Presented at the 18th Conference of the European Association for Psychology and Law, July 2–5, 2008, in Maastricht, The Netherlands, and the 21st Annual Meeting of the Association for Psychological Science, May 22–25, 2009, in San Franscisco, CA.
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Extracting Concealed Information from Groups†
Article first published online: 2 NOV 2010
DOI: 10.1111/j.1556-4029.2010.01474.x
© 2010 American Academy of Forensic Sciences
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How to Cite
Meijer, E. H., Smulders, F. T. and Merckelbach, H. L. (2010), Extracting Concealed Information from Groups. Journal of Forensic Sciences, 55: 1607–1609. doi: 10.1111/j.1556-4029.2010.01474.x
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Publication History
- Issue published online: 2 NOV 2010
- Article first published online: 2 NOV 2010
- Received 6 May 2009; and in revised form 10 Aug. 2009; accepted 5 Sept. 2009.
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Keywords:
- forensic science;
- terrorism;
- lie detection;
- polygraph;
- concealed information test;
- CIT;
- Guilty Knowledge Test;
- network analysis
Abstract: Lie detection procedures are typically aimed at determining guilt or innocence of a single suspect. Serious security threats, however, often involve groups, such as terrorist networks or criminal organizations. In this report, we describe a variant of the skin conductance-based Concealed Information Test (CIT) that allows for the extraction of critical information from such groups. Twelve participants were given information about an upcoming (mock) terrorist attack, with specific instructions not to reveal this information to anyone. Next, each subject was subjected to a CIT, with questions pertaining to the details of the attack. Results showed that for every question, the average skin conductance response to the correct answer option differed significantly (p < 0.05) from those to all other options. These results show that the information about the upcoming attack could be extracted from the group of terror suspects as a whole.