Cultural and Cross-cultural Factors in Judgments of Credibility

The study aimed to investigate (i) whether there were, in general, differences in discriminability or response bias depending on culture or language, and (ii) whether any individual factors such as prejudice predict the extent of cross-cultural or second language use bias displayed by participants. With respect to the first aim, this study found that participants were generally poor not only at classifying lies and truths from individuals of their own culture, but also in a cross-cultural context. Although the results indicated that the language spoken by the stimulus subject had no impact on observers ability to discriminate between truthful and untruthful messages, it was found that observers were generally more suspicious of Colombian clips and, in particular, of those that depicted Colombians speaking in a second language. With respect to the second aim, the study found that individual differences in prejudice, stereotypes and ethnocentrism did not appear to predict the bias associated with cultural and language differences. Overall findings provide evidence of the potential of cross-cultural and second language use bias. These results are discussed in light of the practical and theoretical implications for cross-cultural lie detection.