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To avoid a credulous or uncritical acceptance of a person’s paranormal claim, interviewers ought to possess several character traits shared among highly effective investigators, including being honest yet cautious, guarded against fraud, and overly inquisitive. Ideally, they should possess a sense of when things are unusual about someone’s testimony, an attentiveness to details, and the capacity to control, minimize, or eliminate their own biases.[1]
Unfortunately, research from several hundred studies indicate that people are poor lie detectors, averaging a 54% accuracy rate in identifying deception, which is only slightly better than mere guesswork.[2] Indeed, those who are more confident in their ability to detect lies in others (like police detectives) are also more likely to be incorrect about their judgments.[3] In laboratory settings, even professionals whose vocation involves the detection of lies are not able to recognize deception significantly better than the general public.[4]
Moreover, studies indicate that people have mistaken notions about how to detect lying, including the incorrect assumption that certain verbal and nonverbal cues such as body gestures, posture, fidgeting, speech disfluencies (e.g. stuttering and hesitations), and gaze aversion accurately indicate deception.[5]
In reality, however, liars do not consistently display verbal or nonverbal markers of dishonesty.[6] Thus, merely accepting people’s reports without a thorough investigation of their credibility offers little to no apologetic value beyond the fact that some people claim to have witnessed a paranormal event. Considering that these stories are not likely to exhibit the same affective or behavioral signals as other high-stake scenarios (e.g. concealing a crime), it is unlikely that a mere interview can determine whether someone’s report is fictitious or not.[7]
Paranormal investigators need to be aware that liars will attempt to convince people of their stories by strategizing beforehand. While testifying, deceivers will often avoid or deny details that could potentially expose their falsities by providing investigators with overly simplified and persuasive descriptions.[8] Thus, investigators ought to practice due diligence by verifying a claimant’s credibility.
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Verifying Credibility
A pre-interview background investigation into people’s lifestyle, personal history, and propensity to lie about certain subjects will help assess their credibility by determining whether the claimant possesses a trustworthy character. This initial investigation should also explore possible conflicts of interest where claimants have already received or anticipate receiving some form of personal gain from their story (financial or otherwise). The investigator will also need to identify whether the claimant has ulterior motives for their report. While a history of truthtelling does not automatically solidify a person’s credibility, paranormal investigators should be wary about accepting someone’s testimony at face value if the claimant has a propensity for lying about religious subjects or personal experiences.[9]
The rationale for this cautiousness is simple: investigators would have no assurance that the claimant is telling the truth without external corroborating evidence. Likewise, if an investigator discovers a deliberate falsehood in any part of the claimant’s testimony, then the entire report becomes suspect and potentially unusable. Once claimants pass the initial background check, investigators will then need to concentrate on the content of their story, utilizing cognitive approaches to lie detection.[10]
For the initial interview, researchers need to allow claimants to report what they remember in its entirety without interruption or interrogation. However, investigators should still obtain basic information (if not voluntarily disclosed) about the people involved (including race, gender, physical descriptions, attire, relationships to other persons, etc.), actions done before, during, and after the incident, spatial elements about the location, and timeframes of the incident. Wherever possible, the investigator should audio and video record every interview.
