Abstract
We investigated how information on a motive to lie impacts on the perceived content quality of a statement and its subsequent veracity rating. In an online study, 300 participants rated a statement about an alleged sexual harassment on a scale based on Criteria-based Content Analysis (CBCA) and judged its veracity. In a 3 × 3 between-subjects design, we varied prior information (motive to lie, no motive to lie, and no information on a motive), and presented three different statement versions of varying content quality (high, medium, and low). In addition to anticipating main effects of both independent variables (motive information and statement version), we predicted that the impact of motive information on both ratings would be highest for medium quality statements, because their assessment is especially ambiguous (interaction effect). Contrary to our hypotheses, results showed that participants were unaffected by motive information and accurately reproduced the manipulated quality differences between statement versions in their CBCA-based judgments. In line with the expected interaction effect, veracity ratings decreased in the motive-to-lie group compared to controls, but only when the medium- and the low-quality statements were rated (truth ratings dropped from approximately 80 to 50%). Veracity ratings in both the no-motive-to-lie group and controls did not differ across statement versions (≥82% truth ratings). In sum, information on a motive to lie thus encouraged participants to consider content quality in their veracity judgments by being critical only of statements of medium and low quality. Otherwise, participants judged statements to be true irrespective of content quality.
Highlights
In the last 30 years, a growing body of research has shown that criteria-based content analysis (CBCA; Steller and Köhnken, 1989; Volbert and Steller, 2014) validly distinguishes true from fabricated accounts (Vrij, 2008; Amado et al, 2015, 2016; Oberlader et al, 2016)
The missing difference between the nomotive-to-lie group and controls was presumably driven by the fact that the latter judged the contextual information as tending to dismiss a motive to lie
A two-way ANOVA with motive information and statement version as between-subjects factors revealed a large main effect of statement version on CBCA-based ratings, F(2, 291) = 50.87, p < 0.001, ηp2 = 0.26, and 95% CI (0.17, 0.33), with all differences between statements with high, medium, and low content quality taking the expected direction
Summary
In the last 30 years, a growing body of research has shown that criteria-based content analysis (CBCA; Steller and Köhnken, 1989; Volbert and Steller, 2014) validly distinguishes true from fabricated accounts (Vrij, 2008; Amado et al, 2015, 2016; Oberlader et al, 2016). Statement validity assessment (SVA; Köhnken, 2004; Volbert and Steller, 2014), in which CBCA plays a key role, even requires the expert to actively gather more contextual information from the case file or an interview with the witness so that it can be considered in the final evaluation of a statement (Steller, 1989; Volbert and Steller, 2014) Even though this procedure aims to improve the validity of an expert’s decision making, little is known in general about the actual impact of contextual information on the content analysis of a statement using CBCA and veracity ratings (Bogaard et al, 2014). We investigated the effect of information regarding a motive to lie, because this has received particular consideration within the framework of SVA (Steller and Köhnken, 1989; Köhnken, 2004) and in work on everyday deception detection (Levine et al, 2010)
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