Forensic Psychology For Dummies (30 page)

Showing respect.

Being non-confrontational.

Understanding the respondent’s anxieties.

Responses to questions can also be influenced by social pressures, such as the desire by people being interviewed to please the interviewer, wanting to help because of the seriousness of a situation even though they may not have much to offer, or when rapport or a relationship develops with police officers involved in the case, so they go out of their way to imply their memory is clear when it’s really very vague.

Pressure on a witness to remember the details of an event can cause mistaken recollections because of the witness desiring to appear correct, observant, helpful and not foolish. For example, a witness who’s keen to help may be trying hard to guess what the police want to hear and so they persuade themselves that what they’re remembering corresponds with what’s required.

Combating the possibility of witnesses saying what they think the interviewer wants to hear rather than what they really remember is a subtle business. Letting them give an account of what they remember without too much direct prompting, saying things like ‘tell me what happened’ rather than ‘did you see him punch her?’ is part of good interview technique. But there is a lot more to it than that, which is why all sorts of interview frameworks have been developed that I discuss later in this chapter and in the next.

Remembering That Memory Can Mislead

Researching how the memory works is a hot topic in psychology and has been for over 150 years. No surprise, therefore, that forensic psychologists have been exploring witness and victim memories since the earliest days. (In Chapter 20 I give you an example of the role and significance of memory in an internationally famous trial.)

Try this little test. Can you remember what you had for breakfast three days ago? If I ask you to describe what the table looked like (assuming you weren’t eating on the run and indeed you had breakfast), are you likely to give me a different answer if I provide a list of possible settings and ask you to tick a box? Or, how do you go about explaining to someone who always has breakfast in bed, what breakfast looks like sitting at a table?

What I’m getting at is that your account takes on two crucial aspects:

The act of remembering:
You have to remember what happened, which isn’t simply a matter of taking out some sort of ‘mind movie’ and playing it to the person who’s asking the questions. Then you need to put together a description, drawing on your verbal skills and what you can dig out of your memory.

The situation:
What you say depends on who’s asking the questions. You may give a different account to a close friend to the one you would give to a police officer. How questions are asked will also influence how you answer. If you are given a list of possible answers to choose from you may choose one even though none of them really fits the situation you remember, but if you are asked to describe what you remember in your own words you may struggle to find the exact words.

You may think that a question is a question is a question, but not so. How you phrase a question can unwittingly direct the answer. An
open question
is one that doesn’t give any hint of supplying an answer: for example, ‘What did you have for breakfast?’. In contrast, a
closed question
gives the respondent possible answers, such as the yes/no kind (‘Did you have breakfast today?’), or more detailed such as ‘Which of the following did you have for breakfast: cereal, eggs, coffee, juice?’. The problem with the closed question is that the questioner is assuming what the possible answers can be. If you had chapatti and banana for breakfast, a closed question isn’t going to reveal that fact.

Asking open-ended questions is the art of good investigative questioning.

Going back over a crime with a witness and getting them to remember the details relies heavily on their working memory, which is often less than perfectly reliable. Psychological studies of witness memories show that things can go wrong in many different ways, not least because of a witness lying (turn to Chapter 5 for more on lying and detecting deception). ‘Interrogation’ (meaning asking a question) is a word you often hear when referring to police interviews, implying a challenging confrontation with a suspect. But, the main purpose of an interview with a witness, victim or suspect is to get a description of who did what, where and when. The event you’re asking about is in the past and it’s rare to have an on-the-spot record of what happened. An
explanation
of what happened may also be needed, to determine whether a crime’s been committed and if the suspect being interviewed knew what he was doing: remembering why he did what he did. This explanation may be arrived at after the event, opening the way for the witness’s statement to be legally challenged.