Application of Uncertainty Thought Environment in Judicial Adjudication Based on Cognitive Psychology

The uncertainty of judicial decision-making has a deep and extensive theoretical foundation. Theoretical analysis starts with a reflection on legal rationalism that challenges the legal certainty before delving deeply into the case's facts and the entire legal system. In light of this, this paper explores a novel approach to enhance the reasoning mechanism of trial documents from the viewpoint of modern cognitive psychology, concentrating on the parties' and the public's cognitive processes to justice. It is suggested to use an inert hierarchical multilabel classification algorithm. In order to predict the category of invisible examples, the extended multilabel training set is first searched for adjacent samples of invisible examples, and the classification weight and confidence of each category are then determined in accordance with these adjacent samples. The group of invisible examples is then anticipated. Experimental comparison demonstrates that this algorithm outperforms other prediction techniques; the macro accuracy, macro recall, and macro F1 of this method are, respectively, 0.896, 0.871, and 0.814. It has some advantages in many multilabel evaluation indexes when compared to other multilabel algorithms.

Reading Lies: Nonverbal Communication and Deception

The relationship between nonverbal communication and deception continues to attract much interest, but there are many misconceptions about it. In this review, we present a scientific view on this relationship. We describe theories explaining why liars would behave differently from truth tellers, followed by research on how liars actually behave and individuals' ability to detect lies. We show that the nonverbal cues to deceit discovered to date are faint and unreliable and that people are mediocre lie catchers when they pay attention to behavior. We also discuss why individuals hold misbeliefs about the relationship between nonverbal behavior and deception-beliefs that appear very hard to debunk. We further discuss the ways in which researchers could improve the state of affairs by examining nonverbal behaviors in different ways and in different settings than they currently do.

Interview expectancies: awareness of potential biases influences behaviour in interviewees

Expectancy effects are known to influence behaviour so that what is expected appears to be true. In this study, expectancy was induced using (fabricated) information about honesty and specific group membership. Targets were tested in a non-accusatory interview environment using neutral and information-gathering questions. It was hypothesized that those exposed to the negative information (the expectancy) would demonstrate behaviour consistent with an increased cognitive load, and evidence was found to support this prediction. Due to the investigative nature of the information-gathering questions, it was also expected that the targets exposed to the expectancy would exhibit more of these behaviours in the investigative portion of the interview. Some behaviour was found to support this prediction (i.e. shorter responses and increased speech disturbances); however, indicators of performance altering load were not observed during this phase of the interview. These findings support the hypothesis that expectancy effects can noticeably alter interviewee behaviour.

Factors affecting Observers' Accuracy when Assessing Credibility: The Effect of the Interaction between Media, Senders' Competence and Veracity

The present experiment examined how the interaction between senders' communicative competence, veracity and the medium through which judgments were made affected observers' accuracy. Stimuli were obtained from a previous study. Observers (N = 220) judged the truthfulness of statements provided by a good truth teller, a good liar, a bad truth teller, and a bad liar presented either via an audio-only, video-only, audio-video, or transcript format. Log-linear analyses showed that the data were best explained via the saturated model, therefore indicating that all the four variables interacted, G2(0) = 0, p = 1, Q2 = 1. Follow-up analyses showed that the good liar and bad liar were best evaluated via the transcript (z = 2.5) and the audio-only medium (z = 3.9), respectively. Both the good truth teller and the bad truth teller were best assessed through the audio-video medium (z = 2.1, good truth teller, z = 3.4, bad truth teller). Results indicated that all the factors interacted and played a joint role on observers' accuracy. Difficulties and suggestions for choosing the right medium are presented.

Strong, but Wrong: Lay People's and Police Officers' Beliefs about Verbal and Nonverbal Cues to Deception

The present study investigated the beliefs of students and police officers about cues to deception. A total of 95 police officers and 104 undergraduate students filled out a questionnaire addressing beliefs about cues to deception. Twenty-eight verbal cues were included in the questionnaire, all extracted from verbal credibility assessment tools (i.e., CBCA, RM, and SCAN). We investigated to what extent beliefs about nonverbal and verbal cues of deception differed between lay people (students) and police officers, and whether these beliefs were in agreement with objective cues known from research. Both students and police officers believed the usual stereotypical, but non-diagnostic (nonverbal) cues such as gaze aversion and increased movement to be indicative of deception. Yet, participants were less inclined to overestimate the relationship between verbal cues and deception and their beliefs fitted better with what we know from research. The implications of these findings for practice are discussed.

Outsmarting the liars: the benefit of asking unanticipated questions

We hypothesised that the responses of pairs of liars would correspond less with each other than would responses of pairs of truth tellers, but only when the responses are given to unanticipated questions. Liars and truth tellers were interviewed individually about having had lunch together in a restaurant. The interviewer asked typical opening questions which we expected the liars to anticipate, followed by questions about spatial and/or temporal information which we expected suspects not to anticipate, and also a request to draw the layout of the restaurant. The results supported the hypothesis, and based on correspondence in responses to the unanticipated questions, up to 80% of liars and truth tellers could be correctly classified, particularly when assessing drawings.