‘Please tell me all you remember’: a comparison between British and Arab interviewees’ free narrative performance and its implications for lie detection

Abstract

We examined how much information British and Arab truth tellers and lie tellers volunteer in an initial free narrative. Based on cultural differences in communication styles we predicted that British interviewees would report more details and more complications than Arab interviewees (culture main effect). We further predicted that truth tellers would report more details and complications than lie tellers (veracity main effect), particularly in the British sample (Veracity × Culture interaction effect). A total of 78 British and 76 Israeli-Arab participants took part. The experiment was carried out at a British university and an Israeli university. Participants carried out a mission. Truth tellers were instructed to report the mission truthfully in a subsequent interview whereas lie tellers were asked to lie about certain aspects of the mission. The three hypotheses were supported for details, whereas for complications only the predicted veracity main effect occurred.

Key words:

• cross-cultural comparison
• deception
• information-gathering

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Notes

1 Originally 107 participants took part. Two lie tellers did not describe a mission and were therefore deleted from the sample. In 29 interviews the three questions were not asked one by one but were asked as one question. We could not use these interviews either.

2 This is a subsample of the dataset presented in Vrij et al. (2020). We only included the British citizens (and left out the participants from African, Arab, Asian and European origins). The details and complications are from the initial phase in that article, ‘description of route to and from the location’ and ‘total details of experiences at the location’ combined.

3 At a univariate level the age covariate effect was significant for details, F(1, 147) = 9.47, p = .002, η_p² = .06, but not for complications, F(1, 147) = 0.90, p = .344, η_p² = .01. For the pre-motivation covariate, the details effect, F(1, 147) = 0.00, p = .991, η_p² = .00, and the complications effect, F(1, 147) = 2.45, p = .120, η_p² = .02, were not significant. For the post-motivation covariate, the details effect, F(1, 147) = 3.01, p = .085, η_p² = .02, and the complications effect, F(1, 147) = 0.53, p = .468, η_p² = .004, were not significant.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats [ESRC Award: ES/N009614/1].