Arabic within culture forensic interviews: Arabic native speaking lay-observer truth and lie accuracy, confidence, and verbal cue selection

Cross cultural differences in behavioral and verbal norms and expectations can undermine credibility, often triggering a lie bias which can result in false convictions. However, current understanding is heavily North American and Western European centric, hence how individuals from non-western cultures infer veracity is not well understood. We report novel research investigating native Arabic speakers' truth and lie judgments having observed a matched native language forensic interview with a mock person of interest. 217 observers viewed a truthful or a deceptive interview and were directed to attend to detailedness as a veracity cue or given no direction. Overall, a truth bias (66% accuracy) emerged, but observers were more accurate (79%) in the truth condition with the truthful interviewee rated as more plausible and more believable than the deceptive interviewee. However, observer accuracy dropped to just 23% when instructed to use the detailedness cue when judging veracity. Verbal veracity cues attended too were constant across veracity conditions with 'corrections' emerging as an important veracity cue. Some results deviate from the findings of research with English speaking western participants in cross- and matched-culture forensic interview contexts, but others are constant. Nonetheless, this research raises questions for research to practice in forensic contexts centred on the robustness of western centric psychological understanding for non-western within culture interviews centred on interview protocols for amplifying veracity cues and the instruction to note detailedness of verbal accounts which significantly hindered Arabic speaker's performance. Findings again highlight the challenges of pancultural assumptions for real-world practices.

Power and lie detection

Social power undermines focus on others and increases reliance on stereotype-consistent information. Thus, power may enhance focus on stereotypical cues to deception, thereby decreasing lie detection accuracy. In three studies, we tested whether having power affects lie detection accuracy. Participants (overall N = 502) were asked to identify truthful and lying candidates (N = 12) during mock job interviews. Study 1 was a field experiment involving employees who held managerial and non-managerial positions (N = 88). In the following laboratory experiments, we manipulated power and asked participants to imagine themselves as managers (Study 2, N = 214) or provided them with control over resources and the ability to reward others (Study 3, N = 200). In Studies 2 and 3, we additionally manipulated the method of lie detection (direct vs. indirect). In contrast to the original hypotheses, we found that power led to increased veracity assessment accuracy. Having power over others enhances the accuracy of one’s veracity assessment, although this increase is small and limited to lie detection (Study 1) or direct judgments (Studies 2 & 3). Together, power affects the processing of social information and what aspects of this information are taken into account.

Autistic Adults May Be Erroneously Perceived as Deceptive and Lacking Credibility

We hypothesized that autistic adults may be erroneously judged as deceptive or lacking credibility due to demonstrating unexpected and atypical behaviors. Thirty autistic and 29 neurotypical individuals participated in video-recorded interviews, and we measured their demonstration of gaze aversion, repetitive body movements, literal interpretation of figurative language, poor reciprocity, and flat affect. Participants (N = 1410) viewed one of these videos and rated their perception of the individual's truthfulness or credibility. The hypothesis was partially supported, with autistic individuals perceived as more deceptive and less credible than neurotypical individuals when telling the truth. However, this relationship was not influenced by the presence of any of the target behaviors, but instead, by the individual's overall presentation.

Mnemonic Techniques and Lie Detection: Accuracy of Truth and Deception Judgments in Repeated Accounts

This study was an examination into whether the use of memory-enhancing techniques (mnemonics) in interviews can be helpful to distinguish truth tellers from liars. In the previous study (Izotovas et al., 2018), it was found that when mnemonic techniques were used in the interview immediately after the event, truth-tellers reported more details than liars in those immediate interviews and again after a delay. Moreover, truth-tellers, but not liars, showed patterns of reporting indicative of genuine memory decay. In the current experiment, participants (n = 92) were asked to read the repeated statements reported by participants in the Izotovas et al.’s (2018) study and decide whether the statements they read were truthful or deceptive. One group of participants (informed condition) received information about the findings of the previous study before reading the statement. The other group received no information before reading the statement (uninformed condition). After participants made veracity judgements, they were asked an open-ended question asking what factors influenced their credibility decision. Although truthful statements were judged more accurately in the informed condition (65.2%) than in the uninformed condition (47.8%), this difference was not significant. In both conditions deceptive statements were detected at chance level (52.2%). Participants who relied on the self-reported diagnostic verbal cues to deceit were not more accurate than participants who self-reported unreliable cues. This could happen because only the minority of participants (27.4%) in both conditions based their decisions on diagnostic cues to truth/deceit.

Lie detection accuracy and beliefs about cues to deception in adult children of alcoholics

When one or both parents misuse alcohol, it can lead to the development of particular and varied traits in their children. The present study tested whether adult children of alcoholics (ACoAs) who participated in therapy had better veracity assessment skills and more reliable beliefs about cues to deception than the control group of non-ACoAs. The results revealed that individuals who grew up in a family with alcohol misuse problems detected truth - but not lies - significantly better than the control group. The groups did not differ in accuracy of their beliefs about cues to deception. It is possible that the ACoAs' higher truth detection accuracy is to some extent attributable to their participation in therapy, which increased their level of trust in others.