Forensic Interview Methods

A professional deception detector, and author, Pamela Meyer points out the fact that, “ Lying is complex. It 's woven into the fabric of our daily and our business lives. We 're deeply ambivalent about the truth…. It 's as old as breathing. It 's part of our culture, it 's part of our history. Think Dante, Shakespeare, the Bible, News of the World”, in a TED Talk in which she details certain clues about how to

“It is difficult to prove a causal relationship between permissible investigative and interrogatory deception and testimonial deception.  Police freely admit to deceiving suspects and defendants.  They do not admit to perjury, much less to the rationalization of perjury.  There is evidence, however of the acceptability of perjury as a means to the end of conviction.  The evidence is limited and fragmentary and is certainly not dispositive” (Skolnick, 1982).

Many of today’s interrogation models being utilized in police investigations have an impact on false confessions. The model that has been in the public eye recently is the social psychological process model of interrogation known as the “The Reid Technique.” There are two alternatives used by the police today to replace the Reid Technique, one is the PEACE Model and the other is Cognitive Interviewing. These methods are not interrogation techniques like Reid but interview processes.

In the essay The Ways We Lie, author Stephanie Ericsson writes in depth about the different types of lies used by most people everyday. While listing examples of them, Ericsson questions her own experiences with lying and whether or not it was appropriate. By using hypothetical situations, true accounts, and personal occurrences, she highlights the moral conflicts and consequences that are a result of harmless fibs or impactful deceptions. In an essay detailing the lies told to ourselves and others, Ericsson points out one bold truth; everyone lies. Through her writing, Ericsson causes the reader to look into how they’ve lied in the past and how to effects others and the general greater good of society.

Determining a false confession proves difficult due to the multitude of dimensions involved. According to Kassin and Wrightsman’s (1985) survey of the literature, there are three main types of false confessions—voluntary, coerced-compliant, and coerced-internalized. Unlike coerced false confessions, voluntary false confessions arise as a result of someone willingly turning themselves into the police with an account of their crime (McCann, 1998). Voluntary false confessions can result from multiple motives, including an internalized need for punishment or to save someone else’s face. In contrast, coerced false confessions directly result from police interrogations. While coerced-compliant confessions are made to avoid interrogation, escape the stressful situation, or achieve some other reward, coerced-internalized confessions emerge when a suspects begins to

To develop an experimental paradigm to study the influence of psychologically based interrogation techniques on true and false confessions.

Information is the lifeblood of a criminal investigation. The ability of investigators to obtain useful and accurate information from eyewitnesses of crimes is crucial to effective law enforcement, yet full and accurate recall is difficult to achieve (Stewart, 1985). Such elicitation of complete and accurate recall from people is important in many aspects of life; specifically, eyewitness recall may determine whether a case is solved. Principle advocates of the cognitive interview (Fisher, Geiselman, Holland & MacKinnon,

However, although this suggests that human lie detection is fairly accurate, earlier research has found the opposite. According to Wallace (1999), psychological research on deception shows that most of us are poor judges of truthfulness. One may assume that this only applies to only ordinary people and not professionals. However further research shows that ‘this applies to professionals such as police and custom inspectors, whose jobs are supposed to include some expertise at lie detection’ (Wallace, 1999).

(1996) was a broad study that yielded several results. People lie daily, a finding not many would be surprised with. The lie more often outside of face-to-face interactions, unsurprising given the prominence of body language in communication. The types of things people lied about were consistent with ideas of monitoring impression formation; in simpler terms, people often lie to look better to others. It also appears that people lie with some frequency about positive feelings. This suggests that we may not want to take responses or comments about positive feelings at face value, and may want to dig deeper out of concern if we believe these responses to be dishonest. The findings in sex difference suggest that women lie to protect others much more often than men, but also lie more about others more than men. While this reinforces gossip stereotypes, it also reinforces the idea that women are more sensitive. To summarize the findings, if you desire open and honest conversation, you will likely have to encourage it. The prevalence of lying, for positive or negative reasons, is so great that it is a daily occurrence. To combat this, you must first acknowledge the astounding frequency of lying, and then voice your desire for less of it. After all, interactions without lies were rated more positively than ones with lies. If you want a more open, honest,

Is our justice system fair? Is our justice system truly set out to do what it was meant to do? Or are there social factors and memory errors that come into play that can change a conviction outcome. In today’s court rooms we have, Defense attorneys, Prosecutors, judges, juries, evidence, forensics experts, witness testimonies, and of course the human memory. What better type of evidence than the human memory, right? Unfortunately, human memory is subject to the power of suggestion and unable to truly recall an event when told to recall. In other words, the story may not be the same as the one that actually happened the day of that event because many variables come into play like cross examinations and the way a question can be asked can alter the answer or how the event was perceived. The main focus of this paper is to see how the human brain is not able to effectively recall events which could possibly convict an innocent person of wrong doing. Also how lawyers use the misinformation effect to their advantage. In order to understand how something as simple as a question can decide a person’s faith we must first answer some questions. First, How does memory actually work and how is memory retrieved when your need to answer a question or being cross examined? Second, how does the misinformation effect play a role when a witness needs to testify against the defense or vice versa? Third, how can structuring a word or sentence effect the outcome of a conviction?

Behavior analysis focuses mainly on understanding the conduct or behavior of the suspects (Inbau et al., 2011). Interrogators may face a challenge in getting a suspect’s statement if they are not capable of reading and understanding the suspect’s conduct in terms of both verbal and non-verbal language. Reading the body language enables the interrogators to detect when the suspect is telling the truth or when lying. Behavior signs for deception may include fidgeting, perspiration, not maintaining eye contact, uneasiness, and many other behaviors. However, not every suspect is likely to behave in a similar way which makes it quite difficult for the interrogators to analyze the suspect's behavior and may end up making a false confession statement. Therefore, interrogators have to base their suspect behavior analysis based on the evidence provided as well as their personal

When an interrogation subject does not tell the truth, creating and remembering a fictional story places a heavy load on their mental faculties. They must continually calculate whether their story is cohesive. When Criminal Justice investigators question these subjects, increasing this load will increase the physical responses the subject exhibit, which helps investigators predict whether the person is telling the truth. A practice investigators use to accomplish this is to have the subject tell the story from end to beginning. This makes it difficult for the subject to recall details that match the fictional story timeline. Additionally, the investigators can request that the subject sustain eye contact. When a subject is recalling a fictional recount, looking away helps them focus on remembering their story.

Pamela Meyer in her speech identify different concept of communication through which one can identify a liar. The speaker attributes speech, body language, confidences and other distinctive features that are used to identify a liar. She attributes day-to-day activities as the environments at which liars may exist. The speaker’s ideas are based on assumptions and personal components. The ideas highlighted by the speaker could be applicable to some instances but may fail to reflect the truth of the matter.

As many know, we lie to cover up things that we don’t want others to know. Maybe when you were a child you broke your brothers toy and when he confronted you, you lied and said you had no idea who did it, or maybe you completely try to change the subject. In a way, that is what interpersonal deception theory is, it’s an attempt to explain how individuals handle actual deception at the conscious or subconscious level while they are engaged in a face-to-face communication. And Actually This type of deception has 3 aspects such as falsification, concealment, and equivocation.

Credibility- Now, I would like to consider myself an expert lie detector, but apparently binge-watching 12 seasons of Criminal Minds in 3 months does not give me those qualifications. So to better inform and assist you, my lovely audience, I did some research, mostly utilizing online materials.