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Increasing Cognitive Load to Facilitate Lie Detection: The Benefit of Recalling an Event in Reverse Order

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Law and Human Behavior

Abstract

In two experiments, we tested the hypotheses that (a) the difference between liars and truth tellers will be greater when interviewees report their stories in reverse order than in chronological order, and (b) instructing interviewees to recall their stories in reverse order will facilitate detecting deception. In Experiment 1, 80 mock suspects told the truth or lied about a staged event and did or did not report their stories in reverse order. The reverse order interviews contained many more cues to deceit than the control interviews. In Experiment 2, 55 police officers watched a selection of the videotaped interviews of Experiment 1 and made veracity judgements. Requesting suspects to convey their stories in reverse order improved police observers’ ability to detect deception and did not result in a response bias.

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Notes

  1. We did not calculate the verbal cues per minute of speech because we believe that this changes the nature of the verbal cues. That is, the number of details mentioned in a statement is different from the number of details mentioned per 100 words, because the latter refers to the conciseness of presenting information whereas the former does not. When we included the duration of answer as a covariate in our analysis, the results for the verbal cues showed the same pattern as presented in the main text.

  2. Perhaps one would expect liars to break up their stories in larger chunks than truth tellers, as this is probably easier to do. Indeed, truth tellers told their stories less chronologically (M = 6.65, SD = 2.0) than liars (M = 5.50, SD 2.0), F(1, 38) = 3.36, p < .01, one-tailed, η 2 = .08. As such, the tendency to comply with the request to tell the story in reverse order could be used as an indirect tool to detect deceit.

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Acknowledgements

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

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Authors and Affiliations

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

    Aldert Vrij, Samantha A. Mann, Sharon Leal & Rebecca Milne

  2. Florida International University, North Miami, FL, USA

    Ronald P. Fisher

  3. University of Leicester, Leicester, UK

    Ray Bull

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  1. Aldert Vrij
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  2. Samantha A. Mann
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Correspondence to Aldert Vrij.

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Vrij, A., Mann, S.A., Fisher, R.P. et al. Increasing Cognitive Load to Facilitate Lie Detection: The Benefit of Recalling an Event in Reverse Order. Law Hum Behav 32, 253–265 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10979-007-9103-y

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