Evaluation of the effectiveness of a brief deception detection training program

Abstract

The discrimination of genuine and falsified emotional displays is critical in many contexts, including healthcare, forensic, and airport security settings. Previous research has demonstrated that comprehensive (two-day) empirically based deception detection training can lead to moderate gains in judgment accuracy. However, for many professional groups such extensive training is not feasible due to time and resource limitations. In the present study, we evaluated the effectiveness of brief (three-hour) training. N = 26 (13 females, 13 males) healthcare professionals with experience in evaluating the validity of medical claims participated in the training workshop. Their performance on two deception detection tasks was measured pre- and post-training; the participants attempted to discriminate: (1) videotaped truthful and fabricated stories concerning emotional events and (2) sincere and falsified emotional facial expressions. Results indicated that participants' overall accuracy on both tasks increased modestly from chance (M = 51.2%) to significantly above chance (M = 60.7%), primarily due to an increase in their improved ‘hit’ rate from pre- to post-training.