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Article
He’s guilty!: Investigator bias in judgments of truth and deception
Law & Human Behavior (2002)
  • Christian A Meissner, Florida International University
  • Saul M Kassin, Williams College
Abstract

Detecting deception is an inherently difficult task, but one that plays a critical role for law enforcement investigators in the interrogation room. In general, research has failed to indicate that performance in this domain is improved by training or prior experience. A signal detection framework is applied to the paradigm to better conceptualize the influence of these two factors. We found that although neither factor influenced discrimination accuracy, there was an effect on response bias such that training and prior experience appeared to increase the likelihood of responding “deceit” as opposed to “truth”. This “investigator bias” was observed both in a review of the literature and in the present study of North American law enforcement investigators who took part in a forensically based deception-detection task. Possible theoretical mechanisms and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Publication Date
January 1, 2002
Publisher Statement
Author Posting © Springer, 2002. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of the Springer for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Law & Human Behavior, Volume 26, Issue 5, October, 2002. doi: 10.1023/A:1020278620751
http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1020278620751. The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com.
Citation Information
Christian A Meissner and Saul M Kassin. "He’s guilty!: Investigator bias in judgments of truth and deception" Law & Human Behavior (2002)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/christian_meissner/31/