Perjury and deceptive judgments: How the timing and modality of witness deception affects jurors' deceptive judgments

Abstract

Social perceivers either viewed a videotape or read a transcript of a witness's testimony. The witness encoded four messages, three truthful and one deceptive. In one condition the witness encoded the deceptive message before the truthful messages, whereas in the other condition the truthful messages were encoded before the deceptive message. The witness then was asked a critical “alibi” question regarding his/her activities with the defendant when the alleged crime occurred. The alleged crime in the trial was either mild (breaking a VCR) or severe (killing a neighbor's dog). Based on Reeder's (Reeder & Brewer, 1979) implicational model of dispositional attributions, it was hypothesized that social perceivers playing the role of jurors would rate the witness more deceptive when he/she told the truth before lying than if he/she lied before telling the truth. In addition, it was hypothesized that due to the effect of modalities on information processing, social perceivers who read the testimony would make stronger deceptive attributions when the crime was mild whereas social perceivers who viewed the videotape would make stronger deceptive attributions if the crime was severe. Results confirmed both hypotheses. The implications of the findings and future directions for research are discussed.