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23 Cardozo L. Rev. 809 (2001-2002)
Human Judges of Truth, Deception, and Credibility: Confident but Erroneous

handle is hein.journals/cdozo23 and id is 831 raw text is: HUMAN JUDGES OF TRUTH, DECEPTION, AND CREDIBILITY: CONFIDENT BUT ERRONEOUS* Saul M. Kassin** I want to talk about the notion that people are good judges of truth and deception-that we are, in fact, human lie detectors. This is a particularly enlightened group, so I've heard a lot of cautionary statements to that effect this morning that you ordinarily don't hear from people. What I want to do is talk about some psychology research data. Specifically, I want to use Ellen Yaroshefsky's Fordham Law Review Article and her finding as a starting point. Her finding-and I'll pull out the quote-is that many prosecutors believe that evaluating credibility is a matter of common sense.2 Well, I want to attack that notion in two ways. First, I want to ask the question, what exactly is common sense-and does it work? Social psychologists have been asking these empirical questions for years. Dozens of studies have been conducted and statistically analyzed. When the studies are combined, a compelling pattern emerges-that, as a general rule, people are poor human lie detectors.3 How do we know? * This transcript is an edited version of a presentation given by Professor Kassin at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law Symposium, The Cooperating Witness Conundrum: Is Justice Obtainable? (Nov. 30, 2000). ** Saul M. Kassin is Professor of Psychology at Williams College. He received his Ph.D. in 1978 from the University of Connecticut. In 1984, he was awarded a U.S. Supreme Court Judicial Fellowship and spent the year at the Federal Judicial Center. In 1985 he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Psychology and Law Program at Stanford University. Dr. Kassin is author of the textbooks PSYCHOLOGY (3d ed., Prentice Hall 2001) and SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY (5th ed., Houghton Mifflin 2002), and has coauthored several scholarly books, including: CONFESSIONS IN THE COURTROOM (1993), THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EVIDENCE AND TRIAL PROCEDURE (1985), and THE AMERICAN JURY ON TRIAL: PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES (1988). Dr. Kassin has published research articles on interviewing, interrogation, and the elicitation of confessions by police--and on the impact of this and other types of evidence on jury decision-making. He has served on the editorial board of Law and Human Behavior since 1986 and has worked as a consultant and expert witness in federal, military, and state courts. I Ellen Yaroshefsky, Cooperation with Federal Prosecutors: Experiences of Truth Telling and Embellishment, 68 FORDHAM L. REV. 917 (1999). 2 Id. at 943. 3 Bella M. DePaulo et al., The Accuracy-Confidence Correlation in the Detection of Deception, 1 PERSONALITY & SOC. PSYCHOL. REV. 346 (1997).

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