Original title: Maladaptive Personality Traits and Statement Validity Assessment. Mapping DSM-5 Trait Domains and Facets onto Lying, Suggestibility, and Autobiographical Memory Quality
Elsa Gewehr, Merle Hurtmanns, Johannes Zimmermann · September 2026
When legal experts evaluate a witness's testimony, they must consider the person's personality to judge if they might be lying, remembering poorly, or easily swayed by suggestions. Researchers tested whether a medical framework of negative personality traits can help experts do this. They asked volunteers to complete personality surveys, take honesty and memory tests, and report how often they lie. They found that people who scored higher in traits linked to hostility, poor impulse control, and negative emotions admitted to lying more in daily life. Meanwhile, people who felt emotionally detached or depressed reported having less clear and vivid memories. However, none of the personality traits predicted actual cheating on a task or how easily someone accepted false suggestions. Experts should lower memory expectations for detached witnesses.
You are a parent trying to decide which child actually broke the vase. One child is usually quiet and anxious, the other is loud and often blames others. The signs you look for—nervousness, evasiveness—mean different things depending on each child's natural character. In this paper, researchers use a formal model of personality extremes to help experts interpret witness statements, sorting out when nervousness is a sign of lying versus just someone's typical behavior.
Forensic experts evaluating witness credibility need to account for personality, but lack a systematic framework. This study shows how extreme personality traits from the DSM-5 model affect lying, memory clarity, and suggestibility. The findings help experts expect less vivid detail from detached or depressed witnesses, and interpret self-protective motives in antagonistic witnesses, improving accuracy in court.
The abstract notes that no trait was related to behavioral dishonesty or suggestibility, with Bayes factors mostly supporting the null. This study used low-stakes paradigms and a community sample, not real forensic settings. Self-reported lying may not correspond to actual deceptive behavior. The results are correlational, not causal, and based on a single German sample. The findings may not generalize to high-stakes witness situations or clinical populations.
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Maladaptive Personality Traits and Statement Validity Assessment. Mapping DSM-5 Trait Domains and Facets onto Lying, Suggestibility, and Autobiographical Memory Quality — Elsa Gewehr, Merle Hurtmanns, Johannes Zimmermann — PsyArXiv — doi:10.31234/osf.io/pt9jy_v1
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.