Post‐probe decision making in a prison context

If a listener becomes suspicious during a conversation, and asks questions (probes) of a speaker, the listener tends to judge the speaker's message as honest. This result has been termed the probing effect (McCornack, Levine, Aleman, Oetzel, & Miller, ). This study hypothesized that an untested decision‐making phenomenon, an opposite probing effect, or a post‐probe tendency to judge a message as deceptive, might occur when lie‐biased individuals judge statement veracity. Prison inmates and non‐inmates participated in dyads as judges and speakers. Speakers watched a video, and then lied or told the truth to judges. Judges covertly showed thumbs up or down before asking questions, and subsequently made post‐probe judgments. Findings indicate that inmates use heuristic processing to a greater extent than non‐inmates, and that inmates, surprisingly, exhibit a probing effect, and not an opposite probing effect, when heuristic processing is employed to decide message veracity.