Vrij Aldert
Vrij, Aldert
Attitude change
Attitude change. This can refer to attempts to change the ATTITUDES of others, or understanding how people's attitudes change with changing experiences.
Deception
Deception. Psychologists have studied how a person's non-verbal behaviour can betray the fact that they are engaged in deceiving the person they are talking to. The human capacity for deception has been taken up by evolutionary psychologists, as part of our recent evolutionary development relates to the human capacity for interpersonal communication and the ability to 'read' the views and intentions of other people. The capacity to deceive implies an ability to overcome this faculty.
Prejudice
Prejudice/ Racism. The word 'prejudice' basically means to 'pre-judge', and in this sense always refers to some kind of negative preconception held against a particular social grouping or person. The grouping may be based on religion, social class, geography, or many other factors. When the prejudice is based on 'race', it is termed racism. The concept of 'race' does not have any sound biological basis, and it must therefore be understood as a social category that is used to identify self and others. Many psychologists, from a variety of perspectives, have done research on prejudice and racism. Pre-judging, in a less negative sense, is an inevitable part of categorization in the course of everyday life. We tend to categorize stimuli and experiences on the basis of our pre-existing schemas. A schema is a mental structure containing knowledge relating to a particular kind of object. Schemas lead to schematic processing which is usually an efficient way of processing information based on pre-existing schemas. But schemas can also limit and sometimes distort what we perceive. Schematic processing leads to overgeneralizations which, in some social, cultural and personality contexts, can lead to prejudice.
I am an associate editor of Legal and Criminological Psychology.
The other side of the coin might be that liars, when aware of the cues that lie detectors may be looking for, try to adjust their behaviour and speech content in such a way that they avoid showing these cues.
The consequences are often greater in real life situations than in laboratory studies, particularly in situations such as police interviews (where the positive and negative consequences of the lie are typically more severe). We therefore started to examine how liars behave in police interviews. This work is still in progress. If adults show signs of impression management when they lie (and we believe they do), how do young children behave? At what age do these signs start to occur? Our current work addresses this issue.
I was born in Rijswijk (the Netherlands) in 1960 and am a Professor of Applied Social Psychology at the University of Portsmouth (United Kingdom). My move to England in 1994 was motivated by better opportunities to conduct research.
These studies convincingly demonstrated that liars do not typically behave the way Caucasian observers expect them to behave.
This experimental research project revealed that Caucasian (Dutch) and non Caucasian people (Indonesians from Surinam) exhibit different behaviours in (simulated) police interviews.
This faulty interpretation of their behaviour (seen as suspicious instead of natural) might be a contributory factor to the increased likelihood for non Caucasian people to be arrested.
Written by: Aldert Vrij
That is, gaze aversion, stuttering and fidgeting are not reliable indicators of deception. Instead, liars tend to decrease their movements.
At present, we are investigating this aspect.
Having investigated which behaviours make a suspicious impression on Caucasian observers, the next question to address was how liars really behave.
For example, compared to Caucasian participants, non Caucasian participants showed more gaze aversio n, made more stutters and fidgeted more.
Sponsors of my research include the Dutch Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), the Economic a nd Social Research Council, the Leverhulme Trust and the Dutch Ministry of Justice.
After finishing an MSc in Social Psychology (1986, Free University, Amsterdam), I was a research assistant for two years.
One explanation for this is a desire to avoid showing 'stereotypical deceptive behaviours', or 'impression management'.
We conducted experimental laboratory studies in which (mostly Caucasian) participants were requested to lie or tell the truth. We then analysed their behaviour and speech content.
My PhD thesis (1988 1991, Free University, Amsterdam) was entitled 'Misunderstandings Between the Police and Ethnic Minorities: Social Psychological Aspects of being a Suspect'.
Follow up experiments revealed that the behavioural patterns characteristic for Surinamese people made a suspicious impression on Caucasian police officers.
I have published 200 articles and book chapters and five books. I give seminars about deception to police officers in several countries, and have been recognised by criminal courts as an Expert Witness.
On the basis of laboratory studies it is difficult to predict how liars behave in real life situations.
Professional lie catchers look for certain behavioural cues and speech content characteristics when they try to detect deceit.
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