Applying the Verifiability Approach in an international airport setting

In the current study we tested the utility of applying the Verifiability Approach within an International airport setting. The Verifiability Approach works on the notion that truth tellers provide more verifiable details than liars and has shown to be successful within other empirical deception detection scenarios. 399 airside participants (those originating from Europe, Asia and African) were asked questions regarding their travel plans. We asked participants to either lie (n = 195) or tell the truth (n = 204) about their planned activities. The critical question required participants to provide information that would convince the investigator they were telling the truth. We then transcribed and coded their responses for verifiable details; that is details that could potentially be checked by an investigator. Overall, truth tellers provided significantly more verifiable details than liars. Furthermore, when taking their geographical origin into account, there was no interaction effect between veracity and region. Additionally, truth tellers provided a higher verifiable/total detail ratio than liars, which again showed no interaction effect between veracity and region. These findings support the suitability of the Verifiability Approach as a cross-cultural veracity tool and implications for its use as an additional security aid are discussed.