Psychology (Criminology - Cognitive Interview) Flashcards
What is the Cognitive Interview?
The CI is a way of interviewing eyewitnesses to improve the accuracy and detail of their memory of a crime. Asking open questions, trying to get the correct data in detail in order to potentially find the right suspect.
Focus is more on the social dynamics of the situation, reducing anxiety - witness breathing slower (using breathing techniques) in order to elicit more information (predominantly correct information)
1970s and 1980s the police interviewing techniques asked a lot of closed questions, forcing an answer out. Generally quite aggressive questioning and there was increased criticism of traditional police interviewing techniques. Predetermined questions.
What can confabulated answers lead to?
Miscarriage of Justice - Unfair judicial judgement
Who invented the CI?
Fisher et al. 1984
What techniques were used? Explain each one
Mentally reinstate the context - Tell them everything, maybe they can put themselves in the situation again and recreate the physical and psychological environment of the original incident. External and internal things, sensors, wheather. Acting as a cue.
Report everything - The encouraging of telling the interviewer every detail. Telling them everything even if you perhaps think it may be insignificant.
Change the Perspective - Witnesses try to tell the story from different perspectives, for example, by imaging how it may have appeared to other witnesses, the suspect, victim etc..
Change the order - The interviewer may attempt to run through the events in a different order, for example in reverse, from the total beginning to the end, or pick certain events so that the person being interviewed is not confabulating anything and adding other meanings.
CI Retrieval Failure
Forgetting occurs due to the absence of the necessary cues. The CI aims to provide cues to aid recall.
CI Schema
Schema: A cognitive Framework that we use to interpret information and guide cognitive processes
CI Strengths
Research evidence shows that cognitive interview is much more effective than the standard interview. Fisher (1989) examined the effectiveness of the CI in real police interviews and the trained detectives gained 46% more information after their CI training compared to the control group (90% of the information was found to be accurate).
Geiselman et al (1985) found that the cognitive interview led to more correct information being recalled compared to standard interviews.
Holliday (2003) found cognitive interviews were more useful than
standard interviews when interviewing children.
CI Weaknesses
CI has been largely in terms of quantity of information rather than quality. For example, in their research Köhnken et al. (1999) also found an increase in the amount of inaccurate information recalled by participants. This was a particular issue in the enhanced cognitive interview, which produced more incorrect details than the standard CI. (Same with Geiselman et al (1985).
Another criticism is that it takes a lot of time and training to implement it. Some dont have the resources to offer the correct training etc. Making it more expensive.