A claimant’s credibility is questionable if they are unable to recall these basic details, although investigators will also need to differentiate between recognizable facts and details that are easily confused (e.g. a person having a beard vs. unshaven stubble). If anyone involved in the incident did something that could impede identification (e.g. wearing a disguise), then the testimony will likely be difficult to corroborate.[11] Descriptions of a relative nature where the individual has to estimate certain details, such as causal relationships, distances, numbers of people, height, weight, and age, are likely to be guesses and, therefore, less consistent or accurate.[12]
In any case, interviewers must refrain from briefing claimants about the questions they will ask or even suggesting that others have corroborated their story. The reasoning is because these kinds of comments could increase a claimant’s confidence level and appearance of sincerity, which will make credibility and accuracy harder to detect.[13]
For future investigators, it is important to know that liars tend to omit information while truthtellers tend to volunteer more details in their testimonies. In fact, “escape responses,” where liars avoid or deny information, become more pronounced as they approach certain incriminating details in their story.[14] Investigators will eventually want to interview witnesses at least two or more times in order to identify any possible inconsistencies or contradictions in their narratives, in addition to obtaining further details or corrections to their previous statements.[15] In situations where there are two or more claimants, the investigator should implement the same interviewing processes for each person in order to detect inconsistencies and contradictions both with other claimants and with any empirical evidence obtained during the investigation.[16]
Once complete, investigators should then transcribe their initial interview and submit the transcript through the Criteria-Based Content Analysis (CBCA), which examines texts for the presence or absence of nineteen different content-related signals of truthtelling. Generally, reality-based statements are likely to contain more details and unusual phenomena than invented stories because fabrications derive mostly from a person’s stock experience comprised of generalized scripts and schemas. These measures are also the underlying criteria for the Statement Validity Assessment (SVA), a test that is admissible as evidence in some Western European and American court systems.[17]
Part of the criteria that analysts use to determine a testimony’s credibility are the following characteristics: the presence of a logical narrative structure, a sizable quantity of detail, contextual embeddings (e.g. portrayals of the environment), the spontaneous nature of narrative plotlines, descriptions of interactions, unusual and superfluous details, unexpected self-corrections or self-interruptions, and admitting a lack of memory about certain features. The more cues the CBCA and SVA detect, the more likely a claimant is telling the truth.[18]
Credible eyewitnesses should be able to provide details of the location, people, and activities involved in the incident, both before and after its occurrence, which the investigator can then attempt to verify. However, while greater detail is a positive indicator of truthtelling, the more inaccuracies an investigator discovers in the testimony, the less reliable an eyewitness will be with accurately interpreting the incident.[19] Likewise, according to “Reality Monitoring” (RM), there is a qualitative difference between memories of actual events and reports based on fabricated or imagined stories. RM has demonstrated that authentic memories contain more contextual and sensory details, fewer references to the person’s cognitive processes, and less eccentric or idiosyncratic information than false recollections.[20]
From this initial interview, investigators should be able to corroborate or falsify many of the claimant’s details, such as descriptions of the event’s location, the people involved, or anything else mentioned in the report. While researching these details, investigators should also note other descriptions of the environment or situation (not initially provided by the claimant) before conducting subsequent interviews. This process will allow interrogators to utilize a fact-finding technique known as the “Strategic Use of Evidence” (SUE), which exposes falsehoods and signs of deception. Here, SUE employs a calculated strategy of asking unexpected questions about facts an eyewitness should know but had not previously disclosed to the investigator. For example, investigators might retrieve video footage of the claimant at a certain place and time, which was not mentioned during the interview. Investigators can also examine the location of the incident and the people involved for other factual details not described by the claimant. During subsequent interviews, the investigator can unexpectedly ask open-ended questions about these details, giving claimants an opportunity to lie in the process of answering (unaware that the investigator already knows the facts). The same strategy can be employed regarding information acquired during the initial background check, as well. This type of strategic questioning allows investigators to discern if claimants actually have experiential knowledge of the incident and to expose inconsistencies in their narration of the event.[21] The point is to ask questions about details an investigator already knows or can verify later.
The SUE method builds upon the assumption that there are cognitive disparities between deceivers and those telling the truth (“cognitive load hypothesis”). To lie is more mentally taxing than being honest because it requires greater brain activity and detail retention than authentic recall.[22] Because liars will attempt to avoid incriminating details, investigators need to think of questions that could potentially discredit their testimony. The goal is to identify “statement-evidence (in)consistencies,” which reveal contradictions in a fabricated story. If a claimant is caught lying, the investigator can then ask further questions that would require claimants to construct plausible sounding denials, alter their story, or proffer ad hoc explanations, further revealing their deception.[23] Ideally, an interrogator should insist on a polygraph test or Voice Stress Analysis (VSA) to detect lying, though this is not always practical or permissible by the claimant. Indeed, there are known problems with using polygraph and VSA equipment and, therefore, should not be the sole basis for assessing someone’s credibility.[24]
It is important for investigators to be aware that minor inconsistencies in stories are not always an indication of untruthfulness, especially since discrepancies occur among actual witnesses during laboratory experiments.[25] Indeed, there exist four predominant reasons why eyewitnesses might report different details: 1) a person’s point of view; 2) amount of attention given to the event; 3) focusing on different details; and 4) overall interpretation. To assess whether a discrepancy is inconsequential or not, the investigator should determine if the eyewitness had an adequate vantage point at an appropriate distance, as well as if the discrepancy is a result of elemental variables, such lighting and duration of the event.[26]
Investigators should also seek to determine the witness’s attention span during the incident, as well as whether they focused too much or too little on certain details. Finally, investigators will need to evaluate whether these discrepancies are a result of misinterpreting the event due to preconceived expectations or biases.[27] Inconsistencies that are not easily explainable by these factors are likely to indicate more than just a superficial mistake of observation and can suggest a credibility problem with the claimant. Even more pertinent to a miracle claimant’s credibility, however, is the presence of an overactive imagination and fantasy proneness.
