Abstract
Research on deception detection in legal contexts has neglected the question of how the use of evidence can affect deception detection accuracy. In this study, police trainees (N=82) either were or were not trained in strategically using the evidence when interviewing lying or truth telling mock suspects (N=82). The trainees’ strategies as well as liars’ and truth tellers’ counter-strategies were analyzed. Trained interviewers applied different strategies than did untrained. As a consequence of this, liars interviewed by trained interviewers were more inconsistent with the evidence compared to liars interviewed by untrained interviewers. Trained interviewers created and utilized the statement-evidence consistency cue, and obtained a considerably higher deception detection accuracy rate (85.4%) than untrained interviewers (56.1%).
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by a grant from the Swedish Research Council given to the second author. Thanks are due to Simon Andersson, Katja Dahlqvist, Sara Landström, Malin Olsson, Anna Rebelius, and Emma Roos af Hjelmsäter for help with the collection and coding of data. Many thanks to Superintendent Royne Nilsson for inspiring us to conduct this research, and to Professor Aldert Vrij for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.
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Hartwig, M., Granhag, P.A., Strömwall, L.A. et al. Strategic Use of Evidence During Police Interviews: When Training to Detect Deception Works. Law Hum Behav 30, 603–619 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10979-006-9053-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10979-006-9053-9