Abstract
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.
Highlights
Research suggests we tell on average two lies each day [1]
In response to the question ‘how well do you think you would perform in detecting deception?’, police officers indicated their self perceived performance to be moderate (M = 3.92, SD = 1.31), which did not differ from the students (M = 4.15, SD = 0.95)
No significant correlation between literature knowledge and deception detection was found for police officers
Summary
More recent studies have shown that there are large individual differences in the prevalence of lie telling, with the majority of lies being told by a minority of people [2,3,4]. All these studies suggest that everyone has experience with either being lied to, or with telling lies themselves. Despite this personal experience with deception, research has shown that people, including trained police officers, only perform around chance level in detecting deception [5,6,7,8].
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