Overactive Imaginations
Especially important to the study of miracles is the fact that a statistically significant portion of the general population invent past experiences simply because they imagine an event occurring (“imagination inflation”). Indeed, people are almost twice as likely to report false autobiographical memories simply because they have imagined a fictitious, hypothetical event, which is later reported as a genuine occurrence.[28]
A similar issue involves people with “dissociation” problems, who are incapable of differentiating between actual memories and fantasies. While their everyday memories generally remain unblemished, dissociative people easily create false memories purely from their imaginative fancies. In fact, those who routinely fantasize in their daily life (“fantasy proneness”) often create fictional memories that possess the same type of salience and lucidity as authentic memories. This proneness is especially characteristic among those who frequently spend time imagining alternate realities, regularly hallucinate, and have intense religious, paranormal, or out-of-body experiences.[29]
While some studies suggest that reporting bizarre occurrences is actually a sign of credibility, these same unusual details could, in reality, be the result of imagination inflation, dissociation, and fantasy proneness. Thus, investigators (wherever possible) should account for this possibility by administering two specific tests in particular. The first is the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES), which assesses whether a person is prone to confusing their own fantasies with actual memories. The second is the Creative Experiences Questionnaire (CEQ), which evaluates whether a person is prone to over-imaginative fantasies.[30] Afterwards, once a claimant’s credibility is sufficiently established, investigators can then proceed to assess the person’s suitability as an eyewitness.
-To be Continued in Part III-
Citations
[1] James W. Osterburg and Richard H. Ward, Criminal Investigation: A Method for Reconstructing the Past, 5th ed. (Newark, NJ: Anderson Publishing, 2007), 12‒13. [2] Charles F. Bond Jr. and Bella M. DePaulo, “Accuracy of Deception Judgments,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 10, no. 3 (2006): 214‒34. See also, Köhnken, “Behavioral Correlates of Statement Credibility,” 280‒81. [3] Bella M. DePaulo et al., “The Accuracy-Confidence Correlation in the Detection of Deception,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 1, no. 4 (1997): 346‒57. [4] Surprisingly, Secret Service personnel, CIA agents, sheriff’s deputies, and police officers are unable to detect lies in one-quarter to one-third of low-stake situations (see Maria Hartwig, Pär Anders Granhag, and Timothy Luke, “Strategic Use of Evidence During Investigative Interviews: The State of Science,” in Credibility Assessment: Scientific Research and Applications, ed. David C. Raskin, Charles R. Honts, and John C. Kircher [San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 2014], 5‒6 and Memon, Vrij, and Bull, Psychology and Law, 9‒11, 26‒27). [5] Hartwig, Granhag, and Luke, “Strategic Use of Evidence,” 6; Memon, Vrij, and Bull, Psychology and Law, 30‒33. [6] Miron Zuckerman, Bella M. DePaulo, and Robert Rosenthal, “Verbal and Nonverbal Communication of Deception,” in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, ed. Leonard Berkowitz (New York: Academic Press, 1981), 14:1‒59. However, these studies are limited in their approach to lying, making the application or elimination of verbal and nonverbal cues inconclusive. For an overview of these studies, see Memon, Vrij, and Bull, Psychology and Law, 14‒20, 28‒36. Likewise, according to some research, cognitive overload due to deception may, in fact, cause the impairment of speech (see Günter Köhnken, “Speech and Deception of Eyewitnesses: An Information Processing Approach,” in Social/ecological Psychology and the Psychology of Women: Proceedings of the XXIII International Congress of Psychology of the International Union of Psychological Science, ed. Florence L. Denmark [Amsterdam, Netherlands: North-Holland, 1985], 7:117‒39). For potential verbal and nonverbal cues to deception, see Memon, Vrij, and Bull, Psychology and Law, 11‒18. [7] Interestingly, people are more likely to perceive stories with an excessive amount of bizarre details as less believable than stories with fewer peculiarities (see the research findings in Kristine A. Peace, Krista L. Brower, and Alexandra Rocchio, “Is Truth Stranger Than Fiction? Bizarre Details and Credibility Assessment,” Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology 30, no. 1 [March 2015]: 38‒49). [8] Hartwig, Granhag, and Luke, “Strategic Use of Evidence,” 14‒15.
