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Cues to Deception and Ability to Detect Lies as a Function of Police Interview Styles

  • Original Paper
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Law and Human Behavior

Abstract

In Experiment 1, we examined whether three interview styles used by the police, accusatory, information-gathering and behaviour analysis, reveal verbal cues to deceit, measured with the Criteria-Based Content Analysis (CBCA) and Reality Monitoring (RM) methods. A total of 120 mock suspects told the truth or lied about a staged event and were interviewed by a police officer employing one of these three interview styles. The results showed that accusatory interviews, which typically result in suspects making short denials, contained the fewest verbal cues to deceit. Moreover, RM distinguished between truth tellers and liars better than CBCA. Finally, manual RM coding resulted in more verbal cues to deception than automatic coding of the RM criteria utilising the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software programme.

In Experiment 2, we examined the effects of the three police interview styles on the ability to detect deception. Sixty-eight police officers watched some of the videotaped interviews of Experiment 1 and made veracity and confidence judgements. Accuracy scores did not differ between the three interview styles; however, watching accusatory interviews resulted in more false accusations (accusing truth tellers of lying) than watching information-gathering interviews. Furthermore, only in accusatory interviews, judgements of mendacity were associated with higher confidence. We discuss the possible danger of conducting accusatory interviews.

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Notes

  1. The Pearson correlations between the two coders for the frequency scores were as follows: logical structure, r=.36; unstructured production, r=.50; quantity of details, r=.98; contextual embedding, r=.96; description of interactions, r=.51; reproduction of conversation, r=.97; unexpected complications, r=.61; unusual details, r=.71; superfluous details, r=.60; related external associations, r=.37; subjective mental state, r=.79; attribution of other’s mental state, r=.85; spontaneous corrections, r=.67; admitting lack of memory, r=.82; raising doubts about one’s own memory, r=.44; self-deprecation, r=.62; pardoning the perpetrator, r=.53. The correlations indicate fair to very good inter-rater reliability (Fleiss, 1981; Gödert, Gamer, Rill, & Vossel, 2005). The relatively low agreement scores for “logical structure” and “related external associations” are probably due to the low frequency of occurrence of these criteria. In low frequency distributions the correlations tend to underestimate the true inter-rater agreement (Gödert et al., 2005). Spearman correlations between the two coders revealed a similar pattern to the Pearson correlations.

  2. Intercoder reliability scores (Pearson’s correlations) on the frequency scores were good for all the individual criteria (visual details: r=.98; auditory details: r=.98; spatial details: r=.89; temporal details: r=.95; cognitive operations: r=.94). Spearman correlations between the two coders revealed a similar pattern to the Pearson correlations.

  3. The CBCA and RM inter-rater reliability scores were also calculated per interview condition. The correlations for the information-gathering and behaviour analysis interview conditions were very similar to the correlations reported in the text. Several reliability scores could not be calculated for the accusatory condition because several criteria were never present in that condition. Those that could be calculated were very good for CBCA scores (all r’s > .80) and good for RM scores (all r’s > .65).

  4. Univariate tests on the individual CBCA criteria (frequency scores) revealed that liars and truth tellers significantly differed on contextual embeddings, F(1, 38)=4.11, p < .05, eta 2=.10; description of interactions, F(1, 38)=4.33, p < .05, eta 2=.10; reproduction of conversations, F(1, 38)=3.08, p < .05, one-tailed, eta 2=.08; unusual details, F(1, 38)=3.10, p < .05, onetailed, eta 2=.08; and admitting lack of memory, F(1, 38)=8.11, p < .01, eta 2=.18. For all these criteria, truth tellers obtained higher scores than liars (contextual embeddings: M=20.85 (SD=9.5) vs M=15.40 (SD=7.4); reproduction of conversations: M=2.65 (SD=4.3) vs M=.90 (SD=1.1); unusual details: M=3.20 (SD=3.2) vs M=1.85 (SD=1.3); and admitting lack of memory: M=4.30 (SD=3.3) vs M=1.90, SD=1.7)). The exception was description of interactions where, in contrast to CBCA predictions, truth tellers obtained a lower score than liars: M=.10 (SD=.3) vs M=.45 (SD=.7).

  5. Univariate tests on the individual RM criteria (frequency scores) in the information-gathering condition revealed that liars and truth tellers significantly differed on auditory details, F(1, 38)=7.45, p < .01, eta 2=.16, spatial details, F(1, 38)=16.62, p < .05, eta 2=.30, and temporal details, F(1, 38)=7.73, p < .01, eta 2=16. For all these variables, truth tellers obtained higher scores than liars (auditory details: M=18.40 (SD=12.7) vs M=10.35 (SD=3.7); spatial details: M=6.35 (SD=3.7) vs M=2.75 (SD=1.5); and temporal details: M=11.95 (SD=6.8) vs M=7.00 (SD=4.4)). Univariate tests on the individual RM criteria (frequency scores) in the behaviour analysis interview condition revealed that liars and truth tellers significantly differed on auditory details, F(1, 38)=13.69, p < .01, eta 2=.27, spatial details, F(1, 38)=10.18, p < .01, eta 2=.21, temporal details, F(1, 38)=4.35, p < .05, eta 2=10, and cognitive operations, F(1, 38)=4.05, p < .05, one-tailed, eta 2=.10. In agreement with RM theory, truth tellers obtained higher scores than liars for auditory details (M=8.75 (SD=3.9) vs M=4.85 (SD=2.6), spatial details (M=5.45 (SD=2.8) vs M=2.90 (SD=2.5), and temporal details (M=10.25 (SD=4.9) vs M=7.50 (SD=3.3)). Also in agreement with RM theory, liars (M=2.85 (SD=2.1) obtained higher scores for cognitive operations than truth tellers (M=1.65 (SD=1.7)).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Psychology Department, King Henry Building, University of Portsmouth, King Henry 1 Street, Portsmouth, PO1 2DY, United Kingdom

    Aldert Vrij, Samantha Mann & Susanne Kristen

  2. Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA

    Ronald P. Fisher

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  1. Aldert Vrij
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  2. Samantha Mann
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  3. Susanne Kristen
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  4. Ronald P. Fisher
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Correspondence to Aldert Vrij.

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This Project was sponsored by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council (RES-000-23--0292).

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Vrij, A., Mann, S., Kristen, S. et al. Cues to Deception and Ability to Detect Lies as a Function of Police Interview Styles. Law Hum Behav 31, 499–518 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10979-006-9066-4

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