Police Detection of Deception: Beliefs About Behavioral Cues to Deception Are Strong Even Though Contextual Evidence Is More Useful

Abstract

Research questions the validity of behavioral deception cues; however, people believe behavioral cues are reliable deception indicators. Police officers and community members indicated both how lies can be detected (beliefs), and how they discovered a lie in the past (revealing information). Officers did the latter twice, prompted with a professional versus a personal context. For both groups, beliefs were primarily behavioral (e.g., demeanor) and revealing information contextual (evidence, third-party information, etc.). Officers responded similarly regardless of context. Relative to community members, officers provided more cues and referred more often to verbal contradictions and active detection strategies when asked about beliefs. Practitioners should be made aware of the discrepancies between their beliefs about deception cues and useful information to detect lies.

Self‐Reported Beliefs About Verbal Cues Correlate with Deception‐Detection Performance

“…To this end, participants were asked to make credibility judgments about eight statements that were presented as either videos or verbatim transcripts. As expected, participants primarily reported nonverbal cues-most notably gaze aversion and nervous behavior-as useful for detecting deception, replicating our previous study (Bogaard et al, 2016), as well as many others (e.g., Akehurst et al, 1996;Masip & Herrero, 2015;Strömwall et al, 2004;Strömwall & Granhag, 2003;Taylor & Hick, 2007;Vrij et al, 2006;Vrij & Semin, 1996). Although verbal signals were reported to a lesser extent, the cues that were reported (i.e., inconsistencies, details, and coherence) were largely supported by empirical research (Amado et al, 2015;Amado, Arce, Fariña, & Vilariño, 2016;Masip et al, 2005;Oberlader et al, 2016;Vrij, 2005).…”

“…Thus, people predominantly rely on nonverbal cues and largely ignore verbal cues when detecting deceit, even though the latter are more diagnostic (Levine & McCornack, 2014;Masip & Herrero, 2015;Vrij, 2008c). Nevertheless, which beliefs people hold about verbal cues are only investigated sporadically.…”

ALIED: Humans as adaptive lie detectors.

“…self-report they actually make use of the more diagnostic content and behavioral cues that are available (Hartwig & Bond, 2011; see also Masip & Herrero, 2015). This is perhaps the first evidence that lie detectors are more adaptive (in the sense of functional) than they were previously thought to have been.…”

An Evolutionary Perspective on Pain Communication

“…Park, Levine, McCornack, Morrison, and Ferrara (2002) criticized that the low lie detection rates found in experimental studies are an artifact based on the exclusion of contextual information forcing the participants to exclusively rely on nonverbal cues to judge the veracity of a statement. In fact, in real life, lies are usually discovered by information from the context, not by the nonverbal behavior of the liar (Masip & Herrero, 2015;Park, Levine, McCornack, Morrison, & Ferrara, 2002). Accordingly, introducing a familiar situation and diagnostic contextual information to the experimental paradigm can raise accuracy rates substantially (Blair, Levine, & Shaw, 2010;Bond, Howard, Hutchison, & Masip, 2013;Levine, 2015;Levine, Kim, & Blair, 2010;Reinhard, Sporer, Scharmach, & Marksteiner, 2011).…”