Investigative Interviewing Research: Ideas and Methodological Suggestions for New Research Perspectives

Cues to deception: can complications, common knowledge details, and self-handicapping strategies discriminate between truths, embedded lies and outright lies in an Italian-speaking sample?

“…Research has shown that there is high variability in deceptive communications due to interpersonal differences ( Serota and Levine, 2015 ; Caso et al, 2018 ; Park et al, 2021 ). Building on this, scholars have made an effort to reduce the effect of interpersonal variability, for example by adopting specific interviewing strategies and within-subjects measures ( Vrij, 2016 ; Vrij et al, 2018a ; Verigin et al, 2020 ) but also by applying statical approaches that aims at grouping similar subjects ( Palena and Caso, 2021 ; Palena et al, 2021a , 2022 ). It could be that people who score high on storytelling and on risk-taking and bluffing would provide more complications than people who score low on such variables, as the former would likely to be more apt and willing to create credible stories (storytelling skills) that include complication details that could be potentially proved wrong by an investigator (high risk-taking and bluffing tendency).…”

The role of individual features of memory and impulsiveness in telling a true or false story in a realistic, clear, and reconstructible way

“…However, in the present study, we took a different look at the data by focusing on memory and personality-related variables (see below) and by employing a person-centered approach. Such a statistical approach has rarely been used in deception research experiments (Palena et al, 2021a(Palena et al, , 2022 but has the advantage of accounting for interpersonal differences (Caso et al, 2018;Palena and Caso, 2021).…”

“…One example to deal with such differences is the baseline approach (Vrij, 2016 ), which builds on the idea that, if an investigator has a baseline reference of how someone behaves and talks when telling the truth, then deciphering if someone is lying should be easier than not having a baseline. Another and more recent approach is the application of person-centered methodologies in interviewing settings (Palena and Caso, 2021 ). Briefly speaking, the more common variable-centered approach assumes that the effect under investigation is the same across individuals.…”

“…Similarly, Palena et al (2022) obtained profiles starting from participants' scores on the six factors of personality, Machiavellianism, and moral disengagement and found that profile membership was associated with, among others, lying ability and lying frequency. These studies indicated that lie detection research might benefit from the application of personcentered approaches that, although new to the topic of lie detection, are well-known in other research areas (Palena and Caso, 2021). Indeed, given the high variability between individuals in lying behavior, person-centered approaches provide a solid psychometric ground to deal with interpersonal differences.…”

Beware, Not Everyone Lies the Same Way! Investigating the Effects of Interviewees’ Profiles and Lie Content on Verbal Cues

“…There are other more robust analytical procedures that are useful within deception detection research. The person-centred approach accounts for the specificity of individuals and is based on the assumption that people can be grouped based on their response patterns on preselected variables, with people with similar responding patterns being grouped together in the same profile or cluster (Palena and Caso 2021). The person-centred approach could thus be more suitable for lie detection research than the variable-centred approach as it can shed light on how specific groups of individuals, rather than the whole population, behaves when lying.…”