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For police officers, the ability to distinguish between truthful and deceptive statements in interrogations is essential. However, research shows that their classification accuracy is typically rather low. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ability to detect deception as a function of perceived experience, in a sample of German police officers and police trainees.

The authors had the participants judge ten video recordings of a mock crime with respect to the displayed suspects’ truthfulness. Following the assumptions and findings of previous research, the authors expected their manipulation of perceived experience to increase detection accuracy, but expected objective experience not to be correlated with the ability to detect deception.

As expected, police officers and trainees in the experience condition achieved higher accuracy than control participants. On the objective self‐report measures of experience, no relationship with classification accuracy was found.

The findings suggest that police officers’ objective experience does not perfectly translate into subjective experience. A subjective feeling of experience can be sufficient enough to increase detection accuracy, even if one is objectively inexperienced.

The manipulation proved to be a simple and efficient method of increasing judgmental accuracy in lie detection without increasing police officers’ actual knowledge or changing their beliefs about deception cues.

This paper aims to systematically compare the textbook‐based criminal justice and psychological literatures on detecting deception in field settings to determine the accuracy of the criminal justice literature in this area.

A total of 18 criminal justice textbooks covering detecting deception were systematically reviewed and coded. The alleged indicators of deception were then compared with the psychological literature on the valid indicators of deception.

Many criminal justice textbooks on interviewing, interrogation, and criminal investigation claim that there are numerous accurate indicators of deception which can be readily used in field settings. The comparison of these claims with the research in psychology indicates that a great deal of the information found in criminal justice textbooks is erroneous. Further review indicates that in controlled studies criminal justice practitioners rarely detect deception at levels greater than chance or comparison groups of non‐practitioners. It is exceedingly difficult to detect deception in field settings without the help of technology or complicated instruments or aids.

Much of the information in criminal justice textbooks on detecting deception is erroneous and may have negatively affected practitioners to the extent that they are unable to detect deception effectively. Textbooks on interviewing, interrogation, and criminal investigation should be circumspect regarding an individual's ability to detect deception in field settings. Texts should refrain from presenting deception detection as a simple and accurate science. Practitioners should be cautious when attempting to detect deception in field settings.

The criminal justice and psychological literatures on detecting deception have not been synthesized before. This information will be useful to criminal justice practitioners who seek to detect deception.

Understanding when an individual is being deceptive is an important part of police and criminal investigations. While investigators have developed multiple methods, the research literature has yet to fully explore some of the newer applied techniques. This study aims to investigate statement analysis, a recent approach in forensic linguistic analysis that has been applied to criminal investigations.

Real-world statements of individuals exposed as deceptive or truthful were used in the analyses. A behaviour sequence analysis approach is used to provide a timeline analysis of the individuals’ statements.

Results indicate that sequential patterns are different in deceptive statements compared to truthful statements. For example, deceptive statements were more likely to include vague words and temporal lacunas, to convince investigators into believing that the suspect was not present when the crime occurred. The sample in this research did not use one deceptive indicator, instead, electing to frequently change the order of deceptive indicators. Gaps in deception were also noted, and there was common repetition found in both the deceptive and truthful statements. While gaps are predicted to occur in truthful statements to reflect an absence of deception, gaps occurring in the deceptive statements are likely due to cognitive load.

The current research provides more support for using statement analysis in real-world criminal cases.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of question type (open-ended, prompted, reverse order and chronological order recall) on children’s ability to maintain a truth or a lie in a two-part mock-courtroom study.

In total, 96 children (M _age=131.00 months) between 9 and 12 years of age were asked to testify about an interaction with a research assistant the week prior. They were assigned to one of four conditions (true/false×assertion/denial).

Results indicate that question type has an influence on children’s ability to maintain their condition. Results also indicate that regardless of question type, children have difficulty recalling information sequentially.

Implications of the current research support the use of various question types, including increasing the cognitive load demands, when interviewing children.

To date, this is the first study to investigate the use of reverse order questioning in a courtroom study with children.

Experimental research on lie detection has indicated that accuracy rates hover around chance but that police are significantly better in detecting deception in “high” stakes rather than “low” stakes situations. This paper has three objectives: to compare confidence levels in lie detection for property crime and violent crime detectives; to compare differences in confidence levels for custodial and noncustodial interviews; and to evaluate the relationship between interrogation techniques and lie detection confidence.

The study uses self‐report data from a sample of Texas police detectives.

The results of this study show that property crime detectives are significantly more confident in their lie detection ability than are violent crime detectives. The results also highlight the fact that police detectives are significantly less confident in their lie detection abilities when the suspect has been provided his or her Miranda warnings.

The study highlights the disparity in findings derived from self‐reported data and experimental studies on veracity judgments and the need to account for contextual factors that ultimately impact the ecological validity of this research.

Deception detection is instrumental in business management but professionals differ widely in terms of deception detection performance. The purpose of this paper is to examine the genetic basis of deception detection performance using the classic twin study design and address the research question: how much variance in individual differences in deception detection performance can be accounted for by the variance in genetics vs environmental influences?

In total, 192 twins, with 65 pairs of monozygotic (identical) twins and 31 pairs of dizygotic (fraternal) twins participated in an experiment. A series of behavioral genetic analyses were performed.

The variability in deception detection performance was largely determined by differences in shared and non-shared environments.

The subjects were solicited during the Twins Days Festival so the sample selection and data collection were limited to the natural settings in the field. In addition, the risks and rewards associated with deception detection performance in the study are pale in comparison with those in practice.

Deception detection performance may be improved through training programs. Corporations should continue funding training programs for deception detection.

This is the first empirical study that examines the complementary influences of genetics and environment on people’s ability to detect deception.

