Investigative Interviewing Research: Ideas and Methodological Suggestions for New Research Perspectives

Research studies concerning investigative interviewing and lie detection have seen a steep rise in recent years. Detecting lying is a human ambition and an interesting research question. Yet, people often hold wrong stereotypes about how to detect lies (The Global Deception Research Team, 2006), which makes paramount sound research studies. Two examples are the use of non-verbal communication and microexpressions as a means for lie detection. Neither of the two showed to be a reliable approach to detect lies (DePaulo et al., 2003; Burgoon, 2018; Jordan et al., 2019), and both have been criticised as ineffective (for two recent overviews, see Vrij et al., 2019; Brennen and Magnussen, 2020). Recent research studies prioritise verbal content (Masip et al., 2005), which appears to be a better tool for credibility assessment (Vrij, 2015; Amado et al., 2016) and on developing interviewing approaches that aim at enhancing the differences between truth tellers and liars (Vrij and Granhag, 2012, 2014). Yet, we are far from being able to accurately and reliably discriminate truth tellers from liars. The reasons can be traced back to several issues.