The article entitled “He’s Guilty: Investigator Bias in Judgments of Truth and Deception” by Christian Meissner and Saul Kassin’s aims at establishing the effect of “investigator bias” in influencing investigation outcomes. The research question posed by the article is “do cognitive and behavioral biases ascertain investigator’s performance in making judgments of truth and Deception?” The article adopts unique methodology through incorporating forty-four participants from North American law enforcement (Meissner & Kassin, 2002). It also incorporates the discussions covering research from related articles, review of the literature and resource materials for conducting videotaped interview. The methodology procedure was through random sample/respondents collection whereby, they were grouped in fours, others being innocent while other being guilty respondents. The investigators used the scale from one to ten to rate the level of confidence exhibited by the respondents. Then, based on the respondents’ performance, it was to be compared with that of the investigators who were police.
The results findings were coded into tables indicated as 1 & 2 for analysis purposes with table 1 representing respondents’ performance against the police’s table 2. With the use of ANOVA variance, results were comparable to previous studies. The accuracy did not significantly differ as a post of F(2, 81) = 1.54, ns, η2 = .03 and F(2, 81) = 11.50, p < .001, η2 = .22 reflected simultaneously on the two tables. Similar findings were evident when the analysis was done through signal detection and correlation analyses. Although the study incorporated unique methodology, the reliability of data is something of doubt since videotaping is associated with a lot of gaps. I feel that the methodology and analysis was not appropriate and adequate to test the hypothesis. I did not characteristically like their research. Instead, the researchers could have adopted the qualitative analysis as it is significant in giving reliable data analysis. With their methodology, does the correlation between respondents’ performance realistically conforms to that of the police investigators?
References
Meissner, A. C., & Kassin, S. M. (2002). "He's Guilty!": Investigator Bias in Judgments of Truth and Deception". Law and Human behaviour, 26(5).
