Listening, not watching: Situational familiarity and the ability to detect deception.

Abstract

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.

Does Training Improve the Detection of Deception? A Meta-Analysis

“…Focusing on verbal content rather than on heuristic cues like nonverbal behavior has also been demonstrated to result in higher detection rates in a series of recent studies based on dual process theories of credibility attribution (Reinhard, Sporer, & Scharmach, 2013;Reinhard, Sporer, Scharmach, & Marksteiner, 2011). We found additional support for verbal content training within the second metaanalytic approach, where these programs showed a medium size training effect, with the exception of studies by and Köhnken (1987) who obtained negative training effects.…”

Let’s be honest: A review of experimental evidence of honesty and truth-telling

“…Our review excludes studies in various related areas such as the ability of individuals to detect lies (cf. Reinhard, Sporer, Scharmach, & Marksteiner, 2011), socially-desirable responding (cf. Lalwani, Shavitt, & Johnson, 2006), neurological processes and dishonesty (cf.…”

Individual Differences Predicting Impression Management Detection in Job Interviews

“…In a study with police officers, deception detection was improved when they focused on story-related cues, such as vagueness or contradictions, instead of nonverbal cues like posture change or fidgeting (Mann, Vrij, & Bull, 2004). Detection deception is also more accurate when judges are familiar with the situation described in the (truthful vs. deceptive) statement (Reinhard, Sporer, & Scharmach, 2015;Reinhard, Sporer, Scharmach, & Marksteiner, 2011). Similarly, judges provided with "content in context" cues, such as meaningful contextual information, reached an average of 75% detection accuracy (Blair, Levine, & Shaw, 2010).…”