Methodological improvements for studying face matching in border control tasks

Border control officers must decide whether passport images match their holders. In previous research on passport verification most participants have been more willing to report nonmatching passports than is likely to occur in practice. We designed an experimental paradigm to increase participants' motivation to avoid these types of errors in passport verification. Participants decided whether passport photographs matched ambient photographs of passport holders. Most passports matched their holders and nonmatching passports were rare. All participants received feedback on their passport verification decisions, and an experimental group also received a time-consuming consequence if they made an error. Relative to the control condition that only received feedback, consequences were effective in reducing mistaken accusations of nonmatching passports. Consequences also increased the miss rate for nonmatching passports, but the increase in misses over the control condition was not significant. We conclude that consequences can make participants behave more like real border control officers.