Juveniles and adults differ in their beliefs about cues to deception and strategies during a hypothetical police interview

Abstract

Police officers are often trained to use the Behavior Analysis Interview (BAI) to detect deceit, but it is based on faulty indicators of lying that may be especially problematic for juveniles due to developmental immaturities. Juveniles, young adults, and adults were assigned to guilt or innocence conditions, read a criminal scenario, and selfreported their likelihood of providing truthful and deceitful responses during a hypothetical BAI. All participants indicated they would give more truthful than deceptive responses. Guilty participants reported more use of strategies to appear innocent, while innocent participants said they would behave naturally. Juveniles were more likely to choose deceitful responses and say they would use strategies to appear innocent during a police interview but endorsed fewer stereotypical cues of deception compared to adults. Juveniles may not recognize how certain behaviors could be seen as cues to deception, which could put them at risk of being misidentified as guilty.

The risks and consequences of innocence in school discipline: Implications for policy and research.

“…However, many BAI claimed-deceitful behaviors are exhibited by adolescents regardless of their truthfulness (e.g., avoiding eye contact, evasiveness, slouching; see Birckhead, 2008), rendering its use in schools even more unreliable. Experimental research finds both innocent and guilty adolescents are more likely to endorse using claimed-deceitful responses than their adult counterparts; adolescents also hold fewer of the stereotypical cues of deception (Bettens & Warren, 2023). In other words, not only are innocent youth likely to display the behaviors that administrators and SROs are taught to indicate lying, but these youth are probably woefully unaware of how those behaviors are being perceived.…”