Persistent rent extraction

Representative democracy does not necessarily eliminate political corruption. Existing models explain the survival of rent-taking politicians by ideological divisions in the electorate and/or informational asymmetries. The current paper demonstrate that rent extraction can persist even if voters are fully informed and ideologically homogenous. We show that in such an environment, voters may gain by persistently reelecting a rent-taker that limits his rent extraction. Such an equilibrium occurs when voters and politicians do not discount the future too heavily, and the share of honest candidates is relatively small.     

Deception among pairs: “Let's say we had lunch and hope they will swallow it!”

Deception research has neglected the fact that legal-workers often have to try to detect deceit on the basis of statements derived from pairs of suspects, each having been interrogated repeatedly. To remedy this shortcoming we conducted a study where each member of 10 truth-telling pairs and 10 lying pairs was interrogated twice about an alibi. One hundred and twenty undergraduate students were enrolled as lie-catchers. The main findings were that (a) overall deception detection accuracy was modest; (b) lie-catchers given access to a large number of statements did not outperform lie-catchers given access to a lesser number of statements; (c) when asked to justify their veracity assessments the most frequently reported cue was ‘consistency within pairs of suspects’; (d) all cues to deception were of low diagnostic value. Psycho-legal aspects of integrating sequential information in deception detection contexts are discussed.     

Effects of preconceptions on deception detection and new answers to why lie-catchers often fail

Abstract

This study investigated the extent to which crediting and discrediting background information, given to observers before they watched three video-taped interviews with the same witness, affected their veracity judgments. Our analyses show that the observers' distribution of truth/lie-judgments were more affected by crediting than discrediting background information. We also mapped the subjective cues given to justify the truth/lie-judgments, and found that the most frequently used cue was whether or not the three statements were consistent over time. In addition, our analysis revealed two types of inter-observer disagreements. One type referred to how different cues were perceived (e.g., forty observers perceived the three statements as being inconsistent over time while an equal number perceived the same three statements as being consistent over time). The second type referred to how different cues were used (e.g., the fact that the witness was perceived as not being confident in his testimony worked against him equally as often as it worked for him).     

A “weapon focus” effect in children

In this paper we examined beliefs about deception held by legal professionals. Three groups of presumed expert lie-catchers were investigated: police officers ( n =104), prosecutors ( n =158), and judges ( n =251). The experts' beliefs about deception were remarkably inconsistent with the general pattern resulting from studies mapping actual cues to deception. For example, a majority of police officers believed there is a strong relationship between (a) deceptive behaviour and gaze aversion and (b) deceptive behaviour and an increase in body movements. The scientific literature does not support this view. Furthermore, all three professional groups believed that truthful consecutive statements are more consistent than deceptive, and that it is easier to detect deception in interactive than non-interactive contexts. Research on deception shows the opposite. For five of the seven investigated items we found significant between-group differences. Both the genesis and the implications of these differences are discussed. Judging from self-ratings, the presumed experts admitted knowing close to nothing about scientific research on deception.