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The Economist - Backwards and forwards A modern approach to interviewing witnesses of crimes may make things worse

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PEOPLE love to tell tales. Indeed, even when someone's memory is patchy, he will still do his best to spin the information he has into a credible yarn. This is not a matter of deceit. Rather, it is an established psychological phenomenon in which the brain tries to make sense of fragmentary information. Although such behaviour is natural and normal, it is a nuisance for the forces of law and order when they are trying to find out what happened during an incident by taking statements from witnesses. For this reason, psychologists working with the police often advocate asking witnesses of crimes to say what they saw in reverse order, to stop them making things up to help the story run smoothly. It sounds like sensible advice, and police forces in Australia, Britain, New Zealand, Norway, Spain and Sweden have all adopted it. But a new study suggests that far from improving recall, it makes things worse.

Coral Dando of Lancaster University, in Britain, showed 54 volunteers a short film of a staged mobile-phone robbery. The participants were then split into three groups and, two days later, interviewed about what they remembered from the film. All were asked to describe what they had seen twice, with no wait between the two descriptions. However, the way they were asked to make these descriptions differed from group to group. In one, participants were first told to recall the robbery freely, and then to recall it in reverse order. In another, they were told to recall the robbery in reverse order first and then to recall it freely. The third group was a control. Participants were told to recall the robbery freely on both occasions. All the interviews were recorded and passed to coders who were unaware of the purpose of the study, but who knew all the details of the film. These coders scored every apparent recollection in each interview by noting which items were correct, which were inaccurate (saying a dog was brown when it was really black, for example), and which were complete confabulations—things or events that bore no resemblance at all to anything in the film. A participant's final score for each type of recollection was the number of such items recalled or invented in at least one of his two debriefings.

Period3/09/2011

PEOPLE love to tell tales. Indeed, even when someone's memory is patchy, he will still do his best to spin the information he has into a credible yarn. This is not a matter of deceit. Rather, it is an established psychological phenomenon in which the brain tries to make sense of fragmentary information. Although such behaviour is natural and normal, it is a nuisance for the forces of law and order when they are trying to find out what happened during an incident by taking statements from witnesses. For this reason, psychologists working with the police often advocate asking witnesses of crimes to say what they saw in reverse order, to stop them making things up to help the story run smoothly. It sounds like sensible advice, and police forces in Australia, Britain, New Zealand, Norway, Spain and Sweden have all adopted it. But a new study suggests that far from improving recall, it makes things worse.

Coral Dando of Lancaster University, in Britain, showed 54 volunteers a short film of a staged mobile-phone robbery. The participants were then split into three groups and, two days later, interviewed about what they remembered from the film. All were asked to describe what they had seen twice, with no wait between the two descriptions. However, the way they were asked to make these descriptions differed from group to group. In one, participants were first told to recall the robbery freely, and then to recall it in reverse order. In another, they were told to recall the robbery in reverse order first and then to recall it freely. The third group was a control. Participants were told to recall the robbery freely on both occasions. All the interviews were recorded and passed to coders who were unaware of the purpose of the study, but who knew all the details of the film. These coders scored every apparent recollection in each interview by noting which items were correct, which were inaccurate (saying a dog was brown when it was really black, for example), and which were complete confabulations—things or events that bore no resemblance at all to anything in the film. A participant's final score for each type of recollection was the number of such items recalled or invented in at least one of his two debriefings.

References

TitleThe Economist - Backwards and forwards A modern approach to interviewing witnesses of crimes may make things worse
Date3/09/11
PersonsCoral Dando