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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of response bias and target gender on detecting deception.

Participants were randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions: a stereotype condition (bogus training group), a tell-signs condition (empirically tested cues), and a control condition. Participants were required to decide whether eight targets were lying or telling the truth, based upon the information they had been given. Accuracy was measured via a correct or incorrect response to the stimuli. The data were then analyzed using a 2×2×3 mixed analysis of variance (ANOVA) to determine whether any main or interactional effects were present.

Results revealed training condition had no significant effect on accuracy, nor was there a within-subject effect of gender. However, there was a significant main effect of accuracy in detecting truth or lies, and a significant interaction between target gender and detecting truth or lies.

Future research should seek a larger sample of participants with a more extensive training aspect developed into the study, as the brief training offered here may not be fully reflective of the extent and intensity of training which could be offered to professionals.

Within the criminal justice system, the need for increased accuracy in detecting deception is of critical importance; not only to detect whether a guilty individual is being deceitful, but also whether someone is making a false confession, both to improve community safety by detaining the correct perpetrator for the crime but also to maintain public trust in the justice system. The present research provides a fresh insight into the importance of training effects in detecting deception.

The purpose of this paper is to test the construct validity and dimensionality of the measure of criminal social identity (MCSI) within both a combined sample of American, Pakistani, and Polish inmates, as well as examined as individual country samples.

Adopting a cross-sectional survey design, the opportunistic sample consisted of offenders incarcerated in three different countries; 351 inmates from Poland, 501 from the USA, and 319 from Pakistan (combined data set n=1,171), with inmates completing anonymous, self-administered, paper-and-pencil questionnaires. Traditional confirmatory factor analysis, along with confirmatory bi-factor modelling, was used in order to examine the fit of four different models of criminal social identity (CSI).

Results revealed that data were best explained by a three-factor model of CSI (cognitive centrality, in-group ties, and in-group affect) within both combined and individual offender samples. Composite reliability indicated that the three factors were measured with very good reliability.

Validation of the MCSI within the large cross-cultural combined prison sample provides substantial support for the measure’s reliability and utility across diverse offender samples. Consideration of low factor loadings of items one and three for the Pakistan data set and item two for the US data set, leads the researchers to outline possible recommendations that these questions be reworded and additional items be added.

This is the first study to validate MCSI cross-culturally and specifically utilising a western prison sample, consisting of male and female offenders.