FieldP-10 · Account first, challenge later
Interview to Gather, Not to Win
Get an accurate account from a person without manufacturing one.
Step 1
Prepare and Plan
Know the file. Decide what you need, what you already know, and what you will not reveal.
Step 2
Engage and Explain
Build rapport, explain the purpose and the process. Hostility produces compliance, not accuracy.
Step 3
Take the Uninterrupted Account
Let them tell it through before any questioning. Interruption destroys recall and imports your structure into their memory.
Step 4
Use Recall Aids, Not Leading Questions
Ask them to reinstate the context, report everything including what seems trivial, recount out of order, and describe it from another vantage point.
Step 5
Challenge From the Record
Put inconsistencies to them as questions about the record, not as accusations. Accusatory pressure is how false accounts are produced.
Step 6
Close and Evaluate
Summarize back for correction, explain what happens next, then assess what the account did and did not establish — and what to re-check.
Step 7
Watch the Wording of Your Own Questions
Question phrasing changes answers. In Loftus and Palmer's 1974 paper the speed estimates and the broken-glass reports come from two experiments. In the first, “smashed” produced an average of about 40.8 mph against about 34 mph for “hit.” In the second, a week later, more than twice as many of the “smashed” group remembered broken glass that was never there.
How It Fails
The confession that fits the theory and nothing else. Accusatory interrogation is a documented producer of false confessions; a major industry trainer stopped teaching the confrontational method in 2017 for that reason.