of the interviewee as intervening variables between perceptions of behavior and suspicion of lying. It was evaluated using SEM. The results show the instrumentality of two impressions, uneasiness and non-informativeness. An additional finding is that mental stress, which can be more intense for liars than for truth tellers, is not a suspicious behavior. Auditors may disregard signs of mental stress because interviewees typically have to answer thought-provoking questions, thereby confounding the mental stress of lying with the mental stress of the interview.