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Legal and Criminological Psychology (2010), 15, 25–38 q 2010 The British Psychological Society
The British Psychological Society www.bpsjournals.co.uk
Interviewing cooperative witnesses Ronald P. Fisher* Department of Psychology, Florida International University, USA
Importance of the interview In the world of television and cinema, crimes are solved by applying exotic techniques and conducting high-tech, computer-driven analyses of physical cues. In the real world of police investigation, however, most crimes are solved because cooperative witnesses provide detailed descriptions of what happened. Witnesses generally do not volunteer such information in a vacuum; rather, police officers must actively seek out witnesses and interview them. The outcome of this investigative interview therefore often marks the difference between successful and unsuccessful investigations. Nevertheless, despite the central role that investigative interviewing plays, many police officers are poorly, or not at all, trained to interview cooperative witnesses. As a result, police investigators frequently make avoidable errors and elicit considerably less information than is potentially available. Even worse, they may actively distort the witness’s memory by conducting the interview poorly. Improving on this critical element of the investigation requires adopting a more professional approach that draws from the relevant scientific knowledge. In the past three decades, research scientists have illuminated some of the psychological principles that underlie the interview process, and have formulated effective interviewing protocols. The central theme of this paper is to describe these interviewing techniques. The paper also addresses several related issues: (a) whether these techniques combine to form a holistic entity or whether the techniques can be implemented independently, (b) how to train investigators to use the techniques, (c) empirical testing of the techniques, (d) applying the techniques to real-world investigations, and, finally, (d) recommended future directions for research. To appreciate our current knowledge, we should note the generally poor quality of police interviews prior to the current scientifically driven approach. Researchers examined the state of pre-scientific interviewing by systematically poring through scores of tape recorded interviews by American and British police with victims and witnesses (Fisher, Geiselman, & Raymond, 1987; George & Clifford, 1992). The results were discouraging – although enlightening – as they showed that interviewers regularly * Correspondence should be addressed to Professor Ronald P. Fisher, Department of Psychology, Florida International university, Biscayne Bay Campus, 3000 NE 151st Street, North Miami, FL, USA (e-mail: fisherr@fiu.edu). DOI:10.1348/135532509X441891
26 Ronald P. Fisher
used poor techniques that either reduced the amount of information witnesses provided, or worse, enticed witnesses to provide incorrect information. The most common mistake was to conduct the interview predominantly as a series of pointed, closed questions, (e.g. How old was the robber? How tall was he? What colour was his hair? Did he have a weapon?) rather than encouraging witnesses to provide information freely by asking open-ended questions (e.g. Describe the robber.) In Fisher et al.’s analysis, closed questions accounted for approximately 90% of all of the questions asked (see also George & Clifford, 1992). Several problems are created by relying almost exclusively on closed questions: These questions (a) tend to elicit very brief answers, (b) discourage witnesses from volunteering unsolicited information, thereby burdening the interviewer to ask all of the relevant questions, and (c) encourage witnesses to guess, even if they are unsure of the answer. The more egregious error that police interviewers often made was to ask leading or suggestive questions, which are known to distort witnesses’ recollections, and especially for child witnesses (Schreiber et al., 2006). Unfortunately, these interviewing errors still exist when police are not trained properly (Fisher & Schreiber, 2007). The above-noted systematic errors are particularly discouraging because forensic research scientists have known better methods of conducting interviews for decades (e.g. Flanagan, 1981). Of the various scientific interviewing protocols, the best known are the cognitive interview (CI), conversation management (Shepherd, 1988), the Memorandum of Good Practice (1992), the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Protocol (Sternberg, Lamb, Esplin, Orbach, & Hershkowitz, 2002), and the step-wise method (Yuille, Hunter, Joffe, & Zaparniuk, 1993). Each of these protocols is composed of many specific techniques that have generally been found to (a) increase the amount of correct witness recollection, and/or (b) decrease