NCJ Number
215323
Journal
Forensic Examiner Volume: 15 Issue: 1 Dated: Spring 2006 Pages: 6-11
Date Published
2006
Length
6 pages
Annotation
A meta-analysis that involved 108 studies and 16,537 subjects examined whether there were individual differences in evaluators' ability to detect deception.
Abstract
The analysis found that confidence, age, experience, education, and gender were not significantly related to accuracy in detecting deception. It also found that "professional lie catchers" such as police officers, detectives, judges, and psychologists were no more accurate in detecting deception than students and other citizens. There were not a sufficient number of relevant studies available to examine the relationship between evaluators' personality dimensions and accuracy in detecting deception. Although these findings could mean that people are not good at detecting deception regardless of their age, gender, confidence, and experience, the findings could also indicate that the artificial situations and tasks used in the studies were not proper settings for the detection of deception. In "real world" situations, judgments about deception are often based on such factors as the story not making logical sense, a subject not directly answering the questions being asked, and inconsistencies with previous statements or the statements of others. Deception is best detected when there is a baseline of behavior, the subject's responses are spontaneous, and there is a consequence for getting caught. In most, if not all, of the studies in this meta-analysis, such conditions were absent. Future studies should involve more realistic situations. To be included in the meta-analysis, a publication had to report the results of an empirical investigation and had to include a correlation coefficient, another statistic that could be converted to a correlation coefficient, or tabular data or raw data that could be analyzed to yield a correlation coefficient. 4 tables and 36 references