Deception: concepts, forms, and psychological impacts

Criminal Justice - Investigations

DECEPTION in INVESTIGATION, INTERROGATION, and TESTIMONY

Deception Detection in Criminal Investigation:

Criminal investigation includes the evaluation of statements for truthfulness or deception at every stage of investigation and interrogation, as well as during sworn testimony. In that regard, trained criminal investigators must be aware of numerous cues available in the content of conversations, the context of word choice, omissions intended to conceal information of guilt of complicity, and nonverbal cues in posture, eye contact, and unconscious physical gestures intended to mislead investigators or conceal the truth (Sandoval, 2008).

In many cases, the indicators of deception are extremely subtle and require the benefit of specific training to identify them. Individuals also vary in their innate ability to detect intentional deception in others, and generally, those individuals tend to notice the same types of cues as those taught during investigative training, except that they do so unconsciously rather than by methodical adherence to learned deception detection strategies (Sandoval, 2008).

Deception During the Investigative Phase:

Guilty individuals who wish to conceal their responsibility for or involvement in criminal activity tend to be deceptive at every phase of the investigative process, beginning with their first contact with investigative authorities, regardless of who initiates that contact. For this reason, deception detection is crucial for patrol officers responding to crime scenes as well as for subsequent investigators (Schmalleger, 2008; Sweeney, 2005)

Specifically, statement analysis of emergency service calls to authorities via 911 systems provide a wealth of information capable of distinguishing victims and innocent uninvolved individuals from perpetrators concealing their criminal involvement (Adams & Harpster, 2008).

In particular, patrol officers focus on specific behaviors and linguistic cues consistent with deception, including patterns of eye contact, word choice, and behavioral indicators such as repeating the officer's questions or reflexive questions like "What?" Or "Who, me?" Or "Huh" in contexts where it is clear that the subject heard the question clearly the first time. In that regard, officers compare the apparent difference in supposed comprehension of non-incriminating questions like "Do you live here?" And potentially incriminating questions like "Did you argue with the victim at all today?" (Conlon, 2004). Deception During the Interrogation and Testimonial Phases:

While 911 calls are not technically part of the investigative phase, their potential to provide crucial clues and indicators of intentional deception suggests that 911 operators be trained to focus on specific characteristics of word choice and demeanor of callers that typically differ substantially based on whether or not the caller is intentionally trying to conceal criminal involvement (Adams & Harpster, 2008). Generally, innocent callers who discover a homicide scene, for example, request assistance for the victim, omit irrelevant information, cooperate with dispatchers but can be rude or overly insistent in an effort to obtain assistance for the victim a soon as possible. Conversely, guilty callers generally try to conceal their criminal involvement by requesting help for themselves, providing extraneous irrelevant information, and tend to be somewhat uncooperative while maintaining a calm and collected demeanor (Addams & Harpster, 2008).

During other phases of investigation such as interviews, investigators are trained to detect subtle choices of words that often correspond to intentional deception.

Specifically, individuals attempting to lie to investigators do not lie directly as often as indirectly, such as by omitting information instead of making affirmative statements that are untrue (Sandoval, 2008; Schafer, 2008). Examples of passive attempts to misrepresent information during criminal investigators and sworn testimony tend to employ text bridges in the form of words and phrases like "and then" or "later on" where their criminal conduct took place during the period of time corresponding to those text bridges (Schafer, 2008).

Similarly, guilty individuals attempting to conceal or minimize their connection to crimes often employ words that change the temporal context. Specifically, when describing events in the past, people generally use the past tense, as in "We went downstairs to watch television...' However, individuals attempting to conceal information typically change to present tense, such as by saying "...after that, I get up and go outside for a while." According to psychologists, this is a function of the fact that When recalling past events, subjects replay those events in their mind's eye; conversely, when fabricating events to conceal information, subjects tend to switch (unconsciously) to present tense because they are creating those events in real time instead of recalling them in the past (Sandoval, 2008).