When the Evidence Is Incorrect: an Exploration of What Happens When Interviewers Unwittingly Present Inaccurate Information in Interviews with Suspects

Abstract

Skillfully presenting evidence/information to suspects is one of the few interviewing techniques that increases the likelihood of guilty suspects providing information or making a confession, without making innocent ones do so as well. It is important that this evidence/information is correct, since deliberately disclosing incorrect evidence poses some risks. Also, in real-life interviews, police interviewers may unwittingly disclose incorrect evidence, for example when a witness was mistaken and provided the police with incorrect information. The present study examined the behavior of fifty police interviewers in interviews with “suspects” of a scripted crime: what is their response when the interviewees try to explain to them that some of the evidence/information just disclosed by them is incorrect? Eleven interviewers responded adaptively (by actively picking up on this new information), 35 responded in a neutral way and four responded maladaptively (by discrediting the interviewee’s claim). Experience and a full interview training had a significant negative relationship with adaptiveness. These results indicate that, when preparing and conducting interviews with suspects, greater awareness is needed of the possibility that some of the evidence/information that is to be disclosed could be incorrect, and therefore it is crucial that suspects’ responses which suggest such may be the case are taken into account.

Proximity-based evidence disclosure: Providing an operational purpose for disclosing evidence in investigative interviews.

“…In other words, when training practitioners in interview methods that have been developed through laboratory testing, it is important to consider how that research can be immediately relevant to specific operational needs (Nisin & Nahari, 2023). Failing to translate research-based methods to operational needs brings the risk that the research could be mistaken as irrelevant or ineffective by practitioners, or even worse, used inappropriately in practice (Beek et al, 2021). To reduce such risks when training practitioners, we made a first attempt to synthesize laboratory-based findings with practical experience to develop a training program that provides an operational purpose for evidence disclosure.…”