Credibility Assessment

Scientific Research and Applications

David C. Raskin, Charles R. Honts, John C. Kircher

• Publisher: Academic Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780123947826
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Forensic Science
• Index: Law

In 2001, the late Murray Kleiner and an array of experts contributed to the Handbook of Polygraph Testing, published by Elsevier, which examined the fundamental principles behind polygraph tests and reviewed the key tests and methods used at that time. In the intervening thirteen years, the field has moved beyond traditional polygraph testing to include a host of biometrics and behavioral observations. The new title reflects the breadth of methods now used.

Credibility Assessment builds on the content provided in the Kleiner volume, with revised polygraph testing chapters and chapters on newer methodologies, such as CNS, Ocular-motor, and behavioral measures. Deception detection is a major field of interest in criminal investigation and prosecution, national security screening, and screening at ports of entry. Many of these methods have a long history, e.g., polygraph examinations, and some rely on relatively new technologies, e.g., fMRI and Ocular-motor measurements. Others rely on behavioral observations of persons in less restricted settings, e.g., airport screening. The authors, all of whom are internationally-recognized experts associated with major universities in the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe, review and analyze various methods for the detection of deception, their current applications, and major issues and controversies surrounding their uses. This volume will be of great interest among forensic psychologists, psychophysiologists, polygraph examiners, law enforcement, courts, attorneys, and government agencies.

• Provides a comprehensive review of all aspects of methods for deception detection
• Includes methods being used in credibility, such as autonomic, CNS, fMRI, and Ocular-motor measures and behavioral and facial observation
• Edited by leaders in the field with over 25+ years of experience
• Discusses theory and application

Chapter 1

Strategic Use of Evidence During Investigative Interviews

The State of the Science

Maria Hartwig^∗, Pär Anders Granhag^† and Timothy Luke^∗∗, ^∗Department of Psychology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, ^†Department of Psychology, University of Gothenburg and Norwegian Police University College, ^∗∗Department of Psychology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice and The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Abstract

This chapter describes the Strategic Use of Evidence (SUE) technique – an interview method aimed at eliciting cues to deception, and thereby improving the chances of correct judgments of deception and truth. The chapter begins with a general overview of research on deception and its detection, in order to provide a context for the SUE technique. The psychological foundations of the technique are described, with a particular focus on suspects’ counter-interrogation strategies. We then review the empirical research on the SUE technique, in order to illustrate how the principles of the SUE technique can be translated into interview tactics. We also describe how these tactics produce different verbal responses from lying and truth-telling suspects, and how these cues can be utilized by lie-catchers in order to detect deception. Finally, we will provide a meta-analysis of the available research on the SUE technique.

Keywords

deception; lie detection; counter-interrogation strategies; strategic use of evidence; interviewing to detect deception

Outline

Introduction

General Findings on Deception and its Detection

Accuracy in Deception Judgments

Cues to Deception

High-Stakes Lies

Eliciting Cues to Deception: Strategic Questioning Approaches

SUE: Theoretical Principles

Psychology of Self-Regulation

Self-Regulatory Differences Between Liars and Truth-Tellers

Liars’ and Truth-Tellers’ Information Management Strategies

Empirical Research on Counter-Interrogation Strategies

Translating Psychological Theory into Interview Tactics

Questioning Tactics

Disclosure Tactics

Meta-Analytic Review of SUE Research

Method

Selection Criteria

Literature Search

Coding Procedure

Analyses

Results

Discussion

Limitations

Conclusions

Summary and Concluding Remarks

References

Introduction

Judging veracity is an important part of investigative interviewing. The aim of this chapter is to review the literature on a technique developed to assist interviewers in judging the veracity of the reports obtained in interviews. More specifically, the purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the research program on the Strategic Use of Evidence (SUE) technique. The SUE technique is an interviewing framework that aims to improve the ability to make correct judgments of credibility, through the elicitation of cues to deception and truth. As such, it is not a general framework that will accomplish all goals relevant to interviewing and interrogation. However, as will be shown in this chapter, the SUE approach can help an interviewer plan, structure, and conduct an interview with a suspect in such a way that cues to deception may become more pronounced. As will be described, the SUE technique relies on various forms of strategic employment of the available information or evidence. While the SUE technique was originally developed to plan, structure, conduct, and evaluate interviews in criminal contexts, the theoretical principles apply to interviews and interrogations in other contexts, including those in which the goal is intelligence gathering.

