Abstract
This article examined how to elicit cues to deception when a suspect is asked both about his/her intentions and his/her corresponding past planning, and when the investigator holds evidence on the suspect’s planning activities. In a new experimental set-up accommodating the main characteristics of intent, participants (N = 120) either planned a criminal or a non-criminal act. They were intercepted before completing the planned act. Each participant was interviewed in accordance with one of three interview techniques: Early Evidence disclosure or one of two versions of the Strategic Use of Evidence (SUE) technique. All the interviews were transcribed and scored for consistency. As predicted, the liars were perceived as having a higher degree of inconsistency for two of the three relevant comparisons (Statement on Planning–Evidence on Planning; Statement on Intent–Evidence on Planning). Furthermore, using the evidence strategically resulted in differences between liars and truth tellers being magnified, as predicted. This article advances previous findings in showing that by interviewing strategically with respect to the evidence, it is possible to elicit reliable cues to deception when a suspect is asked about intentions and corresponding planning activities.
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Acknowledgment
This research was funded by grant from the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research (Grant No. ECRP: 2009-1566) given to the second author.
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Appendix
Appendix
Each suspect’s statement about each piece of evidence was assigned a score in one of three categories. The first was Perfect consistency, measuring the extent to which the statement given by the suspect was perfectly consistent with the pieces of evidence (e.g., “I touched the folder”). The second category was Possible consistency, meaning the suspect provided a statement that was neither consistent nor inconsistent with one of the pieces of evidence (e.g., the suspect does not deny touching the folder but it does not become clear during the interview whether s/he really talked about the specific folder of interest or not). The third was Inconsistency, meaning that the suspect gave a statement that was inconsistent with one of the pieces of evidence (e.g., “I did not touch the folder”).
The above described three categories measuring different aspects of statement–evidence inconsistency were combined. The reason was that we wanted one measure of Statement on Planning–Evidence on Planning inconsistency. For each piece of evidence that was perfectly consistent with the statement, the suspect received a value of 1. For the pieces of evidence that were possibly consistent, the suspect received a value of 2. For each piece of evidence that was contradicted in the statement, the suspect received a value of 3. Since there were in total three pieces of evidence, the sum of these values was divided by three, creating a measure of the average degree of consistency between the statement and the evidence. For example, a value of 1 on this new scale indicates that the statement of the suspect was perfectly consistent with all the three pieces of evidence, while a value of 3 indicates that all the three evidence pieces were contradicted in the statement on planning.
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Clemens, F., Granhag, P.A. & Strömwall, L.A. Eliciting Cues to False Intent: A New Application of Strategic Interviewing. Law Hum Behav 35, 512–522 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10979-010-9258-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10979-010-9258-9