incorrect recollections. Common to all of these protocols are several core elements, including (a) developing rapport with the witness, (b) asking open-ended questions primarily, (c) asking neutral questions and avoiding leading or suggestive questions, and (d) funneling the interview, beginning with broader questions and narrowing down to more specific questions. Most of the above-named protocols are intended for a specific set of respondents or emphasize one or two of the common elements. For instance, the Step-Wise method and the NICHD protocol are directed primarily towards interviewing children, whereas conversation management’s main contribution is on interviewing suspects and uncooperative witnesses. Furthermore, each technique emphasizes a limited number of elements: The NICHD protocol emphasizes the importance of asking non-leading questions, whereas the step-wise method emphasizes the funneling approach. We shall focus here on the CI procedure because (a) it is more encompassing than the others – it incorporates all of the commonly accepted principles of interviewing found in the other techniques, but in addition, contains many unique elements; (b) it has been tested more extensively than any of the other protocols; and (c) its focus is on interviewing cooperative witnesses, the scope of this article. In developing the CI, Fisher and Geiselman took an eclectic approach and explored a variety of sources. Specifically, they (a) examined the scientific literature in cognitive and social psychology and converted the relevant principles into interviewing techniques, (b) pored through dozens of tape recorded police interviews and modelled the differences between good and poor interviewers, and (c) borrowed interviewing techniques from several professions that conduct face-to-face interviewing, including clinical psychology, medicine, social work, journalism, and oral history.
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The principles of the CI are organized around three psychological processes: (a) cognition, (b) social dynamics, and (c) communication. A thumbnail sketch of the major principles of the CI follows, and borrows heavily from Fisher and York (2007). For a more complete description of the CI, see Fisher and Geiselman (1992). Cognition Several principles emanating from general cognitive theory and, specifically, memory retrieval can be adapted to enhance witnesses’ recollection. In addition to the witness, we must also consider the interviewer, as he or she performs many complex tasks: asking questions, notating witnesses’ answers, and formulating a theory of the crime. The following are the core cognitive principles. Context reinstatement Memory retrieval is facilitated when the context of the crime is recreated at the time of recall (Tulving & Thomson, 1973). Interviewers should therefore instruct witnesses to mentally recreate their thoughts and emotional states that existed at the time of the original event. If it is practical, interviews should be conducted at the crime scene itself. The principle of context reinstatement becomes increasingly important when the interview is conducted long after the critical event or if the witness’s emotional or cognitive state has changed from the time of the crime (e.g. Fisher, Falkner, Trevisan, & McCauley, 2000). Limited mental resources People have only limited mental resources to process information (Baddeley, 1986; Kahneman, 1973). Performance, therefore, suffers when we engage in several difficult tasks at the same time. For instance, a witness’s search through memory may suffer, because he or she is concurrently occupied with listening to the interviewer’s questions. For the same reason, interviewers may fail to process subtle nuances within a witness’s response, because they are occupied with formulating questions. Interviewers can minimize overloading witnesses, and also themselves, by refraining from asking questions while witnesses are searching through memory and, in general, by asking fewer, but more open-ended, questions. Interviewers can also promote more efficient use of witnesses’ limited mental resources by encouraging them to close their eyes when recalling (Perfect et al., 2008), a tactic that people often do on their own when faced with a difficult cognitive task (Glenberg, Schroeder, & Robertson, 1998). Conversely, interviewers should reduce physical and psychological distractions (telephone calls, eye-contact) during those segments of the interview that require intense concentration. Witness-compatible questioning Each witness’s mental record of an event is unique. To take advantage of such differences, interviewers should tailor their questions to the mental record of each particular witness instead of asking all witnesses the same set of questions. Interviewers often violate this rule by using a standardized checklist, which guides the questioning of all witnesses (Fisher, Geiselman, & Raymond, 1987). Similarly, interviewers often violate