We will first provide an overview of the core findings from a vast body of research on human ability to judge truth and deception. This overview will serve to contextualize the research on the SUE technique and illustrate the ways in which the technique departs from many other lie detection techniques. After reviewing basic work on judgments of truth and deception, we will turn to the fundamental principles on which the SUE framework is based. We will describe the central role of counter-interrogation strategies (i.e., the approaches suspects adopt in order to reach their goal during an interview), and we will review both theoretical and empirical work on the topic of counter-interrogation strategies.

Subsequently, we will describe research on how to translate the basic theoretical principles into interview tactics. That is, we will describe research on strategic questions that aim to produce different responses from truthful and deceptive suspects. We will also review approaches to disclose the information in varying forms to produce cues to concealment and deception. Finally, we will offer the first meta-analysis of the available SUE research, in order to provide a quantitative synthesis of the literature to date.

General Findings on Deception and its Detection

For about half a century, psychologists have conducted empirical research on deception and its detection. There is now a considerable body of work in this field (Granhag and Strömwall, 2004; Vrij, 2008). In this research, deception is defined as a deliberate attempt to create false beliefs in others (Vrij, 2008). This definition covers intentional concealments of transgressions, false assertions about autobiographical memories, and false claims about attitudes, beliefs, and emotions. Research on deception focuses on three primary questions:

• How good are people at detecting lies? That is, with what accuracy can people distinguish between true and false statements?

• Are there cues to deception? That is, do people behave and speak in discernibly different ways when they lie compared with when they tell the truth?

• Are there ways in which people’s ability to judge credibility can be improved?

Most research on deception detection is experimental (Frank, 2005; Hartwig, 2011). An advantage of the experimental approach is that researchers randomly assign participants to conditions, which provides internal validity (the ability to establish causal relationships between the variables, in this context between deception and a given behavioral indicator) and control of extraneous variables (e.g., the personality of the subject). Importantly, the experimental approach also allows for the unambiguous establishment of ground truth – definite knowledge about whether the statements given by research participants are in fact truthful or deceptive. In this research, participants are induced to provide truthful or deceptive statements. These statements are then subjected to various analyses, including coding of verbal and non-verbal behavior. This makes it possible to examine objective cues to deception – behavioral characteristics that differ as a function of whether the person is lying or telling the truth. Also, the videotaped statements are typically shown to other participants serving as lie-catchers, who are asked to make judgments about the veracity of the statements.

Accuracy in Deception Judgments

Across hundreds of studies on human lie detection ability, people average 54% correct judgments. This is not impressive, considering that guessing would yield 50% correct. Meta-analyses show that accuracy rates do not vary much from one setting to another (Bond and DePaulo, 2006). Furthermore, people do not seem to have insight into when they have made correct or incorrect judgments – a meta-analysis on the accuracy–confidence relationship in deception judgments showed that confidence was poorly correlated with accuracy (DePaulo et al., 1997).

That lie detection is associated with a high error rate is stable across groups: another meta-analysis on judgments of deception showed that individual differences in deception detection ability are vanishingly small (Bond and DePaulo, 2008). Despite this pattern, some have proposed the existence of a small number of exceptionally skilled lie-catchers, referred to as lie detection “wizards” (O’Sullivan and Ekman, 2004). However, there has been no peer-reviewed research published in support of the ideas of wizards, and various critical arguments have been raised about the plausibility of their existence (Bond and Uysal, 2007; for a response, see O’Sullivan, 2007).

