Abstract
One technique for examining written statements or interview transcripts for verbal cues of veracity and lying involves the analysis of linguistic features and grammatical structures associated with word usage. This technique is commonly referred to as Statement Analysis (SA). There are varying degrees of empirical support for different SA techniques and for specific linguistic markers; what is less known in the literature is the degree to which verbal indicators of veracity and lying vary across cultures or ethnicities. In this study participants from four cultural/ethnic groups participated in an adapted version of a mock-theft scenario in which participants were either asked to steal a check and lie about it to investigators or not steal a check and tell the truth. After being assigned to the steal-lie/don’t steal-truth condition, each participant engaged in three interviews, two prior to committing the crime (screening and secondary interviews) and one afterwards (investigative interview). Prior to the third investigative interview participants were asked to write a statement. The responses provided in the interviews and written statement were coded according to several empirically validated categories of SA. Some linguistic markers differentiated truths from lies across people of different ethnic/cultural backgrounds. Post-hoc analyses indicated interesting ethnic group differences in the base rates of usage for many of these categories but ethnicity did not moderate the veracity condition effects.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
The inclusion criteria meant that the three immigrant samples consisted of participants who were descendants of home countries that were culturally different (e.g., China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan). (To be sure the same could be said about European Americans.) Ethnicity refers to people of a nation or tribe, and can denote one’s racial, national, or cultural origins (Matsumoto and Juang 2013); for example, within the U.S., African Americans, Asians and Pacific Islanders, Hispanics and Latinos, and Native Americans are often considered different ethnic groups. Culture refers to a unique meaning and information system, shared by a group and transmitted across generations, that allows the group to meet basic needs of survival and pursue well-being (Matsumoto and Juang 2013), and ethnic groups are often markers of cultural differences. Cultural values data examining differences within a country and country differences within a world region, for instance, demonstrate that differences within a world region are smaller than differences between regions (Hofstede 2001; Hofstede, Garibaldi de Hilall, Malvezzi, Tanure, and Vinken 2010; Schwartz 2004). Thus we were fairly confident that the regional origins of the three immigrant groups represented meaningful cultural differences.
The inclusion criteria used also meant that some individuals in the immigrant groups were foreign nationals while others were technically U.S. citizens. This is one of the reasons why we included the General Ethnicity Questionnaire in order document group differences in it. The ethnic groups sampled represented the same ethnic group categories with which differences in expressivity and cultural norms for emotional expression have been documented within the U.S. (Matsumoto 1993; Tsai and Levenson 1997; Tsai, Levenson and Carstensen 2000), and emotions often play an important role in telling lies and truths (Porter and ten Brinke 2008). The ethnic groups in this study were also representative of the cultural and ethnic diversity that law enforcement officers in the U.S. (and other multicultural societies) face.
Individuals who did not appear to understand English sufficiently to understand the protocol or complete the screening procedures were not included in the study. Also recall that participants’ responses were coded according to whether or not they appeared to have understood the questions, and these cases were dropped from the analyses.