28 Ronald P. Fisher
the principle by structuring the interview to meet their own needs (e.g. to write a final report) rather than to be compatible with the witness’s mental record of the event. Within each witness, the accessibility of event details varies throughout the course of the interview. Memory for the robber’s face, for instance, will be more accessible when the witness is thinking about the robber than when the witness is thinking about the getaway car. In general, event details will be most accessible when they are perceptually related to the witness’s current mental image (Pecher, Zeelenberg, & Barsalou, 2003). Interviewers should therefore be sensitive to the witness’s currently active mental image, so as to time their questions efficiently. This may require interviewers to defer asking questions about investigatively relevant details until later in the interview, when the questions are compatible with the witness’s current mental image. This is probably the most difficult skill of the CI to employ, as it requires the interviewer to think as if he or she were inside the witness’s mind, knowing what the witness is currently thinking about, and the relative accessibility of various mental records. Multiple and varied retrieval Searching through memory multiple times often generates additional recollections that the witness did not provide on the initial search. Interviewers can implement this principle by (a) asking the witness to describe the critical event several times, and (b) interviewing the witness on two or more occasions. If witnesses attempt to recall the target event repeatedly, they should be directed to think about the event in various ways, since different retrieval searches may access different aspects of a complex event (Anderson & Pichert, 1978). For instance, witnesses might think about an event in terms of its temporal properties (when things happened) and also its spatial properties (where things were located) (Gilbert & Fisher, 2006). Similarly, events may be represented both semantically (e.g. the robber was angry) and also in terms of their sensory properties (e.g. the robber’s face was red: Paivio, 1971). Witnesses should be encouraged to describe an event in terms of its semantic, meaningful properties and also its various sensory properties. In general, the more different ways witnesses think about an event, the more details they will recall. One possible limitation of this technique is that the interviewer may not know the various properties that the witness used to represent the event. To overcome this problem, Phillips and Fisher (1998) asked one set of people (who had experienced similar events) to think about how they coded or thought about these events. For instances, students were asked to describe what made various university courses memorable (e.g. interesting topic, low grade, boring professor). These thoughts, or cues, were then provided to a different group of students and assisted them to remember courses they had previously taken at the university. That is, the recollections of one set of people can be used to generate the various retrieval cues to be used by another set of people. Discouraging guessing Witness recall may be extremely accurate if they refrain from guessing (Koriat & Goldsmith, 1996). To promote such high accuracy, interviewers should instruct witnesses explicitly not to guess, but, preferably, to indicate that they ‘don’t know’ or ‘don’t remember’. Furthermore, interviewers should refrain from applying social pressure on witnesses or otherwise encouraging them to answer questions they are
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uncertain of. This principle is particularly important when interviewing children, who are particularly responsive to social pressure from adults (Ceci & Bruck, 1993). Minimizing constructive recall At times, memory is a constructive process, whereby the rememberer incorporates information from other (non-crime) sources to construct the crime episode (Bartlett, 1932; Bransford & Franks, 1971). Witnesses might incorporate knowledge gathered from other witnesses or the media to construct their memories of a crime. Interviewers should therefore warn witnesses not to expose themselves to these sources. More important, witnesses may also acquire information from the interviewer, based on his or her verbal or non-verbal behaviour (Ceci & Bruck, 1995). Interviewers should therefore be careful not to leak information to witnesses either non-verbally (e.g. smiling or paying increased attention when the witness makes a particular statement) or verbally (e.g. asking leading or suggestive questions, or providing novel information about the event to the witness). Social dynamics Witnesses and victims often are asked to describe unpleasant experiences to people whom they do not know. Two critical features mark this social interaction. First, witnesses