[9] For example, Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (i.e. Mormons), had been arrested, tried, and convicted of being “an impostor” on March 20, 1826 for attempting to deceive people into believing he could locate buried gold by placing a dark seer stone inside of a hat. Four years later, in 1830, Joseph Smith published the Book of Mormon based on his supposed discovery of buried golden plates, though Smith would later say he had actually unearthed them on September 22, 1823, almost thirty months prior to his conviction (see Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith the Mormon Prophet, 2nd ed. [1945; repr., New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978], 16‒33, 427‒29). These facts alone should cast significant suspicion on Smith’s claim to have discovered buried golden plates, especially since the golden plates were never made public and have since been hidden away from further examination. [10] See Köhnken, “Behavioral Correlates of Statement Credibility,” 272‒75 and Bromby and Hall, “ADVOKATE,” 146. [11] Cf. Memon, Vrij, and Bull, Psychology and Law, 112‒13. [12] Elizabeth F. Loftus, Eyewitness Testimony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 27‒31. [13] Gary L. Wells, Tamara J. Ferguson, and R. C. L. Lindsay, “The Tractability of Eyewitness Confidence and Its Implications for Triers of Fact,” Journal of Applied Psychology 66, no. 6 (December 1981): 688‒96; C. A. Elizabeth Luus and Gary L. Wells, “The Malleability of Eyewitness Confidence: Co-Witness and Perseverance Effects,” Journal of Applied Psychology 79, no. 5 (October 1994): 714‒23; Laura Smalarz and Gary L. Wells, “Eyewitness Certainty as a System Variable,” in Reform of Eyewitness Identification Procedures, ed. Brian L. Cutler (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2013), 172; Memon, Vrij, and Bull, Psychology and Law, 111‒12. Attorneys with witnesses who are uncertain about their own testimonies are not likely to admit those witnesses as evidence into court cases (Smalarz and Wells, “Eyewitness Certainty,” 162). [14] Hartwig, Granhag, and Luke, “Strategic Use of Evidence,” 18‒21. [15] Memon, Vrij, and Bull, Psychology and Law, 111. [16] Cf. John C. Yuille and Judith Cutshall, “Analysis of the Statements of Victims, Witnesses and Suspects,” in Credibility Assessment, ed. John C. Yuille, vol. 47, Behavioural and Social Sciences, Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Study Institute on Credibility Assessment (Maratea, Italy, 1988) (New York: Springer, 1989), 189. [17] For details on the CBCA and SVA, including its procedures and research findings, see Aldert Vrij, Detecting Lies and Deceit: The Psychology of Lying and the Implications for Professional Practice, Wiley Series in the Psychology of Crime, Policing and Law (2000; repr., New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2001), 113‒56 and Max Steller and Günter Köhnken, “Criteria-Based Content Analysis,” in Psychological Methods in Criminal Investigation and Evidence, ed. David C. Raskin (New York: Springer Publishing Company, 1989), 217‒45. [18] Content-related signs of deception, on the other hand, are often more incoherent and inconsistent, less detailed (especially regarding interactions, quotes of interactions, and unusual details), and less precise about chronological and spatial particulars (“contextual embeddings”). However, there is no single set of reliable cues to expose deception. These particular verbal cues are merely less likely to occur in deceptive testimonies. See Memon, Vrij, and Bull, Psychology and Law, 14, 19‒20; Köhnken, “Behavioral Correlates of Statement Credibility,” 273, 275‒76; Peace, Brower, and Rocchio, “Is Truth Stranger Than Fiction,” 38‒39; and Yuille and Cutshall, “Analysis of the Statements,” 186‒88. [19] Cf. Yuille and Cutshall, “Analysis of the Statements,” 188. [20] Marcia K. Johnson and Carol L. Raye, “Reality Monitoring,” Psychological Review 80, no. 1 (January 1981): 67‒85; Marcia K. Johnson, Shahin Hashtroudi, and D. Stephen Lindsay, “Source Monitoring,” Psychological Bulletin 114, no. 1 (July 