Suggestibility of the child witness: A historical review and synthesis.

Abstract

The field of children's testimony is in turmoil, but a resolution to seemingly intractable debates now appears attainable. In this review, we place the current disagreement in historical context and describe psychological and legal views of child witnesses held by scholars since the turn of the 20th century. Although there has been consistent interest in children's suggestibility over the past century, the past 15 years have been the most active in terms of the number of published studies and novel theorizing about the causal mechanisms that underpin the observed findings. A synthesis of this research posits three "families" of factors--cognitive, social, and biological--that must be considered if one is to understand seemingly contradictory interpretations of the findings. We conclude that there are reliable age differences in suggestibility but that even very young children are capable of recalling much that is forensically relevant. Findings are discussed in terms of the role of expert witnesses.

Receiver operating characteristic analysis of age-related changes in lineup performance

“…In particular, children appear more willing than adults to guess under conditions of uncertainty (Ceci & Bruck, 1993;Hughes & Grieve, 1980). In line with this, the positive identification rate for children is larger compared to adults Parker & Carranza, 1989, Parker & Ryan, 1993Pozzulo & Lindsay, 1998).…”

Maltreatment increases spontaneous false memories but decreases suggestion‐induced false memories in children

“…We will examine both types of false memories in this study. From a forensic perspective, a canonical example is that maltreated children are repeatedly asked to provide statements and are asked many – sometimes suggestive – questions, thereby creating an opportunity for both spontaneous and suggestion‐based false memories to occur (Ceci & Bruck, 1993; Howe & Knott, 2015). …”

Where There's Smoke, There's Fire: the Effect of Truncated Testimony on Juror Decision‐making

“…Research over many decades has firmly established that the way in which an interviewer questions a child has a significant impact on the accuracy of the child's report (Ceci & Bruck, 1995;Bruck & Ceci, 1999;Ceci & Bruck, 1993;Zaragoza, Dahlgren, & Muench, 1992;Holliday & Hayes, 2001;Poole & Lindsay, 2001). There are typically two types of questions asked when interviewing children; free-recall questions and direct questions.…”

“…In this paradigm, children witness a target event and are later interviewed about things they saw (neutral questions) and things they did not see (suggestive questions). This paradigm can be used to assess the extent to which children take on board the information provided in the suggestive questions, later including that information in their own account of the event (e.g., Bruck & Ceci, 1999;Ceci & Bruck, 1993;Zaragoza, Dahlgren, & Muench, 1992).…”

“…This study provides support that the syntactic form of specific questions may have an influence on children's responses. Other research has shown that some of the other dangers of questioning type on the accuracy of children's responses are suggestion (e.g., Ceci & Bruck, 1993), and repetition of questions (e.g., Fivush & Schwarzmueller, 1995;Poole & White, 1991) What about the long-term effect of poor interviewing techniques on children's testimony? In one study designed to answer this question, Gross, Hayne, and Poole (2006) examined the long-term effect of misleading questioning on children's subsequent reports.…”