Abstract
M.A. (Counselling Psychology)
The aim of this research study was to explore whether counselling/psychotherapeutic training enhances lie detection ability. It furthermore focussed on whether sureness was related to deception detection accuracy and whether psychologists were better able to detect cues related to deception detection. The study consisted of two groups, 25 psychologists and 25 individuals who were educationally matched with the psychologist group. Participants had to watch video clips and state whether the person in the video clip was lying or telling the truth, as well as indicate which cues they used to help make their decisions. The independent variable was counselling/psychotherapeutic training and the dependent variable was lie detection. Quantitative methods were employed to analyse the study. The study design was a non-equivalent control group design. Frequency tables, independent samples t-tests and sensitivity and specificity tables were used to analyse the data. Results indicated that sureness was unrelated to lie detection accuracy and that psychologists were better able to detect cues that were related to deception. This study showed that counselling/psychotherapeutic training enhances lie detection ability.