Interview & Interrogation Techniques Flashcards

The 'Scharff technique,' developed from World War II interrogation research, achieves intelligence disclosure primarily through:

Answer: Projecting omniscience — implying the interrogator already knows everything — to prompt confirmation and elaboration

By creating the impression that the interrogator already possesses all relevant information, the Scharff technique reduces the subject's incentive to withhold and prompts them to fill perceived gaps.

During a structured interview, 'open-ended prompts' such as 'Tell me everything that happened' are preferable to specific questions primarily because:

Answer: They minimize contamination and allow the interviewee's own memory to guide the account

Open-ended prompts reduce interviewer suggestion and retrieval cuing, letting the subject generate information from their own memory rather than responding to potentially leading specifics.

A subject being interviewed says: 'To the best of my knowledge, I never met that individual.' The hedge phrase 'to the best of my knowledge' is notable because:

Answer: It qualifies the assertion and may signal the subject is aware of information that contradicts the denial

Hedging phrases create verbal escape routes, potentially indicating the subject knows the statement may not withstand scrutiny and is pre-building deniability.

False confession research (Kassin & Gudjonsson) identifies 'internalized false confessions' as particularly dangerous because:

Answer: The confessor actually comes to believe their own false confession, making recantation psychologically difficult

Internalized false confessions occur when a suspect is led to genuinely doubt their own memory and believe they committed the act, making them especially persuasive to juries and hard to challenge.

The 'change-of-perspective' instruction in cognitive interviews asks witnesses to mentally narrate events from another person's viewpoint in order to:

Answer: Access additional details encoded from spatial angles not covered by the witness's own perspective

Shifting perspective activates different associative memory cues, recovering details the witness may not have consciously registered from their own vantage point.

When a juvenile is questioned by FBI agents, special considerations beyond standard Miranda include:

Answer: Courts evaluate juvenile waivers under a 'totality of circumstances' standard that weighs age, maturity, and understanding more heavily

J.D.B. v. North Carolina confirmed that age is a relevant factor in determining custody and the validity of Miranda waivers, requiring courts to assess whether a juvenile meaningfully understood their rights.

The 'funnel approach' to interview question sequencing begins with broad open questions and progressively narrows to specific probes because:

Answer: Starting broad maximizes the interviewee's uncontaminated free recall before directed questioning introduces potential suggestion

The funnel approach preserves the integrity of the witness's independent memory by collecting the maximum free narrative before introducing specific, potentially leading questions.