The purpose of this study is to explore the views of practicing negotiators on their experiences of deception and their strategies for detecting deceptive behavior. A thematic analysis of interview data complements the existing experimental literature on deception and negotiation. The authors compare the experiences of practicing negotiators with the results found in experimental studies and provide practical recommendations for negotiators and managers regarding the detection of deception.

Data was collected from 19 practicing commercial negotiators in France by way of semi-structured interviews. The transcribed data was analyzed by way of thematic analysis using the software NVivo 12. Experiences and behaviors identified in the negotiation literature as key factors for the detection of deception acted as a coding framework.

A thematic analysis of the data revealed four themes related to the experience of deception that negotiators perceived as particularly important: the frequency, form, interpretation and consequences of deception. Further, the analysis revealed four factors that negotiators believed influenced their ability to detect deceptive communication: physical cues, such as body language and micro-expressions, and verbal cues, including contradictions and inconsistencies, emotional cues and environmental cues. Finally, the strategies described by negotiators to detect deception could be classified according to six themes: careful listening, asking questions, emotional intelligence, intuition, checking consistency and requesting evidence.

This study elicited the views of commercial negotiators without collecting information from their negotiation counterparts. Hence, it was not possible to verify whether the reported detection of deceptive communication was accurate. Because of optimism bias, the participants in the sample were likely to overrate their ability to detect deception. In part, this was helpful because the negotiators spoke freely about their strategies for dealing with deceptive counterparts allowing the identification of techniques to improve the efficacy of detecting deceptive communication.

Participants overwhelmingly expressed that there is a lack of training on deception in negotiation. It is suggested that the results of this study inform the development of training courses on the detection of deception. In particular, it is recommended that training courses should cover the following topics: how to anticipate and avoid deceptive behavior; how to effectively respond to deceptive behavior; the role of emotional intelligence in detecting deceptive behavior; careful listening and asking questions; and the role of intuition in detecting deception.

Prior empirical studies on the detection of deception have not specifically investigated the range of self-reported strategies used by practicing negotiators to detect deceptive communication. This study addresses this gap. This study complements existing experimental works by widening the spectrum of potential variables that play a role in the effective detection of deceptive communication.

The purpose of this paper is to present a review of the deception detection literature that arrives at a different conclusion from the one presented by King and Dunn. Specifically, the authors’ review shows that people can detect deception at significantly above chance accuracy in policing environments. A new paradigm for deception detection is also discussed.

An extensive literature review was conducted.

People can detect deception at levels that exceed chance in a variety of police‐related environments when an ecological approach to detecting deception is adopted.

The authors’ review suggests that it is time for deception detection training and manuals to move away from the demeanor‐based systems that are currently dominant and toward coherence and correspondence‐based systems.

The paper presents a perspective that is different from the one advanced by King and Dunn. It also introduces the ecological detection of deception paradigm to the policing literature.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss unresolved problems that are reflected in the social scientific research on the linguistic detection of deception in statements, with particular attention to problems of methodology, practical utility for law enforcement statement analysts, and epistemology.

The author reviewed the design, data, statistical calculations, and findings of English language peer‐reviewed studies of the linguistic detection of deception in statements. In some cases, the author re‐analyzed the study data.

Social scientific research holds promise for the development of new methods of linguistic detection of deception that are more thoroughly validated than the linguistic methods law enforcement investigators have been using for many years. Nonetheless, published studies reflect one or more of the following sources of weakness in developing and evaluating detection models: the use of analytes (statements) of uncertain validity; the problematic universality and practical utility of linguistic variables; the widespread use of deficient proportion‐of‐stimuli‐correct “hit rate” calculations to assess the accuracy of detection methods; a possibly irresolvable epistemological limit to the ability of any linguistic detection method to prove deception without confirmation by means external to the analysis.

The research was limited to English language studies in the linguistic detection of deception literature and to the re‐calculation of data in the research literature. Whether the paper has implications for future studies depends on the success of two arguments that are made: the published research projects in the field reflect one or more of four methodological problems that create doubt about the validity and/or the practical utility of their results; and the linguistic detection of deception is subject to an epistemological problem which theoretically limits the ability of any linguistic method of detection to establish with certainty the status of any particular questioned statement.

This is the first published paper to identify and discuss a possibly irresolvable epistemological issue in the detection of deception by linguistic means, as well as unresolved issues of methodology and of utility to law enforcement analysts that characterize the research and the detection models in this field. It is also the first published paper to deconstruct the simple hit rate (and its variants) in order to demonstrate its deficiencies.

To function effectively, police must separate lies from truth. Police, ideally, would be experts at this task, yet there is debate surrounding whether expertise in detecting deception is possible. Drawing upon literature outside of deception detection, the purpose of this paper is to explore whether subjects making deception judgments can improve their performance.

The sample was 19 students from two graduate-level classes. Subjects viewed six sets of videos over eight weeks. The first five sets displayed individuals reporting whether they cheated on an exam. The sixth set displayed individuals reporting whether they had committed a (mock) robbery. After each video, subjects judged whether the videoed individual was truthful, and then the actual status was revealed.

Subjects’ accuracy improved consistently over the first five sets of videos; from about 69 percent accuracy to about 89 percent accuracy. However, the accuracy for the sixth set of videos dropped dramatically to 46 percent. The results indicate that expertise in deception detection may be possible, but is likely to be limited in terms of generalizability.

The actual environment of police investigations is more variable than the study’s setting. Future studies should integrate inaccurate and incomplete feedback, which are realistic characteristics of investigations.

The findings suggest that, like other areas of expertise, it may be possible to develop expertise in detecting deception through the use of deliberate practice with accurate feedback.

This study combines three literature-substantiated criteria for developing deception detection expertise. The study environment involved regularity. Subjects were deliberately practicing, and subjects received accurate feedback.