Lie‐biased Decision Making in Prison

Levine and McCornack (1992 Levine, T. R. and McCornack, S. A. 1992. Linking love and lies: A formal test of the McCornack and Parks model of deception detection. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 9(1): 143–154. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) found that persons who have a truth‐bias (those who tend to believe that most messages are truthful) exhibit low detection accuracy, that moderately suspicious people are more accurate at detecting, and suggested that lie‐bias persons would be as inaccurate at detecting lies as those who are truth‐biased. This study tested Levine and McCornack’s suggestion that lie‐biased people would be inaccurate deception detectors by conducting field experiments in Kansas and New Mexico prisons. Results indicate that prisoners are lie‐biased and are accurate detectors of lies but not truths, and findings suggest a reversed veracity effect in prison.