must be psychologically comfortable with the interviewer as a person to go through the mental effort and emotional distress of describing crime-related details. Second, there is a natural conflict between the interviewer’s greater social or expert status – which dictates that the interviewer should control the interview – and the witness’s greater knowledge of the critical event – which dictates that the witness should control the interview. Resolving this conflict is essential for conducting an effective interview. Developing rapport Witnesses, and especially victims, are often asked to give detailed descriptions of intimate, personal experiences to police officers, who are complete strangers. If anything, the police investigator’s official appearance (badge, uniform, weapon) may create a psychological barrier between the police officer and the civilian witness. To overcome this natural barrier, police interviewers should invest time at the outset of the interview to develop meaningful, personal rapport with the witness (Collins, Lincoln, & Frank, 2002), a feature often absent in police interviews (Fisher, Geiselman, & Raymond, 1987). Active witness participation The witness has extensive first-hand information about the target event. Therefore, the witness, and not the interviewer, should be doing most of the mental work. In practice, however, police interviewers often dominate the social interaction with the witness by asking many questions and by interrupting witnesses. This relegates the witness to sit passively waiting for interviewers to ask questions (Fisher, Geiselman, & Raymond, 1987). Interviewers can induce witnesses to take more active roles by (a) explicitly requesting them to do so, (b) asking open-ended questions, (c) not interrupting witnesses during their narrative responses, and (d) constructing the social dynamic so that witnesses perceive themselves to be the ‘experts’ and therefore the dominant
30 Ronald P. Fisher
person in the conversation. This last point is especially important when interviewing children (McCauley & Fisher, 1995). Communication For police interviews to be effective, investigators must communicate their professional, investigative needs to the witness. Witnesses must also communicate their episodic knowledge of the crime to the investigator. Ineffective communication will lead witnesses to withhold valuable information or to provide irrelevant, imprecise or incorrect answers. Promoting extensive, detailed responses Police interviews require witnesses to describe people, objects and actions in more detail than civilians normally do in casual conversation. Inducing such an extraordinary level of description requires that police convey this goal explicitly, which they rarely do. Compounding the problem, civilian witnesses may withhold information because they do not know what is relevant for a police investigation. To minimize witnesses’ withholding information, interviewers should instruct witnesses to report everything they think about, whether it is trivial, out of chronological order, or even if it contradicts a statement made earlier. This is not a license to guess, as some have misinterpreted (Memon, Wark, Bull, & Koehnken, 1997). Rather, the request to report everything instructs witnesses to describe ideas as they come to mind, before the ideas are forgotten (see above, for ‘Witness-compatible questioning’). Police investigators generally direct witnesses to provide relevant information by asking many specific, closed questions about investigatively relevant topics, e.g. perpetrator’s age, height, weight, clothing, weapon (Fisher, Geiselman, & Raymond, 1987). This questioning style minimizes irrelevant information, but at the cost of (a) reducing unsolicited, but relevant, information, (b) reducing the depth and precision of witnesses’ responses, and (c) sometimes inducing incorrect responses. Rather than asking many specific, detailed questions interviewers should explicitly instruct witnesses about the importance of describing events in great detail. Code-compatible output Interviewers and respondents often exchange ideas using only the verbal medium. Some people, however, are more expressive non-verbally, and some events are better described non-verbally (Leibowitz, Guzy, Peterson, & Blake, 1993). Ideally the response format should be compatible with the format of the witness’s mental record of the event, thereby minimizing the need to transform the mental record into a different format (Greenwald, 1970). For instance, if an event is inherently spatial, (e.g. the location of objects within a room) then witnesses should respond spatially, (e.g. by drawing a sketch of the room, placing model objects within a (model) room, or pointing to locations). Similarly, if the event is an action (e.g. turning a steering wheel, shooting a gun), witnesses may be able to enact the event better than they can describe it verbally.