References
Adams SH (1996) Statement analysis: what do suspects' words really reveal? FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin 65:12–20
Adams SH, Jarvis JP (2006) Indicators of veracity and deception: an analysis of written statements made to police. Speech Language Law 13:1–22
Blandon-Gitlin I, Pezdek K, Lindsay DS, Hagen L (2009) Criteria-based content analysis of true and suggested accounts of events. Appl Cogn Psychol 23:901–917
Bond CF, DePaulo BM (2006) Accuracy of deception judgments. Personal Soc Psychol Rev 10:214–234
Chomsky N (1957) Syntactic structures. Walter de Gruyter, New York
Chomsky N (1972) Language and mind. Harcourt, Brace, and Johanovich, New York
Christie R (1970) Scale construction. In: Christie R, Geis FL (eds) Studies in Machiavellianism. Academic Press, New York, pp 10–34
Connelly S, Allen MT, Ruark GA, Kligyte V, Waples EP, Leritz LE, Mumford MD (2006) Exploring content coding procedures for assessing truth and deception in verbal statements, year 3, cumulative final report. University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK
DePaulo BM, Lindsay JJ, Malone BE, Muhlenbruck L, Chalrton K, Cooper H (2003) Cues to deception. Psychol Bull 129:74–118
Driscoll LN (1994) A validity assessment of written narratives from suspects in criminal investigations using the SCAN technique. Police Stud 17:77–88
Frank MG, Svetieva E (2013) Deception. In: Matsumoto D, Frank MG, Hwang HS (eds) Nonverbal communication: science and applications. Sage, Newbury Park, CA, pp 121–144
Hartwig M, Granhag PA, Stromwall LA, Kronkvist O (2006) Strategic use of evidence during police interviews: when training to detect deception works. Law Hum Behav 30:603–619
Hartwig M, Granhag PA, Stromwall LA, Vrij A (2005) Detecting deception via strategic disclosure of evidence. Law Hum Behav 29:469–484
Hauch, V., Blandon-Gitlin, I., Masip, J., & Sporer, S. L. (2012, 23-27 April 2012). Linguistic cues to deception assessed by computer programs: A meta-analysis. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the EACL 2012 Workshop on Computational Approaches to Deception Detection, Avignon, France.
Hofstede GH (2001) Culture's Consequences: comparing values, behaviors, institutions and organizations across nations, 2nd edn. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA
Hofstede GH, Garibaldi de Hilall AV, Malvezzi S, Tanure B, Vinken H (2010) Comparing regional cultures within a country: lessons from Brazil. J Cross-Cult Psychol 41:336–352
Hong Y-y, Morris M, Chiu C-Y, Benet-Martinez V (2000) Multicultural minds: a dynamic constructivist approach to culture and cognition. Am Psychol 55:709–720
Inbau FE, Reid JE, Buckley JP, Jayne BC (2005) Criminal interrogation and confessions: essentials of the reid technique. Jones and Brtlett Publishers, Sudbury, MA
Johnson MK (1988) Reality monitoring: an experimental phenomenological approach. J Exp Psychol Gen 117:390–394
Johnson MK, Raye CL (1981) Reality monitoring. Psychol Rev 88:67–85
Johnson MK, Raye CL (1998) False memories and confabulation. Trends Cogn Sci 2:137–145
Kassin SM, Fong CT (1999) "I'm innocent!": Effects of training on judgments of truth and deception in the interrogation room. Law Hum Behav 23:499–516
Masip J, Bethencourt M, Lucas G, Sanchez-San Segundo M, Herrero C (2012) Deception detection from written accounts. Scand J Psychol 53:103–111
Masip J, Sporer SL, Garrido E, Herrero C (2005) The detection of deception with the reality monitoring approach: a review of the empirical evidence. Psychol Crime Law 11:99–122
Matsumoto D (1993) Ethnic differences in affect intensity, emotion judgments, display rule attitudes, and self-reported emotional expression in an American sample. Motiv Emot 17:107–123
Matsumoto D, Juang L (2013) Culture and psychology, 5th edn. Cengage, Belmont, CA
Newman ML, Pennebaker JW, Berry DS, Richards JM (2003) Lying words: predicting deception from linguistic styles. Personal Soc Psychol Bull 29:665–675
Porter S, Birt AR, Yuille JC, Lehman DR (2000) The negotiation of false memories: the influence of interviewer and rememberer characteristics on memory distortion. Psychol Sci 11:513–516
Porter S, ten Brinke L (2008) Reading between the lies: identifying concealed and falsified emotions in universal facial expressions. Psychol Sci 19:508–514
