Some professionals, such as intelligence officer, could be expected to be good lie detectors, mainly because some decisions about truthfulness can be a regular activity and errors can lead to tremendous consequences.
Ekman and O’Sullivan (1991) reported that Secret Service agents were good at detecting lies. In a 1999 Psychological Science piece ‘A few can catch a liar’, Ekman, O’Sullivan, and Frank reported that certain federal officers were even better.
This research seeks to compare the deception detection abilities of eight Intelligence Officers from the Federal Penitentiary System in Brazil – half of whom have had training in Six Channel Analysis in Real-time (SCAn-R).
The participants did a test about their abilities for lie detection in three videos of real interviews cases.
They answered through a questionnaire whether the person in the video was lying or telling the truth (1), on what they have based their judgement (2), what they would want to ask the person in order to corroborate their decision (3), and by the end of the activity they indicated, in a Likert scale, the level of confidence on the task overall.
Analyzing the data, the target group had more detailed responses and use more effective the methodology of SCAnR, which may suggest that the SCAnR training can improve some professionals’ abilities mainly to analyze the communications and do probes.
