‘We'll Take It from Here’: The Effect of Changing Interviewers in Information Gathering Interviews

Summary: A common strategy in interviewing is to repeatedly focus on the same topics, for example by asking to recall an event first in chronological order and then in reverse order. We examined the effect of changing interviewers between the two questions or keeping the same interviewers throughout on cues to deception. Truth tellers may be most encouraged to recall again what they have witnessed when confronted with new interviewers, as these new interviewers have not heard their story before. Liars may be most encouraged to recall again their story when confronted with the same interviewers, realising that these interviewers will check for consistency in their answers. The impact of changing interviewers should lead to more pronounced differences between truth tellers and liars in terms of detail and repetition in the ‘Changed Interviewers’ condition compared with the ‘Same Interviewers’ condition. Participants were interviewed by two interviewers about a mock security meeting they attended. In half the interviews, the same two interviewers remained throughout, and in the other half, two new interviewers took over half-way through. As predicted, differences between truth tellers and liars in terms of detail and repetition were most pronounced in the ‘Changed Interviewers’ condition. Changing interviewers during an interview effectively differentiates liars and truth tellers with respect to detail and repetition. We discuss this finding and its place within investigative interviewing and deception detection literature. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. A common strategy employed by investigators is to repeatedly focus on the same topics throughout an investigative interview (Fisher, 2010). This technique is aimed at giving interviewees the chance to say everything they know and to ensure that nothing is missed. One way to achieve this is by asking the same question in a different format, for example by asking an interviewee to recall an event in reverse chronological order (Fisher & Geiselman, 1992). Although the invitation to recall an event in reverse order is mostly used in interviews with collective witnesses (Fisher, 2010), it has also been used when interviewing suspects (Geiselman, 2012). In the present experiment, we also used this reverse order recall in interviews with (mock) suspects. We were particularly interested to know whether using different interviewers in different stages of an interview can heighten the verbal differences between truth tellers and liars. We looked at the effect of (i) having the same interviewers ask both a normal chronological order question at Stage One and a reverse order question at Stage Two (‘Same Interviewers’ condition) and (ii) changing interviewers after Stage One so that the interviewers who ask the normal order question at Stage One are different from the interviewers who ask the reverse order question at Stage Two (‘Changed Interviewers’ condition). For truth tellers, the reverse order question at Stage Two of the interview and the introduction of new interviewers at Stage Two may elicit new information. Anderson and Pichert (1978) showed that recalling an event from a different perspective stimulates an interviewee to think again, subsequently evoking new information. Similarly, recalling an event in reverse order in the presence of two new