A common belief is that people who face the task of detecting deception routinely in their professional lives (e.g., law enforcement officers and legal professionals) may, due to training and/or experience, be capable of achieving higher accuracy rates than other people (Garrido et al., 2004). For example, when law enforcement officers are asked to quantify their capacity for lie detection, they self-report accuracy rates far above those observed for lay people (Kassin et al., 2007). Even though their belief may sound plausible, the literature does not support it. In fact, reviews of the existing studies show that presumed lie experts do not achieve higher lie detection accuracy rates than lay judges (Bond and DePaulo, 2006; see also Meissner and Kassin, 2002, for a review of the literature using signal detection theory). However, as can be expected, legal professionals’ decision making differs in some ways from that of lay people. Typically, law enforcement officers are more suspicious and they are systematically prone to overconfidence in their judgments (Meissner and Kassin, 2004).

In sum, the literature on human lie detection accuracy shows that people’s ability to detect lies is mediocre. This is a stable finding that holds true for a variety of groups, populations, and settings.

Cues to Deception

Why are credibility judgments so prone to error? Research on behavioral differences between liars and truth-tellers may provide an answer to this question. A meta-analysis covering 1338 estimates of 158 behaviors showed that few behaviors are related to deception (DePaulo et al., 2003). The behaviors that do show a systematic covariation with deception are typically only weakly related to deceit. In other words, people may fail to detect deception because the behavioral signs of deception are faint.

Lie detection may fail for another reason: people report relying on invalid cues when attempting to detect deception. Lay people all over the world (Global Deception Research Team, 2006), as well as presumed lie experts, such as law enforcement personnel, customs officers, and prison guards (Strömwall et al., 2004), report that gaze aversion, fidgeting, speech errors (e.g., stuttering, hesitations), pauses, and posture shifts indicate deception. These are cues to stress, nervousness, and discomfort. However, reviews of the literature show that these behaviors are not systematically related to lying. For example, the widespread belief that liars avert their gaze is not supported in the literature. Moreover, fidgeting, speech disfluencies, and posture shifts are not diagnostic signs of lying, either (DePaulo et al., 2003). In other words, it may be that people rely on an unsupported stereotype when attempting to detect lies.

Recently, a meta-analysis investigated whether lie detection fails primarily because of the minute behavioral differences between liars and truth-tellers or because people’s beliefs about deceptive behavior do not match actual cues to deception (Hartwig and Bond, 2011). The results showed that the principal cause of poor lie detection accuracy is lack of systematic differences between people who lie and people who tell the truth. In other words, lie detection is prone to error not because people use the wrong judgments strategies, but because the task itself is very difficult. We will return to remedies for this problem shortly.

High-Stakes Lies

Some aspects of the deception literature have been criticized on methodological grounds, in particular with regard to external validity (i.e., the generalizability of the findings to non-laboratory settings; see Miller and Stiff, 1993). The most persistent criticism has concerned the issue of generalizing from low-stakes laboratory situations to those in which the stakes are considerably higher. Critics have argued that when lies concern serious matters, liars will be more emotionally invested and aroused, leading to more pronounced cues to deception (Buckley, 2012; Frank and Svetieva, 2012). There are several bodies of work addressing this issue. In a previously mentioned meta-analysis of the literature on deception judgments (Bond and DePaulo, 2006), researchers compared hit rates in studies where senders were motivated with only trivial means to studies in which people told lies under far more serious circumstances (e.g., Vrij and Mann, 2001). There was no difference in judgment accuracy between these two sets of studies. However, an interesting (and possibly problematic) pattern emerged – when senders told lies under high-stakes conditions, lie-catchers were more prone to false alarm, meaning that they more often mistook truth-tellers for liars. It seems that higher stakes may put pressure on both liars and truth-tellers to appear credible, and that perceivers misinterpret signs of such pressure as indications of deceit.

Eliciting Cues to Deception: Strategic Questioning Approaches

The research reviewed above shows that...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Preface
• Contributors
• Chapter 1. Strategic Use of Evidence During Investigative Interviews: The State of the Science
• Chapter 2. Credibility Assessment at Portals
• Chapter 3. Validity of Polygraph Techniques and Decision Methods
• Chapter 4. Countermeasures and Credibility Assessment
• Chapter 5. Detecting Deception Using Ocular Metrics During Reading
• Chapter 6. The Neural Basis of Deception and Credibility Assessment: A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective
• Chapter 7. Theories in Deception and Lie Detection
• Index