When did you conclude she was lying? The impact of the moment the decision about the sender's veracity is made nad the sender's facial appearance on police officers' credibility judgments.

Abstract

[EN]ABSTRACT: Two experiments were conducted to explore how the moment observers make their decision about the senders’ veracity affects their judgment and detection accuracy. In Experiment 1 police officers and undergraduates judged the credibility of video-recorded statements. Contrary to our expectation, officers did not judge the statements earlier than the students. An initial lie bias became evident. In Experiment 2 a still face, which could be of the same witness as in Experiment 1, or of two other witnesses, was shown to officers as they listened to truthful or deceptive accounts taken from Experiment 1. There was no effect of the sender’s facial appearance on the lie bias found in the first experiment, which emerged here as well. Accuracy for detecting deceptive accounts decreased across time in both studies, while accuracy for truthful accounts increased only in Experiment 2. How visual and verbal information contributed to these effects is discussed.