Stephen Moston Sometimes even a 98% success rate isn't enough Lies, damned lies, and statistics* The following is offered as an illustration of the sometimes dubious power of numbers in investigative psychology, particularly those relating to ‘success rates’ in profiling. A while back I came across a commercial company offering psychological profiles of offenders. The main target audience for this service was the corporate sector. The profiles were exactly what you would expect, some pseudoscientific psychobabble describing the personality characteristics of offenders (which is always useful ..read more

Mark Severino, LAPD Detective III, Major Crimes Division Kicking off our focus on counter-interrogation strategies. A counter-interrogation strategy is defined as the subject’s tactics to withstand an interview and appear credible. A subject who is telling the truth will typically tell it like it happened and believes the truth will shine through. A subject who is being deceptive will attempt to anticipate the questions that will be asked and: (a) avoid critical information and provide a vague narrative, or (b) deny their role in the crime. Guilty subjects differ from innocent subjects in how ..read more

Stephen Moston The following is a complete* listing of Australian Research on investigative interviewing of suspects. Note: If you are not sure where to start - try Green (2012) and Moston (2009). References Adam, L., & van Golde, C. (2019). Police practice and false confessions: A search for the implementation of investigative interviewing in Australia. Alternative Law Journal, 45(1), 52-59. https://doi.org/10.1177/1037969X19874415 Bartels, L. (2011). Police interviews with vulnerable adult suspects. Canberra, Australia: Australian Institute of Criminology. Retrieved from www.aic.gov.au ..read more

Dr Stephen Moston Déjà vu: “a feeling of having already experienced the present situation” There’s a new article (April 23, 2021) in Policing Insight, ‘Telling the truth: Time for an evidence-based policing approach to lie detection’, by Paine and Porter (2021) which over its roughly 1300 words spends about 1000 words efficiently and accurately debunking a variety of lie detection methods, before outlining a new lie detection technique (the remaining 300 words) called asymmetric information management, which also goes by the catchy acronym AIM. This new lie detection technique is introduced a ..read more

Dr Davut Akca (Centre for Behavioural Sciences and Justice Studies, University of Saskatchewan, Canada) Does training in interviewing improve performance? A Canadian perspective. Training on investigative interviewing has a key role in the translation of research into practice. With regards to the impact of training, what matters is the content and methods used in the training. Many interview guidelines and training courses have been designed based on field experiences, research findings, and best practices. Researchers have used various methods to assess the training outcomes including pre ..read more

Dr Adam Wang (James Cook University, Singapore) Interview with Dr Adam Wang, Part 2. A new research study by Ziano and Wang (2021) found that, across a variety of scenarios, delays in responding reduce the perceived credibility of the speaker. The paper was widely reported in the media. Dr Wang kindly agreed to talk to me about the paper and the field of lie detection research. The recording of that interview will be reported in two entries in The Science of Investigative Interviewing Blog. In the second part, Dr Wang discusses the “Slow lies” research paper. https://video.wixstatic.com/video ..read more

Mark Severino, LAPD Detective III, Major Crimes Division Interviewer mindset One of the benefits of a science-based interview over a traditional interview approach is that an interviewer can elicit more detailed information. Another benefit is the interviewer can identify the cues of deception and truth when assessing credibility. There is no question that science-based interviewing contains all the required concepts that covers all the bases. That said, if the interviewer who is trained in science-based interviewing enters an interview using a traditional interview approach (judgmental/accus ..read more

Dr Barry McGurk was the lead author of the first study to evaluate PEACE Commentary on "Evidence-Based Investigative Interviewing" (Blog 01) In Blog 01 Jan 6 2021 you say: “To date, there have only been two evaluations of PEACE training with police officers. The first was conducted shortly after PEACE training began (McGurk et al., 1993), the second a few years later (Clarke & Milne, 2001). Subsequent evaluations of PEACE have either used non-police samples (e.g., benefits centre investigators) or lacked a relevant comparison group. Neither of the original two police studies provides a co ..read more

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