Misleading cues, misplaced confidence: An analysis of deception detection patterns

First, a case is made that the processes and assumptions underlying judgments of whether someone is lying during a high stakes interview may be similar to movement interpretation processes in a clinical context, and that the former is easier to research than the latter. Graduate students judged the credibility of utterances from actual criminal confessions, explained their decisions, and rated how confident they felt in each decision. Four of the items contained a conventional but invalid nonverbal cue to deception and one contained two conventional, but incorrect, cues to truth-telling. Groups of 30 judged either content only transcripts, verbatim transcripts, audio, or audio/video. Comparison of rationales, confidence level, and accuracy across modality provided evidence of which cues misled judges, how nonverbal cues modified verbal content judgments, and detection patterns that warranted further research. The implications of the results for movement observation and interpretation in dance/movement therapy are discussed. © Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2006.