1993): 3‒28. [21] See Hartwig, Granhag, and Luke, “Strategic Use of Evidence,” 1‒10. [22] Cf. Antonio L. Manzanero et al., “Evaluación de la credibilidad de relatos de personas con discapacidad intelectual,” Anales de Psicología 31, no. 1 (January 2015): 338 and Köhnken, “Behavioral Correlates of Statement Credibility,” 275. [23] Hartwig, Granhag, and Luke, “Strategic Use of Evidence,” 16‒21. [24] See for example, Frank Horvath, “Detecting Deception: The Promise and the Reality of Voice Stress Analysis,” Journal of Forensic Sciences 27, no. 2 (1982): 340‒51; David C. Raskin, “Polygraph Techniques for the Detection of Deception,” in Psychological Methods in Criminal Investigation and Evidence, ed. David C. Raskin (New York: Springer, 1989), 247‒96; and Charles R. Honts, David C. Raskin, and John C. Kircher, “Mental and Physical Countermeasures Reduce the Accuracy of Polygraph Tests,” Journal of Applied Psychology 79, no. 2 (1994): 252‒59. [25] Ronald P. Fisher and Brian L. Cutler, “The Relation between Consistency and Accuracy of Eyewitness Testimony,” in Psychology, Law, and Criminal Justice: International Developments in Research and Practice, ed. Graham Davies et al. (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1996), 21‒28; Eric E. Jones, Phillip G. Palmer Jr., and Abby D. Bandy, “The Effect of Inconsistency on Evaluations of a Second Eyewitness: It Depends On Who Testifies First,” Psychiatry, Psychology and Law 20, no. 6 (2015): 815. Researchers also need to be aware that in scenarios where there are two or more available witnesses, the testimony of the first witness will affect how the interviewer views the consistency and credibility of subsequent witnesses (Jones, Palmer, and Bandy, “The Effect of Inconsistency on Evaluations,” 814‒29). [26] Interestingly, people tend to overestimate the length of events, especially when under stress (Irwin G. Sarason and Rick Stoops, “Test Anxiety and the Passage of Time,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 46, no. 1 [February 1978]: 102‒9). [27] Cf. Steven B. Duke, Ann Seung-Eun Lee, and Chet K. W. Pager, “A Picture’s Worth a Thousand Words: Conversational Versus Eyewitness Testimony in Criminal Convictions,” American Criminal Law Review 44, no. 1 (2007): 26‒30. [28] See Maryanne Garry and Devon L. L. Polascheck, “Imagination and Memory,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 9, no. 1 (February 2000): 6‒10; Giuliana Mazzoni and Amina Memon, “Imagination Can Create False Autobiographical Memories,” Psychological Science 14, no. 2 (March 2003): 186‒88; and Giuliana A. L. Mazzoni, Elizabeth F. Loftus, and Irving Kirsch, “Changing Beliefs about Implausible Autobiographical Events: A Little Plausibility Goes a Long Way,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 7, no. 1 (March 2001): 51‒59. [29] Memon, Vrij, and Bull, Psychology and Law, 142. On fantasy proneness, see Peter Hough and Paul Rogers, “Individuals Who Report being Abducted by Aliens: Investigating the Differences in Fantasy Proneness, Emotional Intelligence and the Big Five Personality Factors,” Imagination, Cognition and Personality 27, no. 2 (2007‒2008): 139‒61; Harald Merckelbach, “Telling a Good Story: Fantasy Proneness and the Quality of Fabricated Memories,” Personality and Individual Differences 37, no. 7 (November 2004): 1371‒82; and André Aleman and Edward H. F. de Haan, “Fantasy Proneness, Mental Imagery and Reality Monitoring,” Personality and Individual Differences 36, no. 8 (June 2004): 1747‒54. [30] Peace, Brower, and Rocchio, “Is Truth Stranger Than Fiction?,” 43‒44. For details on the DES, see Eve M. Bernstein and Frank W. Putnam, “Development, Reliability, and Validity of a Dissociation Scale,” The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 174, no. 12 (December 1986): 727‒35. For the CEQ, see Harald Merckelbach, Robert Horselenberg, and Peter Muris, “The Creative Experiences Questionnaire (CEQ): A Brief Self-Report Measure of Fantasy Proneness,” Personality and Individual Differences 31, no. 6 (October 2001): 987‒95.
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