This is the first wave of a larger project aimed at improving falsehood detection in witness reports, and increase the predicting power of measures of vulnerability to social misinformation. Eyewitness testimony often is the main evidence in investigations and court trials. Assessing its veridicality is of paramount importance for the justice system. Many methods have been proposed to this aim, from physiological measures of deception, to content analysis of witnesses global verbal reports, to cognitive and brain imaging methods. Unfortunately, none of these methods has so far reached a satisfying level in measuring report veridicality or discriminate true from false statements.
The attempts to identify individuals with cognitive and personality characteristics that make them vulnerable to social influence (e.g. suggestions), social pressure and misinformation, often present in investigations, have so far also produced overall unsatisfactory results. It is known that these variables can negatively affect report veridicality.
Surprisingly, these measures have never been systematically compared to each other within the same individuals. Thus, no information is available on the degree of overlap of the variables measured. Obtaining such information is the first aim of the current project. Individual difference measures (personality and suggestibility scales, cognitive tasks), as well as indicators of statement veridicality (verbal and non-verbal), will be administered to the same pool of participants in order to assess for the first time their degree of convergence in predicting proneness to social influence, and in identifying false statements. The second and main aim of the proposal is to create, based on these first results, an easily-manageable integrated tool with sizeably improved predicting and detecting power of report veridicality, when compared to each individual measure. This new tool will be tested in real investigative cases across Italy and Europe.
No previous work exists in the literature that compares and integrates in the same participants various existing methods that assess the veridicality of witness reports. The novelty of this project is the fact that it addresses this major gap and will provide answers to a concrete and strongly felt need, i.e. the improvement of our understanding of the veridicality of witness reports, which are expressed not only by forensic scientists but also by law enforcement agencies and the courts. The innovation of this proposal resides in its outcome, i.e. the concrete possibility of achieving a sizeable increase in the accuracy of the assessment of witness reports. This long-standing goal of both law enforcement agencies and researchers in forensic psychology has not yet been achieved to a satisfying degree.
As already stated, many tools already exist but none achieves, alone, an adequate level of accuracy in the detection of report veridicality. What is proposed in this project is something which surprisingly has never been done before, i.e. combining the best components of a number of the existing tools, including on one hand a) tools that aim at identifying the truth of whole reports using content analysis of discourse (CBCA), b) tools that use content analysis of potential discrepancies across several reports (reverse recall), c) tools that aim at identifying the truth of single statements using response times (aIAT). On the other hand, it will also include tools that measure individual characteristics than can make people vulnerable to errors in reporting information (personality, cognitive and suggestibility tests); the measure of some basic physiological functions; and finally elements of non-verbal behaviour displayed by the witness while reporting the information (more classical non-verbal indicators, and a new tool measuring keyboard dynamics detectable when typing.) If additional funding will become available, these data will be integrated with electrophysiological (EEG/ERPs; electroencephalograph/Event Related Potentials) and possibly brain imaging (fMRI- functional magnetic resonance) techniques.
This information, when correctly and smoothly integrated, will provide a substantially improved instrument that will increase the assessment of the veridicality of witness reports. A secondary novel outcome of this project is to provide information about the actual variables that the various measures assess, and their potential conceptual overlap.
The new tool will be tested by law enforcement agencies in Italy first, and in the UK and The Netherlands afterwards, with the possibility of testing it also in other European countries (Sweden and Germany).
The new integrated instrument might become the best practice in the assessment of truthfulness and falsehood in witness statements, and used as a default measure by law enforcement agencies and courts across Europe to assess the veridicality of witness reports. It can also be extended for the assessment of victims' and defendants' reports.