The High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group was created in 2009 by executive order, in the aftermath of the program described in the next chapter, as an interagency body of FBI, CIA and Defense Department personnel. Its interrogation methods were to be limited to those in the Army Field Manual.
Its more consequential decision was to fund research.
Over the following decade the HIG commissioned more than a hundred scientific studies from academic investigators, on the basis that nobody actually knew, in a way that would satisfy a scientist, which interrogation methods produced accurate information. Christian Meissner, Frances Surmon-Bohr and colleagues reviewed the resulting program in 2017.
The findings converged, and they converged on the material in the preceding chapters.
Rapport and relationship-building outperform confrontation, consistently and across populations. Autonomy-supportive questioning, drawn from Motivational Interviewing, produces more disclosure than directive questioning. Strategic evidence disclosure — chapter 100 — is the most effective single technique for detecting deception. Cognitive-load-based approaches beat behavioral observation. Cognitive-interview methods produce more accurate and more detailed accounts. Accusatorial methods produce more confessions overall but a substantially higher proportion of false ones.
That last comparison is the one that should decide the argument. A synthesis of the experimental literature comparing information-gathering with accusatorial approaches finds information-gathering increases true confessions and reduces false ones, while accusatorial approaches increase both. If the objective is confessions, accusation works. If the objective is accurate information, it does not.
The underlying reason is stated in the review and is worth extracting because it explains the whole of Part 4.
Memory retrieval and voluntary disclosure are functions of a person's state. Both work better when the person is calm, engaged, talking freely and not defending themselves. Coercion produces compliance, and compliance is a behavior with no reliable relationship to truth — a person under sufficient pressure will produce whatever ends the pressure, and there is no mechanism by which the pressure selects for accuracy.
So the two objectives are not merely different. The methods that maximize one actively damage the other.
The HIG's existence is itself the finding worth noting. An operational agency, under real pressure, commissioned independent research on whether its own methods worked, published the results, and changed practice on the basis of them. That is unusual enough in any field, and in this one it is nearly unique — chapter 111's SCAN and chapter 119's voice stress analysis are both still in use with published null findings against them.
The remaining problem is distribution. The HIG's conclusions govern a small number of federal interrogators. The overwhelming majority of interrogations in the United States are conducted by local police departments trained in the method in chapter 91.
Cross-ref: Reid technique chapter