Investigating deception findings in Canadian refugee status rejections: legal inferences and psychological...

This study uses a novel methodology that combines legal and psychological approaches to analyse a large set of Canadian refugee status rejections (n = 120). It distinguishes legal inferences from their underlying psychological assumptions and quantifies both inferences and assumptions in a set of 89 written decisions. Its findings yield new insights that inform the use of social science in the evaluation of deception findings in this field: it identifies the most important categories of legal inference that support these findings (inferences drawn from observations of 'inconsistency', 'non-probative supporting evidence' and 'risk response'), and it is the first study to identify the most significant kinds of assumption that underlie the finding that a refugee claimant is lying. These include assumptions that have been observed in previous studies: assumptions about the consistency of truthful and deceptive accounts and about how people act when they are at risk. Perhaps most importantly, this study has identified a new and significant category of psychological assumption operating in these decisions: assumptions about the robustness of a claimant's metacognition, their ability to understand and explain their own cognitive processes.