The Effect of Different Types of Leading Questions on Adult Eyewitnesses with Mild Intellectual Disabilities

Abstract

Adults with an intellectual disability (ID) are often considered poor witnesses; however, this may depend on the type of questions asked during investigative interviews. We examined the impact of four different types of misleading questions commonly used in interviews. These questions varied in their specificity, presumptive knowledge and structure (open or closed). Forty-one adults with a mild ID watched a short film; they were then interviewed about what had happened. Half of the questions contained misleading information. In a later recognition test, participants showed a misinformation effect: they correctly recognised more items about which they had received control information than the items about which they had received misleading information. Closer inspection of the data revealed that both closed and open presumptive questions generated the largest misinformation effects. These findings highlight the vulnerability of adults with an ID to misleading questions, specifically those that presume certain information to be true.

Trial of three investigative interview techniques with minimally verbal adults reporting about occurrences of a staged repeated event.

“…Research concerning the investigative interviewing of vulnerable witnesses has largely concentrated on children, or on adults with intellectual disability (e.g., Agnew & Powell, 2004; Bowles & Sharman, 2014; Cederborg et al, 2012). This focus has led to broad guidelines that suggest how individuals with communication impairment might be interviewed effectively by investigative interviewers.…”

Communication and cross-examination in court for children and adults with intellectual disabilities: A systematic review

“…Cardone and Dent (1996) compared general and specific questions for adults but did not find any significant impact on suggestibility. In contrast, Bowles and Sharman (2014b) found that the adults with mild ID were most suggestible to misleading information if asked in a ‘presumptive’ (suggestible) style such as a ‘tag’ question, for example, ‘Eric helped himself to a Pepsi, didn’t he?’ A ‘tag’ question is more of a statement, with the question ‘tagged’ on at the end, to invite confirmation. This study was limited in that only one of each question type was asked.…”

“…This poses challenges for cross-examination as the purpose is for the witness to be questioned on the information provided in their examination-in-chief, but a witness with ID may simply agree with alternative suggestions put to them or agree if accused of being mistaken or lying about details of an event. Statements and closed style questions requiring yes/no answers, particularly ‘tag’ questions result in higher levels of suggestibility (Bowles and Sharman, 2014b; Henry and Gudjonsson, 2003, 2007; Perlman et al, 1994). Yet the Kebbell et al (2004) paper showed that closed questions were the most common question type used during cross-examination.…”

“…There is some uncertainty as to whether there is enough data for valid results in four papers. This is because of low overall sample size compared to the other papers (Dent, 1986) low sample size for each method measured (Cardone & Dent, 1996;White & Willner, 2005) and only one question of each type used (Bowles & Sharman, 2014b). Eleven papers used the GSS/GSS 2 test.…”

The effect of question type on resistance to misinformation about present and absent details

“…This sample composition potentially limits the generalizability to other populations; however, we do not believe this to be the case. Research has demonstrated the robustness of the misinformation effect across different samples of younger and older participants, in different countries, with different abilities (e.g., Bowles & Sharman, 2014; Huff & Umanath, 2018; Roebers, Bjorklund, Schneider, & Cassel, 2002; Zhu et al, 2010).…”