Effects of the putative confession instruction on perceptions of children's true and false statements

Abstract

The putative confession (PC) instruction (i.e., "[suspect] told me everything that happened and wants you to tell the truth") during forensic interviews with children has been shown to increase the accuracy of children's statements, but it is unclear whether adults' perceptions are sensitive to this salutary effect. The present study examined how adults perceive children's true and false responses to the PC instruction. Participants (n = 299) watched videotaped interviews of children and rated the child's credibility and the truthfulness of his/her statements. When viewing children's responses to the PC instruction, true and false statements were rated as equally credible, and there was a decrease in accuracy for identifying false denials as lies. These findings suggest that participants viewed the PC instruction as truth-inducing. Implications for the forensic use of the PC instruction are discussed.

Adults' difficulties in identifying concealment among children interviewed with the putative confession instructions

“…Therefore, the present findings indicate that the children who conceal the transgression in the face of the PC are a particularly convincing group of concealers. In this study and in Gongola et al (2019), accuracy was lower when children concealed in response to the PC (31–37%), than for children who did not hear the PC instructions ( M = 62%, Gongola et al, 2019), or for children in similar deception detection studies ( M = 46% reported in Gongola et al, 2017).…”

“…As a final note, the interview videos used in the present study were also used in the PC conditions in Gongola et al (2019). As shown in Table 3, the accuracy scores were replicated in the present study.…”

“…The G*power program was used to estimate the sample size necessary to detect a within‐between interaction of a small‐medium effect size with α = .05 and 80% power. A small‐medium effect size, (specifically, η p 2 = .05) was estimated based on prior research (e.g., Gongola et al, 2019). With a sample of 150 participants, there is an 80% chance of correctly rejecting the null hypothesis.…”

“…During the interview, neither of these children claimed breakage, and they were labeled truth‐tellers. The same four videos here were included in Gongola et al (2019), and all were described in detail in Stolzenberg et al (2017).…”

“…Gongola, Scurich, and Lyon (2019) conducted an initial test of the effect of putative confession instructions on adults' perceptions of children's reports. Adults viewed videotaped interviews of children being questioned about the broken toy transgression when they had versus had not been given the PC instructions.…”