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‘Look This Way’: Using Gaze Maintenance to Facilitate the Detection of Children's False Reports
Author(s) -
Lawrence Hannah,
Akehurst Lucy,
Leach AmyMay,
Cherryman Julie,
Vrij Aldert,
Arathoon Megan,
Vernham Zarah
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
applied cognitive psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.719
H-Index - 100
eISSN - 1099-0720
pISSN - 0888-4080
DOI - 10.1002/acp.3303
Subject(s) - gaze , psychology , lie detection , credibility , interview , task (project management) , deception , social psychology , developmental psychology , cognitive psychology , management , political science , psychoanalysis , law , economics
Summary In two experiments, we investigated whether imposing a secondary task is an effective technique for detecting child deceit. First, 85 children aged 8 to 11 years old provided either a true or false report of a recent school event. At interview, some children were asked to gaze towards either the interviewer's face (IF) or a teddy bear's face (TF), whereas some children were given no gaze instruction. In both the IF and TF conditions, lie‐tellers provided significantly fewer details than truth‐tellers. A total of 192 adult evaluators then judged the credibility of 10 children's reports from one of the three ‘gaze’ conditions with and without guidance on level of detail. Evaluators discriminated truths from lies successfully when judging children instructed to look at IF, but not when children were asked to gaze towards TF. Evaluators who received guidance demonstrated better discrimination between true and false reports than evaluators who received no such information. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.