A Systems Approach to Countermeasures in Credibility Assessment Interviews

Countermeasures, or techniques for hiding guilt during a credibility assessment examination, have long been an important topic in cognitive psychology and criminal justice fields. With recent IS research on automated screening systems, understanding the potential for countermeasures in this new paradigm is of increasing importance. This paper reports on a large experiment examining countermeasures in an automated deception detection screening context. The effectiveness of traditional countermeasure types (mental and physical) are examined, as well as an exploratory approach of trying several countermeasures at once. The exploratory approach was tested to investigate a proposed novel systems-inspired solution to countermeasures—triangulating on deception likelihood using multiple sensors measuring multiple behavioral and psychophysiological anomalies. The findings give credence to the proposition that monitoring multiple heterogeneous cues to deception may be a viable solution for mitigating the effectiveness of countermeasures.