Components or holistic CI? The CI should not be thought of as a recipe that must be followed in a formulaic manner, with every interview following the exact same pattern of questions and
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techniques. Rather, the collection of principles should be thought of as a toolbox of techniques, only some of which will be used in any specific interview. Furthermore, many of the techniques will have to be adapted to meet the demands of the specific interview. Whether one chooses to use or not to use a component technique depends on a variety of factors, including the amount of time available to conduct the interview, the conditions of the interview, and whether or not the witness responds favourably to the technique. If there is not ample time to implement all of the techniques, then the interviewer may opt to delete some of the time-consuming techniques. Davis, McMahon, and Greenwood (2005), for instance, showed that the CI could be shortened considerably, and with relatively little loss of information, by deleting the multiple and varied retrieval mnemonics. Likewise, if the interview is conducted immediately after the crime and at the crime scene, there is little need to reinstate the original context. Finally, certain techniques may not work with some individuals. For instance, some witnesses may be uncomfortable to close their eyes. In such a case, the interview can either omit or modify the instruction, e.g. by instructing the witness to keep his or her eyes open, but to focus on a blank field (e.g. table, floor). The skill of conducting an interview is precisely to know which techniques can be implemented, given the specific conditions of the interview, and how best to implement these selected techniques. This flexibility and the concomitant decision-making are advantageous yet costly. The opportunity to select, modify and adapt the techniques to meet the unique needs of a particular interview is one of the strengths of the CI as it allows the interviewer to analyse the problem creatively and to tailor the interview for maximum benefit. There is a cost in making these adjustments, however, in that the interviewer must be more fully engaged in the interview process and must make more on-line decisions. As a consequence of the CI’s greater complexity and flexibility, it is more difficult to learn and to implement, but it yields considerably more information – which, after all, is the goal of the interview. The ability to omit or modify the various component techniques implies that the CI is not a holistic entity that is either conducted or not conducted. Rather, one should think of the CI as a general approach that contains a panoply of techniques from which the interviewer selects, depending on the situation. Some interviewers mistakenly think of the CI as a recipe, so that failure to use all of the component techniques means that they have not used the CI. For example, some British police have voiced the concern that time pressure often does not allow them to conduct the ‘complete cognitive interview’ (Kebbell, Milne, & Wagstaff, 1999). This kind of holistic approach is comparable to physicians being frustrated because they cannot implement all of their medical knowledge with a given patient, or car mechanics not using every tool in the garage to repair a particular car. The effective interviewer (or physician or car mechanic) knows which of the various tools at his/her disposal are appropriate for the particular task, and uses only those tools that are required. Perhaps only a few of the techniques are the ‘active ingredients’ and the remaining techniques contribute little or nothing. If so, then we could reduce the CI to a small, manageable number of techniques by deleting those that are ineffective. Which of the CI techniques is the most or least effective? The question sounds reasonable, but it is more difficult to answer than appears on the surface. First, it is difficult to isolate many of the techniques, because many are intended to be used in concert with other techniques. For instance, pausing after the witness stops speaking will be effective, but only after the
32 Ronald P. Fisher
interviewer asks an open-ended question. Pausing after a response to a closed question will probably accomplish nothing other than to lengthen the time of the interview. Second, many of the techniques will be more effective in some situations than in others, and hence one cannot assess in an absolute sense how effective any technique is. As noted earlier, reinstating context should be more important for interviews that are conducted after long delays, when the context of the crime has changed, than interviews conducted immediately after the crime, when the crime context is still in effect. Third, most components of the CI were selected because they have already been shown in other contexts to facilitate retention. The task of identifying the ‘most’ and ‘least’ effective techniques is thus, quite difficult. Nevertheless, several researchers have attempted to examine specific components of the CI by isolating them and testing them against a free-recall control condition, i.e. an additional opportunity to recall (e.g. Milne & Bull, 2002). The results of these studies are mixed, with some supporting specific techniques, and others showing no difference between the targeted technique and a free-recall control. Note that demonstrating that a targeted technique is comparable to an additional free-recall does not mean that the technique does not promote additional recall. It simply means that it does not enhance recollection more than the principle of multiple retrieval (as measured by an additional free-recall). Given the difficulty of isolating techniques to calculate their absolute effectiveness, researchers might use their time more wisely by exploring the conditions under which each component works most effectively or by examining how each principle should be adapted or modified for a specific contingency.
