With Study 1 (N=140), we aimed to examine how different ways of disclosing evidence during an interview would influence guilty suspects’ perception of interviewer’s prior knowledge and elicit statement-evidence inconsistencies. We predicted that interviews with evidence disclosed would elicit low statement-evidence inconsistencies whereas interviews where evidence was not disclosed would result in high statement-evidence inconsistencies. The outcome did not support our predictions. Guilty suspects revealed crime-related information about non-critical themes and withheld information regarding critical themes irrespective of evidence disclosure. We explored this unexpected finding in Study 2 (N=216), which was designed to understand if guilty suspects would reveal information regarding themes of the crime that are not incriminating (not critical) in comparison to themes that were incriminating (critical) as observed in Study 1. We used the evidence disclosure tactics of Study 1 in Study 2 and also measured how these influence their perception of interviewer’s knowledge. The outcome replicated findings from Study 1 that guilty suspects reveal or withhold information based on the cost of disclosing the information. This is a novel finding in the Strategic Use of Evidence literature.
The aim of this study was to understand how introducing a higher suspicion tone and specific crime-related details in the content of investigative questions influences inferences guilty suspects draw regarding prior information held by the interviewer. We tested three factors related to the specific content in questions namely level of suspicion (high and low suspicion), level of specificity (the amount of crime-related detail-general and specific) and topic discussion (whether a certain crime-related activity was discussed or not). We recruited N= 232 participants who read a crime narrative and interview transcripts related to the crime. They assumed the role of the suspect in the narrative and responded to scales measuring their perceived interviewer knowledge (PIK) based on the interviews. We found that a specific crime-related topic, when discussed increased PIK. We also found that a topic discussed with specific crime-related details in the questions increased PIK. This study provides support for our findings from a previous study that was the first to test guilty suspects’ inferences from a psycholinguistic perspective, and gives us a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms during police interviews.
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