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Being accurate about accuracy in verbal deception detection

Kleinberg, B; Arntz, A; Verschuere, B; (2019) Being accurate about accuracy in verbal deception detection. PLoS One , 14 (8) , Article e0220228. 10.1371/journal.pone.0220228. Green open access

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Abstract

PURPOSE: Verbal credibility assessments examine language differences to tell truthful from deceptive statements (e.g., of allegations of child sexual abuse). The dominant approach in psycholegal deception research to date (used in 81% of recent studies that report on accuracy) to estimate the accuracy of a method is to find the optimal statistical separation between lies and truths in a single dataset. However, this method lacks safeguards against accuracy overestimation. METHOD & RESULTS: A simulation study and empirical data show that this procedure produces overoptimistic accuracy rates that, especially for small sample size studies typical of this field, yield misleading conclusions up to the point that a non-diagnostic tool can be shown to be a valid one. Cross-validation is an easy remedy to this problem. CONCLUSIONS: We caution psycholegal researchers to be more accurate about accuracy and propose guidelines for calculating and reporting accuracy rates.

Type: Article
Title: Being accurate about accuracy in verbal deception detection
Location: United States
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0220228
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0220228
Language: English
Additional information: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Security and Crime Science
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10080124
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