Does being emotionally intelligent and empathic predict deception detection accuracy?

ABSTRACT

Research into individual differences in deception detection and judgment brought into question the existence of a good liar-catcher. The current study aimed to investigate the role of trait empathy and emotional intelligence (EI) ability in detecting unemotional lies. One hundred and fifty volunteers were given the Interpersonal Reactivity Index and the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test, then they watched a sequence of 14 interviews concerning truthful vs. deceptive holidays. For each videotaped interview, detection accuracy, detection confidence, and detection criteria were assessed. Results confirmed the chance-like ability to detect deception. The empathic trait of perspective-taking and the EI ability to perceive emotions predicted detection accuracy, albeit with a modest effect. Receivers’ judgment accuracy was principally determined by the sender to be evaluated, confirming that detection accuracy is mainly explained by the sender, rather than the receiver's characteristics. Confidence appeared unrelated to detection accuracy.

KEYWORDS:

• Deception detection
• lie-truth detection
• detection accuracy
• emotional intelligence
• empathy

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the help of Sabrina Guaragno, Daniela Morelli, Dalila Piccolomini, Davide Schingaro, and Giuseppina Somma for their collaboration in collecting the data and scoring the protocols.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Authors contributions

TL conceived the study and was responsible for data collection. TJL and TL analyzed the data. TL, TJL, and RMR wrote the manuscript. AC critically revised the manuscript. TL, AC, and CM critically revised the manuscript. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

Data availability statement

Data and supplementary material are available on the Open Science Framework (OSF): https://osf.io/a2mvy/.

Notes

1 The videotapes used for the current study have been selected from the pool of twenty videotapes adopted in Curci et al. (2019). Each videotape lasts 2 min and 5 s, along with the average time each participant spent answering video-related questions (detection, detection confidence, and detection criteria), for a total duration of the session of about 40–50 min for each participant. In the current study, participants were also asked to fill in two self-report measures and MSCEIT usually requires at least 45 min to be completed. So, to avoid the effect of tiredness or distraction caused by the length of the total procedure, we have decided to select 14 videotapes of the 20 (7 per liar vs. truth-teller condition). The choice of the 7 videotapes per condition has been based on the following criteria: (i) selecting videotapes with the lowest % detection accuracy by participants; (ii) balancing videotapes for interviewee’s gender (7 women and 7 men); (iii) in case of equal % of detection accuracy, we proceeded to select videotapes with highest detection confidence scores. For details on the selection, see the supplemental Table S.1 (https://osf.io/a2mvy/).

Stimuli are available upon request.