Perceived Familiarity with a Judgmental Situation Improves Lie Detection Ability

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Lie catchers are often barely better than chance. In this experiment, we investigated the influence of manipulated perceived familiarity with a situation that measured participants’ ability to correctly classify lies and truths. As expected, participants in the high-familiarity condition showed substantially (21%) greater classification accuracy for both truths and lies than in the low-familiarity condition. Furthermore, as predicted, mediational analyses indicated that the higher classification accuracy rates in the high-familiarity conditions were due in part to a stronger reliance on content cues and less use of stereotypical nonverbal cues, compared to the low-familiarity condition. Participants in the high-familiarity condition were also more confident in their decision and better calibrated than participants who had been led to believe that they were unfamiliar with the situation. Analyses of confidence-accuracy calibration challenge previous findings of low correlations between confidence and accuracy.