Examination of the Verifiable Details Provided by Liars in Their Alibis

Abstract

The “cognitive approach” to detecting deception assumes that deception is a cognitively taxing experience, so interpersonal questioning techniques that make the task even more cognitively difficult will make liars easier to detect. The present experiment asked participants to imagine they were involved in either a high-stakes or low-stakes deceptive theft scenario and compared these conditions to a no-theft truthful condition. They were interviewed by a researcher who asked for an alibi of their whereabouts during the theft. Results indicated participants used few verifiable details overall, despite being prompted that they would improve the believability of the alibi. Consistent with the cognitive approach, truth-tellers named identifiable witnesses more in their alibis than deceivers. Participants in the high-stakes condition who wrote their alibis first used significantly more references to identifiable people than any other group. Writing the alibi prior to the interview reduced feelings of guilt and increased both motivation and perceptions of success.

Keywords:

• Deception Detection
• Verbal Cues
• Verifiability Approach

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Dr. Aldert Vrij for providing us with his coding scheme and answering our questions thoroughly and patiently.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The ICC is the correlation between one measurement on a target and another measurement obtained on that target and is used to establish a correlation between pairs of observations that do not have an obvious order (Fleiss, 1981). Shrout and Fleiss (1979) discuss six different versions of the ICC, most of which can be calculated using the reliability analysis function in SPSS. We used the one-way random version of the ICC with a 95% confidence interval and a test value of 0.

2. Eta² was hand-calculated using the formula suggested by Levine and Hullett (2002).