Training Engineering an interviewing protocol to work effectively requires a procedure that is based on sound principles, but also a training method that conveys the message effectively to the trainees. Without an effective training program to communicate the message, even the best protocol will not work well in practice. In fact, several researchers have observed that after presenting what should have been a simple, but novel, protocol for interviewing, the trainees still conducted interviews in the same fashion as they did before training (Fisher & Schreiber, 2007; Memon, Holley, Milne, Koehnken, & Bull, 1994; Powell, Fisher, & Wright, 2005). What might the trainers have done to strengthen the training method? Based on my experience and several of my colleagues, the following seem to be the most critical elements of a successful training program. Motivated trainees Participants must be motivated to change their current techniques in favour of a new technique. Participants who are not so motivated will sit through training and simply refuse to adopt any new approach (Memon et al., 1994). Such trainees are probably unteachable, even with a perfect training regimen. It is important, therefore, for the host organization (e.g. police department) either to motivate potential trainees about the value of the new approach or to select for training only those participants who are already motivated to learn a new technique. In that regard, it is probably easier to train new recruits, who have not yet learned poor interviewing habits, than to re-train experienced (but in poor techniques) investigators (Fisher, Geiselman, Raymond, Jurkevich, & Warhaftig, 1987).
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Explain the underlying principle The scientific principles behind each of the component techniques should be presented so that the trainees understand why specific techniques are effective. Without such conceptual guidance, trainees will have difficulty deciding whether or not to implement a technique in a given case, and how to modify the technique for specific conditions. Understanding why a technique works should also make the training program more interesting than merely memorizing a collection of techniques.
Concrete demonstrations Providing concrete demonstrations of good and poor interviewing techniques helps to reify the training, thereby making abstract concepts more comprehensible and also to provide a model of what the interview should (or should not) look like. Trainers should therefore keep any eye open for examples of good and poor interviewing techniques to incorporate into the training. The more realistic such demonstration material is (taken from real-world cases) the more likely are trainees to ‘buy into’ the new approach.
Practical exercises The goal of training is to facilitate trainees learning a skill, conducting effective interviews in the field, and not merely knowing in the abstract how an interview should be conducted. Therefore, it is essential to incorporate practical exercises during the training program. Without such practical exercises, many trainees will feel that they know the principles (can repeat them back on an examination), but will not be able to conduct an interview properly. These practical exercises are time-consuming (usually at least 30 min, depending on the size of the group), and so trainers need to allot adequate time, even if that means deleting some content.
Feedback When interviewing a respondent, interviewers are typically more attentive to the respondent’s statements than to their own behaviour. As a result, interviewers are often unaware of their errors. It is critical, therefore, to provide honest feedback to interviewers after their interviews. Without such feedback, interviewers will believe that they have conducted error-free interviews, and will be unaware of the need to improve their skills. The most effective feedback methods are to audiotape or videotape the interviews and then to pore over the taped interview with the trainee, pointing out good and poor techniques (Powell, Fisher, & Hughes-Scholes, 2008).
Refresher training Many investigators (especially supervisors) will conduct interviews only infrequently. As such, even if they were trained properly, they may forget the learned skills in the long stretches of time between interviews. To minimize such post-training forgetting, brief refresher courses should be provided where possible (Powell et al., 2008). This is especially the case for supervisory personnel, who are sometimes asked to conduct only the most difficult interviews, and who therefore often go many months between interviews – enough time to lose the skill they once possessed.
