Influence

Part 4 of 12  ·  Mechanics

Extracting the Truth

How states and police get people to talk — the techniques that produce false confessions, and the small number of interview methods that beat chance.

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1 Chicago, 1947: How John Reid Invented the Modern InterrogationJohn E. Reid’s founding of John E. Reid & Associates in Chicago in 1947 and the codification of the nine-step Reid technique in…
2 The Founder’s Own False Confession: Darrel Parker, Lincoln, 1955Darrel Parker, a Lincoln, Nebraska forester who on 14 December 1955 found his wife Nancy murdered, then confessed after roughly…
3 Minimization and Maximization: Promising Leniency Without Saying ItSaul Kassin and Karlyn McNall’s 1991 study 'Police interrogations and confessions: Communicating promises and threats by…
4 The Behavior Analysis Interview: Reading Guilt That Isn’t ThereThe Behavior Analysis Interview (BAI), the pre-interrogation screening stage of the Reid method, empirically tested by Aldert…
5 The ALT Key Experiment: Manufacturing a Memory in Sixty SecondsSaul Kassin and Katherine Kiechel’s 1996 Psychological Science study 'The Social Psychology of False Confessions: Compliance,…
6 Five Confessions, One Rapist: Central Park, 1989The Central Park jogger case of 19 April 1989: five teenagers — Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana…
7 Brendan Dassey: Suggestibility, Youth, and the Fed-Back DetailThe 27 February and 1 March 2006 interrogations of 16-year-old Brendan Dassey in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, later central to…
8 PEACE: Britain Rebuilds Interrogation After the Guildford FourThe PEACE model (Planning and Preparation, Engage and Explain, Account, Closure, Evaluate), introduced across England and Wales…
9 The Cognitive Interview: Fisher and Geiselman’s Memory EngineeringRonald Fisher and R. Edward Geiselman’s cognitive interview, first evaluated in 'Enhancement of eyewitness memory: An empirical…
10 Strategic Use of Evidence: Letting the Liar Trap HimselfThe Strategic Use of Evidence (SUE) technique developed by Par Anders Granhag and Maria Hartwig at the University of Gothenburg…
11 Hanns Scharff: The Luftwaffe Interrogator Who Never Raised His VoiceHanns-Joachim Gottlob Scharff (1907-1992), master interrogator at Auswertestelle West, Oberursel, who extracted intelligence from…
12 Sherwood Moran’s 1943 Memo: Kindness as DoctrineMajor Sherwood F. Moran, US Marine Corps, and his 1943 report ‘Suggestions for Japanese Interpreters Based on Work in the Field’,…
13 ORBIT: Measuring Rapport in Real Terrorism InterrogationsLaurence and Emily Alison’s ORBIT (Observing Rapport-Based Interpersonal Techniques) coding of 181 recorded interviews with UK…
14 The HIG: America Builds an Evidence-Based Interrogation ProgramThe US High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, created in 2009, and its research programme reviewed by Christian A. Meissner,…
15 Torture Does Not Work: The 2014 Senate ReportThe Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s Study of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program, executive summary released…
16 Elicitation: How Intelligence Officers Take Information You VolunteerThe FBI counterintelligence brochure ‘Elicitation Techniques’, which catalogues conversational methods — flattery, deliberate…
17 Thirty-Six Killers: The FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit Learns to InterviewThe FBI Behavioral Science Unit’s Criminal Personality Research Project, in which Robert Ressler and John Douglas interviewed 36…
18 Tell It Backwards: Vrij’s Cognitive Load ApproachAldert Vrij and colleagues‘ reverse-order recall experiment, ’Increasing Cognitive Load to Facilitate Lie Detection: The Benefit…
19 The Devil’s Advocate Question: Asking What Liars Never RehearseSharon Leal, Aldert Vrij, Samantha Mann and Ronald Fisher’s 'Detecting true and false opinions: The Devil’s Advocate approach as…
20 The Verifiability Approach: Counting the Details That Can Be CheckedGalit Nahari, Aldert Vrij and Ronald Fisher’s verifiability approach, including 'The Verifiability Approach: Countermeasures…
21 SCAN: The Statement Analysis Method That Fails Its Own TestAvinoam Sapir’s Scientific Content Analysis (SCAN), used by police and intelligence agencies worldwide, and Glynis Bogaard, Ewout…
22 CBCA and the Undeutsch Hypothesis: Content as EvidenceUdo Undeutsch’s hypothesis that accounts of experienced events differ in content and quality from imagined ones, operationalised…
23 Fifty-Four Percent: Bond and DePaulo on Human Lie DetectionCharles F. Bond Jr. and Bella DePaulo’s meta-analysis ‘Accuracy of deception judgments’, Personality and Social Psychology Review…
24 The Machine That Measured Fear: Marston, Larson and KeelerWilliam Moulton Marston’s systolic blood-pressure deception test (1915-1923, rejected in Frye v. United States, 1923), John A.…
25 The Spy Who Passed: Aldrich Ames and the NAS VerdictCIA officer Aldrich Ames, who spied for the KGB from 1985 while passing CIA polygraph examinations in 1986 and 1991, and the…
26 The Guilty Knowledge Test: Lykken’s Better QuestionDavid T. Lykken’s Guilty Knowledge Test, proposed in 1959 and now called the Concealed Information Test, which uses…
27 Brain Fingerprinting: Farwell, the P300, and the Harrington HearingLawrence Farwell’s ‘brain fingerprinting’ P300-MERMER method and the 2000-2001 Iowa hearing in the Terry Harrington murder case,…
28 fMRI on Trial: United States v. Semrau, 2010The Western District of Tennessee hearing in United States v. Semrau (2010), where Magistrate Judge Tu M. Pham excluded fMRI…
29 Voice Stress Analysis: Fifteen PercentThe National Institute of Justice-funded field study of Computer Voice Stress Analyzer and Layered Voice Analysis programs at the…
30 Algorithms That Claim to See Lies: VeriPol, iBorderCtrl, EyeDetectVeriPol, the text-classification tool deployed by Spain’s Policia Nacional from 2018 to flag false robbery reports and withdrawn…