1b) Discuss the problems of conducting research into the detection of lies (15)
When conducting research into detecting lies, researchers could potentially face many problems. These could be ethical or practical.
The study by Mann attempted to find out about the police’s ability to detect liars. They studied this as we cannot know for sure if the police are good at identifying liars as the public are not allowed to observe recordings of interviews as a suspect is always innocent until proven guilty. The aim of this research was to test police officers ability to distinguish truth and lies during interviews with suspects.
Her research was made up of 99 police officers from Kent. This alone is a practical problem as it means the sample is geographically limited to only one area and means the sample can only be representative of this area or other police forces. Perhaps the MET or the FBI have different methods of detecting lies and are either better or worse than much larger forces. A problem in conducting research with this sample was that there wasn’t a control group of non-police officers to test the hypothesis of this study; therefore it was not proved that police officers were better at detecting lies. This research was a field experiment meaning that the ethical guidelines may be challenged as Mann would have had to have gained the full permission of the participants before conducting the study.
In this study, Police officers were shown 54 video clips of 14 suspects of real life police interviews. The clips were of head to torso range of the individual and they were first asked if the suspect was ‘telling truth or lie?’ They were then asked ‘what cues helped you reach your decision?’ Despite this being a short procedure, it enabled Mann to find out how police detect lies in suspects and the methods they use to do it. In terms of ethics, police officers may