Training in Assessment Criteria Indicative of Deception to Improve Credibility Judgments

Police accuracy in truth/lie detection when judging baseline interviews

Research has shown that a comparable truth baseline (CTB) approach elicits more cues to deception and results in higher accuracy rates than a small talk baseline. Past research focused on laypeople's accuracy rates. We examined whether the CTB also has a positive effect on law enforcement personnel accuracy. In this study, 95 police officers judged 10 interviews, whereby half of the senders told the truth, and the other half lied about a mock undercover mission. Half of the interviews included only questioning about the event under investigation, whereas the other half also included questioning aimed at creating a CTB. Total and truth accuracy did not differ, but observers who watched interviews with a CTB obtained higher lie detection accuracy rates than those who watched interviews without the baseline questioning. Signal detection analyses showed that this effect could be attributed to a decreased response bias in the CTB condition.

The Effects of Group Factors on Deception Detection Performance

Deception has been an important problem in interactive groups, impeding effective group communication and group work, yet deception detection in such a context remains understudied. Extrapolated from the interpersonal deception theory (IDT) and group composition research in cooperative contexts, this research proposes that group factors, including diversity and familiarity, have influence on the performance of deception detection. The measurement of group performance was not limited to success, as previous deception studies did, but included efficiency as well because it is fundamental to the effectiveness of deception detection. An analysis of data collected from a real-world online community found that behavioral familiarity had a positive effect, and gender diversity had a negative effect, on group success in deception detection. In addition, behavioral familiarity had a negative effect and functional diversity had a positive effect on the group efficiency of deception detection. The findings not only extend IDT in several important ways but also suggest the need to distinguish between noncooperative and cooperative groups, an important theoretical implication for group composition research.