NCJ Number
187991
Journal
Legal and Criminological Psychology Volume: 6 Issue: 1 Dated: February 2001 Pages: 85-101
Date Published
February 2001
Length
17 pages
Annotation
A study conducted in Sweden focused on how repeated interrogations affect interrogators’ performance with respect to the detection of deception and tested the previous finding that interrogators who interact face to face tend to be more credulous toward suspects than are observers who watch the same suspects on video.
Abstract
The participants were undergraduate students. They included 12 lying witnesses and 12 truth-telling witnesses who saw a staged event and were interrogated 3 times over a period of 11 days. The interrogator and six observers who had viewed the interrogations on video assessed the veracity of each witness. The study used 144 observers. Results revealed that both interrogators and observers were poor at discerning truth-tellers and liars. In addition, observers who made veracity assessments after seeing one interrogation performed as well as observers who had seen three interrogations. Moreover, observers who assessed veracity after seeing one interrogation and again after watching the additional two interrogations significantly increased their performance. Furthermore, the interrogators displayed a pronounced truth bias. Findings suggested that interrogators should be careful not to hold too lenient an attitude toward suspects. Findings also demonstrated that the number of veracity assessments made is related more to description detection than is the number of interrogations handled. Tables and 44 references (Author abstract modified)