We sought to identify motivations to resist cooperation in intelligence interviews and develop techniques to overcome this resistance. One source of resistance can arise because of concerns for affiliations (e.g., “I do not want to inform on my friends/family/fellow countryman”). We investigated two avenues of rapport building—approach and avoidance—designed to overcome this concern. In a modified cheating paradigm, our participants (N = 116) became affiliated with a confederate who they then witnessed cheating. Participants were interviewed about the event in a 2 (approach: present vs. absent) × 2 (avoid: present vs. absent) design. The interviewer used either an approach technique that aligned them with the interviewer (portrayed as a morally good person) or an avoid technique that moved them away from the culprit (portrayed as nefarious), neither, or both. The approach technique increased rapport between the interviewer and participant. However, the avoid technique decreased the amount information elicited. When submitted to a mediation model, the approach technique had a positive indirect effect on information yield via perceived rapport and cooperation, while this was not the case for the avoid technique. An exploratory moderator analysis revealed that sympathy for the confederate moderated the effect of the avoid technique on information disclosed, where the more sympathy a participant felt for the confederate, the less information he or she provided. Implications for interviewing are discussed.

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Background Deception is a prevalent component of human interaction. However, meta-analyses suggest that discriminating between truthful and deceptive statements is a very arduous task and accuracy on these judgments is at chance levels. To complicate matters further, individuals tell different types of lies. The current studies examined how an individual’s ability to accurately discriminate between truthful and deceptive statements is affected by the way truths and lies are conveyed. Participants judged the veracity of statements given by speakers who told truths or lies about a performed action by describing that action or denying that it had occurred. Additionally, these statements also differed with regard to how often the lie had been repeated (i.e., practiced), either once or thrice. Results The results were largely in line with the prevailing notion that it is difficult to successfully differentiate between truthful and deceptive statements, but also showed that performance was moderated by statement type and repetition. The results revealed that participants were more accurate in discriminating unrepeated descriptions than repeated descriptions, but this difference was not seen for denial statements. Additionally, participants were more likely to believe practiced (repeated) statements, both truthful and deceptive. Conclusion The results show that repeated statements as well as shorter denials can increase the difficulty of differentiating truthful from deceptive statements. Additionally, these findings suggest that truthful statements also benefit from repetition with regard to enhancing their believability.

Recent findings suggest that priming may be useful for facilitating disclosure in investigative interviews; however, the effects of priming on behavioral outcomes have been mixed. The current studies attempted to replicate the increase in information disclosure when the concept of "openness" is primed. We assessed the separate and combined influence of context reinstatement instructions and activation of the concept of openness (via lexical primes in Experiment 1, via contextual and embodiment primes in Experiment 2) on information disclosure. In doing so, we introduced a novel paradigm to investigate factors contributing to the elicitation of sensitive personal information that participants provided in written (Experiment 1) or verbal (Experiment 2) form. Participants (Experiment 1: N ϭ 173; Experiment 2: N ϭ 194) completed a checklist of illegal behaviors and misdeeds, then engaged in an unrelated task that was used to administer the priming manipulation (either the concept of "open" or "closed," or a neutral prime). Participants then described a life event related to the most serious illegal behavior to which they had admitted, following either a direct request for information or a context reinstatement instruction. Across both experiments, context reinstatement led to robust increases in information disclosure. Although we failed to replicate prior effects of priming on disclosure, our observed effect sizes fell within the confidence intervals of previous studies. A meta-analytic assessment of priming across the two studies suggested a small but significant increase in information elicitation, suggesting that investigators are best served using evidence-based interviewing tactics during investigative interviews. Public Significance StatementWe examined the separate and combined influence of an interview tactic and a subtle elicitation tactic on the amount of information disclosed during an investigative interview. Subtle tactics, such as displaying a poster in a room or showing words related to the concept of openness, were less effective at facilitating information disclosure than explicitly requiring interviewees to mentally recreate the context of the event (an interviewing tactic known as context reinstatement) prior to providing a statement. Our results suggest that interviewers should prioritize the use of techniques such as context reinstatement that have been shown to be effective in laboratory settings.