Porter S, Yuille JC (1996) The language of deceipt: an investigation of the verbal clues to deception in the interrogation context. Law Hum Behav 20:443–459
Rabon D (1994) Investigative discourse analysis. Carolina Academic Press, Durham, NC
Ruby CL, Brigham JC (1997) The usefulness of the criteia-based content analysis technique in distinguishing between truthful and fabricated allegations: a critical review. Psychol Public Policy Law 3:705
Rudacille WC (1994) Identifying lies in disguise. Kendall-Hunt, Dubuque, IA
Sandoval VA (2008) Interview clues: words that leave an investigative trail. FBI Law Enforcement Bull 77:1–9
Sapir A (1996) The Laboratory for Scientific Interrogation course on scientific content analysis (SCAN) workbook. Laboratory for Scientific Interrogation, Phoenix, AZ
Schafer, J. R. (2007). Grammatical differences between truthful and deceptive written narratives. Unpublished doctoral dissertation
Schelleman-Offermans K, Merckelbach H (2010) Fantasy proneness as a confounder of verbal lie detection tools. J Investig Psychol Offender Profiling 7:247–260
Schwartz SH (2004) Mapping and interpreting cultural differences around the world. In: Vinken H, Soeters J, Ester P (eds) Comparing cultures, dimensions of culture in a comparative perspective. Brill, Leiden, The Netherlands, pp 43–73
Smith, N. (2001) Reading between the lines: An evaluation of the Scientific Content Analysis technique (SCAN). London, UK: Policing and Reducing Crime Unit: Police Research Series.
Snyder M (1974) Self-monitoring of expressive behavior. J Pers Soc Psychol 30:526–537
Sporer SL (2004) Reality monitoring and detection of deception. In: Granhag PA, Stromwall LA (eds) The detection of deception in forensic contexts. Cambridge University Press, New York, pp 64–80
Tsai JL, Levenson RW (1997) Cultural influences of emotional responding: Chinese American and European American dating couples during interpersonal conflict. J Cross-Cult Psychol 28:600–625
Tsai JL, Levenson RW, Carstensen LL (2000) Autonomic, expressive, and subjective responses to emotional films in older and younger Chinese American and European American adults. Psychol Aging 15:684–693
Tsai JL, Ying Y-W, Lee PA (2000) The meaning of "being Chinese" and "being American": Variation among Chinese-American young adults. J Cross-Cult Psychol 31:302–332
Undeutsch U (1989) The development of statement reality analysis. In: Yuille JC (ed) Credibility assessment. Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, New York, pp 101–119
Vrij A (2007) Criteria based content analysis: a qualitative review of the first 37 studies. Psychol Public Policy Law 11:3–41
Vrij A, Akehurst L, Soukara S, Bull R (2004) Let me inform you how to tell a convincing story: CBCA and reality monitoring scores as a function of age, coaching, and deception. Can J Behav Sci 36:113–126
Vrij A, Leal S, Mann SA, Granhag PA (2011) A comparison between lying about intentions and past activities: Verbal cues and detection accuracy. Appl Cogn Psychol 25:212–218
Vrij A, Mann S (2006) Criteria-based content analysis: Am empirical test of its underlying process. Psychol Crime Law 12:337–349
Weiner M, Mehrabian A (1968) Language within language: immediacy, a channel in nonverbal communication. Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York
Weintraub W (1989) Verbal behavior in everyday life. Springer, New York
Zaparniuk J, Yuille JC, Taylor S (1995) Assessing the credibility of true and false statements. Int J Law Psychiatry 18:343–352
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This work was funded by the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group contract J-FBI-12-197 awarded to Humintell LLC. Statements of fact, opinion and analysis in the paper are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the FBI or the U.S. Government.
Vincent A. Sandoval has retired from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Matsumoto, D., Hwang, H.C. & Sandoval, V.A. Ethnic Similarities and Differences in Linguistic Indicators of Veracity and Lying in a Moderately High Stakes Scenario. J Police Crim Psych 30, 15–26 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11896-013-9137-7
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11896-013-9137-7