34 Ronald P. Fisher
Empirical testing Testing and validating experimental interview protocols has focused mainly on the CI – although also see extensive testing of the NICHD protocol (Sternberg et al., 2002). By now, approximately 75–100 experimental studies (including three field studies with victims and witnesses of real crime) have been conducted that compare the CI with either a generally recommended set of interviewing principles (e.g. Memorandum of Good Practice) or with standard police interviewing procedures. These studies have been reviewed extensively elsewhere (e.g. Fisher & Schreiber, 2007; Holliday, Brainerd, Reyna, & Humphries, 2009; see also Koehnken, Milne, Memon, & Bull’s, 1999, metaanalysis), so I shall only summarize the results. A typical validation test entails showing a videotape of a simulated crime to volunteer witnesses and then interviewing the witnesses with the CI or the comparison technique. The uniform findings are that the CI elicits considerably more information than the comparison procedure (typically between 20 and 50% increase; in Koehnken et al.’s meta-analysis, the mean effect size was 0.87). Accuracy (as measured by the proportion of witness statements that are correct) is about the same or slightly higher for the CI (in Koehnken et al.’s meta-analysis, accuracy rates for the CI and control groups were .85 and .82, respectively). These results are robust in that they obtain across a wide variety of witnesses (college students, young children, older adults, cognitively impaired adults) and cultures (US, England, Spain, Germany, Australia, Brazil), retention intervals (immediate, 5–10 min, 1–2 days, 1–2 weeks, and up to 35 years) and critical events (real crimes, live and videotaped simulated crime, live innocuous events, daily actions, accidents). In sum, the effect is large, stable, and robust.
Application to real-world investigations It is obvious that better interviewing procedures will promote more effective forensic investigations. This should also hold for non-forensic investigations that depend heavily on witness recollection, e.g. accident investigations, debriefing military or other personnel after a critical incident. Thus far, no one has examined the causal relationship between the quality of investigative interviews and the likelihood of completing investigations successfully. However, to the degree that extensive and accurate witness information leads to a successful resolution of the investigation then effective interviewing must enhance investigations. In any one real-world case it is difficult to know what was the principal cause of the investigation’s success, however, we have good reason to believe that effective interviewing contributed significantly in many such instances. One such instance entailed a 3-year-old California homicide case that had reached a dead-end. Then, a CI was conducted of a critical witness, who generated an enhanced description of the vehicle involved in the homicide, including three additional characters from the license plate. This ultimately led to an arrest and successful prosecution (Geiselman & Fisher, 1997). In a another case in the National Court of Appeal in London, a convicted murderer claimed that he did not commit the crime, but that his friend had committed the murder. The friend then participated in a CI interview and provided a very detailed account of the murder episode, leading the Court to overturn the original conviction, setting free the originally convicted defendant (Ray Bull, personal communication). In one of the most interesting cases imaginable, a 4-year and 6 months old girl, who allegedly had witnessed her mother murdered in 1971, was interviewed with the CI in 2005, when she was 38 years old, to
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explore her memory of the original crime. She produced an extensive amount of information (a designated note-taker took 26 pages of notes during the course of the extended interview). It is obviously difficult to determine how accurate her recollections were, because there was no faithful record of the original crime. However, to the degree that we can estimate accuracy (consistency of the witness’s recollection over repeated interviews, consistency with the original police sketch of the crime scene, consistency with other observers’ reports) it appears that the woman’s recollections were very accurate. As opposed to the adversarial nature of many Western legal systems, effective interviewing is a neutral tool that merely seeks to gather more truthful information. Whether such information serves to steer the investigation correctly towards the perpetrator, or to steer the investigation correctly away from innocent suspects should be of little concern. The goal of the investigation is to make the correct decision, and better quality information should invariably promote better decision-making. One difficulty of conducting real-world interviews is that there may be inadequate resources to conduct the interviews in a timely fashion. For instance, if a crime or violence occurs amid a large group of bystander witnesses (e.g. a riot at a public venue), or there are relatively few police officers to interview the witnesses (e.g. in a small town), many witnesses may not be interviewed until several days after the crime. Not surprisingly, those witnesses will forget some of the crime details in that delay. To address this problem, Gabbert, Hope, and Fisher (2009) developed a condensed version of the CI that witnesses could administer to themselves, the self-administered interview (SAI). The SAI is a set of written instructions that can be distributed to many witnesses immediately after the crime, and contains some of the kernel elements of the CI: context reinstatement, multiple and varied retrieval, code-compatible output (drawing a sketch of the crime), and discouraging guessing. Laboratory testing of the SAI shows that it (a) helps to preserve information for a later (1 week) properly conducted interview, and maintains the information at a high level of accuracy (Gabbert et al., 2009) and (b) reduces the detrimental effects of misleading information (Hope, Gabbert, & Fisher, 2008). The SAI should be particularly valuable in small communities, where police resources are often inadequate, and for instances in which mass crimes are committed, with hundreds or thousands of victims.
