Projects & Publications

How People Decide What to Disclose.

This project examines why people disclose sensitive information in investigative interviews. Such interviews are social interactions in which law enforcement interviewers seek information from people (i.e., interviewees)—for security or legal purposes. To date, little research has examined what precisely people disclose in interviews and why they choose to share the information they do. Existing research heavily focuses on how much information interviewees disclose. This project is based on the idea that interviewees determine what information to disclose by performing an intuitive cost-benefit analysis. It is predicted that interviewees estimate what information will yield beneficial, as opposed to costly, outcomes and disclose those information items accordingly.

How Interviewees Determine What Interviewers Want to Know.

Research on investigative interviewing has often focused on topics like aiding the memory of witnesses. Such studies presume that the interviewee has already correctly identified the precise information the interviewer is really after. But how does an interviewee know what sort of information is asked for, a precondition for the interviewee to then choose to provide the information or withhold it (depending on their interests)? In this project, we theorize that interviewees organize the information they possess into item designations that pragmatically correspond to the perceived interviewer-objective. The more an interviewer specifies what they want to know, the more the interviewee will mentally designate (i.e., slice and dice) information in a manner that corresponds with that objective. The idea of slicing and dicing has received little attention in investigative interviewing research. 

Can We Catch Lies by Asking Tough Questions?

This project takes issue with the idea that asking tough questions can expose lies—because lying is more demanding than truth-telling. I discuss the limitations of that hypothesis by reviewing seven of its justifications. For example, liars must suppress the truth while lying, and this handicap makes lying challenging such that one can exploit the challenge to expose lies. The theoretical fitness of each justification is variable and unknown, making its rationale weak. Those ambiguities prevent analysts from ascertaining the strength of the hypothesis. I propose research questions whose answers could assist in better specifying and testing the hypothesis. 

• A tangential but related goal in this project is to examine the reproducibility of the verbal lie detection literature. This side goal comprises auditing published findings on lie detection techniques to ensure practitioners can rely on the scientific evidence base. 

What Makes for Ethical Interviewing?

This project examines ethical considerations for developing psychological investigative interviewing techniques or methods. Psychology researchers are now devoting much attention to improving the efficacy of eliciting information in investigative interviews. Stakeholders agree that such interviewing techniques must be ethical. However, there is a less concerted effort in determining ethical considerations to guide the creation of interviewing methods derived from scientific psychological principles. The disclosures interviewees make may put them at considerable risk (in a forensic context), and it is not always possible to determine beforehand whether placing interviewees under such risks is warranted. This project is based on the argument that research psychologists aiming to contribute ethical methods in this context should ensure that those methods abide by a standard that actively protects interviewees against unjustified risks. Interviewing techniques should give interviewees—especially the vulnerable ones—enough agency to freely determine what to disclose.

Criminal Networks

How can investigators elicit information about criminal networks? Investigations following most high-level organized crimes (e.g., terror attacks and large money laundering schemes) often reveal that complex networks consisting of collaborating individuals are the culprits—not lone wolves. Surprisingly, there is little research on eliciting information from multiple sources within networks whereby the objective is to gain intelligence about the organization rather than specific individual(s). In this project, we examine how members of criminal networks communicate when planning their crimes and how they respond when arrested for interviews.

How to Recruit Informants.

This research aims to explore how to recruit committed informants. Typically, intelligence gathering begins with a handler (i.e., investigator) recruiting a source (i.e., informant). The handler is the party seeking information, and the source has access to the information. Sources require cultivation to become dependable information providers. This work will develop techniques to facilitate such dependability in sources. 

What Does it Mean to Have Rapport? 

In the field of investigative interviewing, there is a consensus that rapport is crucial; an interviewer must induce rapport to elicit information ethically and effectively. Therefore, one may be surprised to hear that researchers hardly understand this supposed panacea. We still don’t know the best way to measure, let alone create rapport in an interview. In fact, researchers can’t even agree on what rapport means: different researchers define the term in different ways. This project explores why rapport seems challenging to define and aims to provide a definition that unifies all the existing ones to reduce ambiguity.