Perceived experience and police officers’ ability to detect deception

Abstract

Purpose

For police officers, the ability to distinguish between truthful and deceptive statements in interrogations is essential. However, research shows that their classification accuracy is typically rather low. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ability to detect deception as a function of perceived experience, in a sample of German police officers and police trainees.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors had the participants judge ten video recordings of a mock crime with respect to the displayed suspects’ truthfulness. Following the assumptions and findings of previous research, the authors expected their manipulation of perceived experience to increase detection accuracy, but expected objective experience not to be correlated with the ability to detect deception.

Findings

As expected, police officers and trainees in the experience condition achieved higher accuracy than control participants. On the objective self‐report measures of experience, no relationship with classification accuracy was found.

Practical implications

The findings suggest that police officers’ objective experience does not perfectly translate into subjective experience. A subjective feeling of experience can be sufficient enough to increase detection accuracy, even if one is objectively inexperienced.

Originality/value

The manipulation proved to be a simple and efficient method of increasing judgmental accuracy in lie detection without increasing police officers’ actual knowledge or changing their beliefs about deception cues.

Citation

Reinhard, M., Dahm, J. and Scharmach, M. (2012), "Perceived experience and police officers’ ability to detect deception", Policing: An International Journal, Vol. 35 No. 4, pp. 822-834. https://doi.org/10.1108/13639511211275805