Future research and goals Although we have made great strides in developing investigative interview procedures to elicit better descriptions of events (objects, actions, people), we have not been as successful to develop interview methods to enhance identifying perpetrators in lineups. We have made other advances in conducting identification tests (see the paper in this volume by Brewer), but these advances have generally centred around choosing fillers, instructing witnesses about possible response options, recording witness’s confidence, etc. In general, though, we have not been able to interview witnesses more effectively prior to an identification test to enhance their recollection. Some studies have shown the benefit of reinstating the original event context prior to the identification test (Krafka & Penrod, 1985; Malpass & Devine, 1981); however, several other studies have found no effects of the same manipulation (Fisher, Quigley, Brock, Chin, & Cutler, 1990). Certainly it would be valuable to develop better methods of interviewing witnesses prior to their participating in an identification test.
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A second valuable area for future research is to parse the CI’s component techniques to determine which techniques are most effective under specific interview conditions (e.g. kind of critical event, retention interval, time constraints) or specific kinds of witness (e.g. children, foreigners, various cultures). That would allow for a more efficient use of the component techniques in any given situation. Given the great variation in interview conditions, another valuable area of research is to provide direction about how to modify or adapt a particular technique for different kinds of situation or witness. For instance, how should we develop rapport with people of different cultures? Does the optimal method of reinstating context vary across different locations: indoors versus outdoors, unique environment versus a frequently experienced environment? As a final note, we have now reached the point in the research effort whereby we know that the CI invariably yields more information than comparison interview protocols. After 75–100 such studies, we do not need any more validation tests of the CI or to demonstrate that it works across different witness populations or events. The research community could use its talents more effectively by developing new component techniques to be added to the existing CI methods or learning how to adapt the CI techniques more effectively for the specific investigation.
Conclusion The CI and other scientifically informed interviewing protocols have elevated the quality of forensic interviews with cooperative witnesses, and this has been well documented in laboratory and field studies. Similar improvements have been made in non-forensic investigative interviews, e.g. accident or public health investigations. Nevertheless, many police and other investigative interviewers still do not make good use of the available scientific advances (Fisher & Schreiber, 2007). As a result, they make the same interviewing mistakes now as they made 20 years ago, before the scientific knowledge had been disseminated. This occurs in large part because real-world investigators and academic researchers have not communicated effectively, but instead, have worked mainly in non-overlapping spheres. Consequently, real-world investigators miss out on potentially valuable theory-driven solutions and academics err by designing studies that do not properly capture the problems faced by real-world investigators. Given the importance of interviewing cooperative respondents, I encourage police and other investigative agencies to take better advantage of the scientific research, and for academics to design their studies with a keener eye towards real-world application. Improving communication between investigative agencies and academic researchers will go a long way towards meeting these goals. I hereby challenge the practitioners and researchers to merge their skills and knowledge to advance the common goal of improved interviewing of cooperative witnesses.
References Anderson, R. C., & Pichert, J. W. (1978). Recall of previously unrecallable information following a shift in perspective. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 17, 1–12. Baddeley, A. D. (1986). Working memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bartlett, F. C. (1932). Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology. London: Cambridge.
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