Ricerc@Sapienza

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.