Personality Differences in Deception Detection

Although a consensus has been reached that humans are no better than average in regards to deception detection, researchers continue to investigate individual differences in deception detection (Aamodt & Custer, 2006). The Big Five model is a widely used personality taxonomy often used to investigate personality differences in deception detection ability (John & Srivastava, 1999). Enos et al. (2006) concluded that there was a correlation between deception detection and openness to experience, agreeableness, and extraversion, respectively. This current study predicted that high levels of openness to experience, agreeableness, and extraversion will correlate with accuracy in a video clip deception detection task. There were 160 undergraduate students who participated in this study. Almost 90% of participants were in the 18-22 age range. The Big Five personality trait openness to experience had a significant correlation to overall accuracy on a video clip deception detection task. None of the other personality traits had significant correlations to accuracy. Although the results of this particular study were not entirely conclusive, the identification of personality differences in deception detection ability could be very useful for careers that rely on deception detection, such as corrections and law enforcement. Future research may want to consider different types of deception detection tasks, as well as different measures of personality. One limitation of this study is that it only focused on college students. It would be beneficial for future research to investigate personality differences in deception detection ability in different populations, especially those whose careers rely on veracity judgments