The devil is in the detail: deception and consistency over repeated interviews

ABSTRACT

Research indicates that truthful statements typically contain more details than fabricated statements, and that truth tellers are no more consistent than liars over multiple interviews. In this experiment, we examine the impact of (i) multiple interviewers and (ii) reverse order recall on liars’ and truth tellers’ consistency and amount of reported detail over repeated recall attempts. Participants either took part in a mock crime (lying condition) or an innocent event (truth telling condition) which they were subsequently interviewed about in two separate interview phases. Truth tellers provided more details overall, and more reminiscent details than liars. There were no differences between veracity groups for the number of omissions made or repetitions reported. Despite the popular belief that inconsistency is a cue to deception, we found little support for the notion that consistency (or lack of consistency) offers a diagnostic cue to deception. We found little evidence that switching interviewer or recalling in reverse order induced inconsistencies in liars. In fact, due to the number of reminiscent details in truth tellers’ accounts, our findings suggest that accounts provided by liars tend to be slightly more consistent than those provided by truth tellers. Materials for this paper can be found at osf.io/hgvmk/.     

NATO Regional peacekeeping center in Central and Eastern Europe: A proposal

Abstract

The article asks what the evolution of NATO–Swedish relations signifies for the understanding of the evolution of security communities. Given the astonishing evolution of NATO and Sweden as a community of practise, it is logical to imagine the two as forming part of the same security community. It could then be argued that common practise can bring about new security communities rather hastily. Analysing NATO's and Sweden's recent discourses on security, the author identifies a significant gap between a principally realist and a predominantly idealist discourse that indicates that the two parties do not share key characteristics of a security community – identities, values and meanings. However, if Libya is the case of the future, the discursive differences may fade and Sweden could more easily pursue its journey towards inclusion in NATO, not as a member of an Alliance, but as a member of NATO as a security community.     

Deliberative Qualities of Generic News Frames: Assessing the Democratic Value of Strategic Game and Contestation Framing in Election Campaign Coverage

News frames are patterns of news construction journalists rely on to present information to their audiences. While much of the research on news frames has focused on their identification and effects, less work has investigated the specific contributions these different frames make to democratic life. Value judgments about distinct news frames are often not generated in a systematic fashion, not grounded in democratic theory, and/or not supported by empirical evidence. In this article, we address these problems by arguing for and extending normative assessment as a standard operating procedure to determine the democratic value of political communication phenomena. We demonstrate the usefulness of normative assessment by showing how two important generic news frames (politics as a strategic game and as a substantive contestation) contribute to a deliberative public discourse prior to a general election. Using data on television news coverage of the German federal election campaign in 2009, we investigate how these frames are related to the inclusiveness and civility of public discourse and the extent to which it features exchanges of substantive reasons for political positions. Results show that mediated democratic deliberation suffers consistently from strategic game framing, while contestation frames make ambivalent contributions. Implications for political communication scholarship as well as journalistic practice are discussed.

[Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resource(s): coding protocol used in content analysis.]     

Performance Measurement in State Budgeting: Advancement and Backsliding from 1990 to 1995

Performance measurement has been one of the dominant themes of budget reform in the 1990s and has been prevalent in the mainstream of budgeting since the 1950s. Given the attention that performance measurement has had nationally, states might be expected to have made major strides in this arena in recent years. The article considers the current status of performance measurement practices, and identifies both advancement and backsliding made by states between 1990 and 1995. The discussion is based on data obtained from surveys of state budget offices in those two years. Indexes of performance measurement were constructed, and these became the bases of regression analyses using independent variables pertaining to state characteristics. Generally, these analyses were unsuccessful in explaining the variations among the states. The findings underscore the diversity among the states in their budgetary practices and the fact that budget reform, in the sense of increased use of performance measurement, is not necessarily achieved in a straight line of progression. The article considers possible explanations for the changes.