Veracity Judgments Based on Complications: A Training Experiment

Abstract

Research has shown that complications are more common in truth tellers' accounts than in lie tellers' accounts, but there is currently no experiment that has examined the accuracy of observers' veracity judgments when looking at complications. A total of 87 participants were asked to judge 10 transcripts (five truthful and five false) derived from a set of 59 transcripts generated in a previous experiment by Deeb et al. Approximately half of the participants were trained to detect complications (Trained), and the other half did not receive training (Untrained). Trained participants were more likely to look for complications, but they did not detect them accurately, and thus their veracity judgments did not improve beyond Untrained participants' judgments. We discuss that the training may have been too brief or not sensitive enough to enhance decision-making.

Keywords: complications; interviews; lie detection; veracity judgment; verbal cues.

Figure 1

ROC curve for participants’ veracity judgments.