Encyclopedia of Psychology and Law

Developing Rapport.Witnesses, and especially victims,

are often asked to give detailed descriptions of intimate,

personal experiences to police officers, who are com-

plete strangers. If anything, the police investigator’s

formal appearance (badge, uniform, gun) may create a

psychological barrier between the police officer and the

witness. To overcome this barrier, police interviewers

should invest time at the beginning of the interview to

develop a meaningful, personal rapport with the wit-

ness, a feature often absent in police interviews.

Active Witness Participation.The witness has extensive

first-hand information about the crime. Therefore, the

witness, and not the interviewer, should be doing most

of the mental work. In practice, however, police inter-

viewers often dominate the social interaction with wit-

nesses by asking many questions that elicit only brief

answers. This relegates witnesses to a passive role,

waiting for the police to ask questions. Interviewers

can induce witnesses to take a more active role by

(a) explicitly requesting them to do so, (b) asking open-

ended questions, (c) not interrupting witnesses during

their narrative responses, and (d) constructing the social

dynamic so that witnesses perceive themselves to be the

“experts” and therefore the dominant person in the con-

versation. The last point is especially important when

interviewing children.

Memory and Cognition

Both the witness and the interviewer are engaged in

demanding cognitive tasks: The witness is attempting

to recall and describe in detail a complex event; the

interviewer is listening to the witness’s response, gen-

erating and testing hypotheses about the crime, formu-

lating questions, and notating the witness’s answers.

Because these tasks are cognitively demanding, the

witness’s and the interviewer’s cognitive resources

must be used efficiently.

Context Reinstatement.Retrieving information from

memory is most efficient when the context of the orig-

inal event is re-created at the time of recall. Interviewers

should therefore instruct witnesses to mentally re-

create their cognitive and emotional states that existed

at the time of the original event (What were your

thoughts and emotions during the crime?).

Limited Mental Resources.Witnesses and interview-

ers have only limited mental resources to process

information. Hence, their performance suffers when

they engage in other difficult tasks concurrently.

Interviewers can minimize overloading witnesses by

asking fewer, but more open-ended, questions. This

also makes the interviewer’s task easier by not having

to formulate many questions. Interviewers can also

promote a more efficient use of witnesses’ limited

mental resources by minimizing physical (extraneous

noises) and psychological distractions (direct eye con-

tact) during the interview.

Witness-Compatible Questioning. Each witness’s

mental record of an event is unique. Some witnesses

may have focused on the perpetrator’s face, whereas

others may have focused on the weapon. Interviewers

should tailor their questions to each witness’s unique

perceptions during the crime, instead of asking all

witnesses the same set of questions. Interviewers

often violate this rule by using a standardized check-

list of questions for all witnesses.

The accessibility of event details varies during the

course of the interview as the witness’s mental images

change. Event details will be most accessible when

they are perceptually related to the witness’s current

mental image. Therefore, interviewers should be sen-

sitive to the witness’s currently active mental image

and ask questions that are compatible with that image.

Multiple and Varied Retrieval.The more often wit-

nesses search through their memories of the crime, the

more new details they will recall. Interviewers can

make use of this principle by (a) asking witnesses to

describe the critical event several times during the

interview and (b) interviewing witnesses on two or

more occasions. If witnesses attempt to recall the tar-

get event repeatedly, they should be directed to think

about the event in various ways, since different

retrieval cues will activate different aspects of a com-

plex event. For instance, interviewers might encour-

age witnesses to describe the crime both visually

(describe what the people and objects looked like) and

temporally (describe the sequence of events).

Minimizing Constructive Recall. Witnesses may con-

struct memories of a crime by incorporating informa-

tion derived from other sources—for example, the

media, other witnesses, or even the interviewer.

Interviewers should therefore be careful about not leak-

ing information to witnesses either nonverbally (e.g.,

by smiling or paying increased attention when the

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