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Dull versus creative liars—Who deceives better? Fantasy proneness and verifiability of genuine and fabricated accounts
Author(s) -
Boskovic Irena,
Ramakers Ayla,
Emre Akca Ali Yunus
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of investigative psychology and offender profiling
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.479
H-Index - 22
eISSN - 1544-4767
pISSN - 1544-4759
DOI - 10.1002/jip.1565
Subject(s) - fantasy , verifiable secret sharing , psychology , deception , lie detection , social psychology , computer science , artificial intelligence , set (abstract data type) , programming language
The Verifiability Approach (VA), a lie detection method, postulates that genuine statements contain more verifiable information, whereas fabricated reports include more non‐verifiable details. We investigated whether participants low ( n = 19), medium ( n = 23) and high ( n = 26) on fantasy proneness differ in the (non)verifiability of their genuine and fabricated accounts. The results showed that groups did not differ in terms of statements' (non)verifiability. Overall, fabricated accounts included more non‐verifiable details, but did not differ in verifiable details from genuine stories. The fabricated accounts from each group were given to legal psychology experts ( N = 13) who rated accounts' authenticity. Experts more often recognised false accounts from the high fantasy proneness group, hence, high fantasy prone deceivers might be easier to detect than people with lower fantasy engagement. Overall, our results show that the VA is not sensitive to fantasy proneness, however, that experts might be.