High stakes lies: Police and non-police accuracy in detecting deception

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Psychology, Crime and Law on 26 June 2014 available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/1068316X.2014.935777To date, the majority of investigations in to accuracy in detecting deception have used low stakes lies as stimulus materials, and findings from these studies suggest that people are generally poor at detecting deception. The research presented here utilised real life, high stakes lies as stimulus materials, to investigate the accuracy of police and non-police observers in detecting deception. It was hypothesised that both police and non-police observers would achieve above chance levels of accuracy in detecting deception, that police officers would be more accurate at detecting deception than non-police observers, that confidence in veracity judgements would be positively related to accuracy, and that consensus judgements would predict veracity. 107 observers (70 police officers and 37 non-police participants) watched 36 videos of people lying or telling the truth in an extremely high stakes, real life situation. Police observers achieved mean accuracy in detecting deception of 72%, non-police observers achieved 68% mean accuracy, and confidence in veracity judgements were positively related to accuracy. Consensus judgements correctly predicted veracity in 92% of cases.ESRC grant number ES/I013288/

The Psychological Assessment of Deception: Obvious and Subtle Items, Obvious and Subtle Subjects

This article provides an analysis of approaches to detecting deception in subjects administered psychological assessment instruments for nondeceptive and/or deceptive purposes

Indicators of Deception: Science or Non-Science

Deception detection is used by many law enforcement professionals who work in interviews and interrogations. The ability to detect deception or having knowledge on the signs of deception is very important in not only law enforcement, but in other careers and everyday life. The question remains: is deception detection a science or not a science? There are three areas where someone can learn how to detect deception and those are verbal communication, non-verbal communication, and paralanguage. The use of verbal communication looks at what the person is saying with their words. The use of non-verbal communication looks at what someone is communicating through their body language and facial expressions. The use of paralanguage focuses on how someone communicates their statements. These all factor into detecting deception and understanding what each looks like is important. Learning about the signs of deception for each will allow people to know what indicators to look for when interacting with another person. There are people that believe they have completely mastered these skills and that have a strong sense of detecting deception. They are called lie wizards and claim to be able to detect deception very easily and naturally. There is not, however, enough evidence to suggest that this is true and that lie wizards exist. Ultimately, through examining several studies and looking at different indicators, deception can be detected to a certain degree of accuracy. The practice of deception detection is not an exact science, but by knowing the various signs and recognizing clusters of them can assist in successfully detecting deception