Increasing pressure does not benefit lie detection: a reply to Ten Brinke et al. (2015)

ABSTRACT

When passively attending to suspects, observers are poor at distinguishing lies from truths. Deception research has therefore shifted to examining interview styles aimed at eliciting and enhancing deception cues. Based upon a literature review and three empirical studies, ten Brinke, L., Khambatta, P., and Carney, D. R. [2015. Physically scarce (vs. enriched) environments decrease the ability to successfully tell lies. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144, 982–992. doi:10.1037/xge0000103] recommend increasing pressure on interviewees as it would increase lie detection accuracy. In this comment, we argue that these authors (1) misinterpret the literature when concluding that lie detection benefits from increasing pressure on interviewees, and (2) their data do not show that lie detection is more accurate when pressure is increased. In absence of such data, we recommend that increasing pressure on interviewees should be avoided: it hampers the elicitation of valuable information and can lead to false confessions.

KEYWORDS:

• Stress
• deception
• deception detection
• confession
• interrogation

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Jan De Houwer and Bram Van Bockstaele for their constructive comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.