On‐the‐Job Experience and Skill at Detecting Deception1

The role of on‐the‐job experience in fostering skill at detecting deception was examined. A deception‐detection test was administered to three samples of more than 100 subjects each: a group of undergraduates with no special experiences at detecting deceit; a group of new recruits to a federal law enforcement training program, who had some limited on‐the‐job experience at detecting deceit; and a group of advanced federal law enforcement officers, with years of experience working at jobs in which the detection of deception is very important. Although the officer samples were more confident about their judgments of deceptiveness than were the students, they were no more accurate than the students. None of the three groups showed a significant improvement in deception‐detection success from the first half to the second half of the test; however, the advanced officers felt increasingly confident about their performance as they progressed through the test. Correlational analyses of the relationship between accuracy and confidence provided further evidence that experience does not improve people's awareness oi the accuracy or inaccuracy of their judgments. The findings from this research are compared to the results of research on other kinds of professional decision‐makers (e.g., clinical psychologists), and several theoretical perspectives on the role of experience in decision making are discussed.