Suggestive question

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A suggestive question is one that implies that a certain answer should be given in response, [1] [2] or falsely presents a presupposition in the question as accepted fact. [3] [4] Such a question distorts the memory thereby tricking the person into answering in a specific way that might or might not be true or consistent with their actual feelings, and can be deliberate or unintentional. For example, the phrasing "Don't you think this was wrong?" is more suggestive than "Do you think this was wrong?" despite the difference of only one word. The former may subtly pressure the respondent into responding "yes", whereas the latter is far more direct. [1] Repeated questions can make people think their first answer is wrong and lead them to change their answer, or it can cause people to continuously answer until the interrogator gets the exact response that they desire. The diction used by the interviewer can also be an influencing factor to the response given by the interrogated individual.

Contents

Experimental research by psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has established that trying to answer such questions can create confabulation in eyewitnesses. [4] For example, participants in an experiment may all view the same video clip of a car crash. Participants are assigned at random in one of two groups. The participants in the first group are asked "How fast was the car moving when it passed by the stop sign?" The participants in the other group are asked a similar question that does not refer to a stop sign. Later, the participants from the first group are more likely to remember seeing a stop sign in the video clip, even though there was in fact no such sign, [3] raising serious questions about the validity of information elicited through poorly phrased questions during eyewitness testimony.

Types

Direct questions

Direct questions lead to one word answers when explanations are sometimes needed. This could include questions like "Do you get it?" and "Where did it happen?"

Repeated questions

Repeated questioning elicit certain types of answers. Repeated questions make people think their first answer was wrong, lead them to change their answer, or cause people to keep answering until the interrogator gets the exact response that they desire. Elizabeth Loftus states that errors in answers are dramatically reduced if a question is only asked once. [5]

Forced choice questions

Yes/no or forced choice questions, like "Should we convict this murderer?", force people to choose between two choices when the answer could be neither of the choices. This generates more "interviewer-talks" moments, where the interviewer is talking and controlling most of the interview. [6] This type of question is also known as a false dilemma.

Presumptuous questions

Presumptuous questions can either be balanced or unbalanced. Unbalanced questions ask questions only from the point of view of one side of an argument. For example, an interrogator might ask, "Do you favor the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?" This question assumes that the person's only point of view in the situation is that a person who is convicted must either get the death penalty or not. The second type of presumptuous question is a "balanced question." This is when the interrogator uses opposite questions to make the witness believe that the question is balanced when the reality is that it is not. For example, the interrogator would ask, "Do you favor life in prison, without the possibility of parole?" This type of question may seem balanced when in reality it is still influencing the person to discuss life in prison and no other choice. [5]

Confirmatory questions

Confirmatory questioning leads to answers that can only support a certain point. Here, the interviewer forces the person to make sure his or her answers make them out to be extroverted or introverted. If they want them to look extroverted they would ask questions like "How do you make a party more fun?" and "When are you talkative?" If they want the person to look introverted they ask questions like "Have you ever been left out of a group?" or "Can you be more hyper sometimes?".

Research

Considerable attention has been devoted to suggestive questions and their effects. Experimental research by Elizabeth Loftus, an American psychologist and an expert on human memory, has established that trying to answer such questions can create confabulation in eyewitnesses. [7] Loftus conducted an experiment where participants all viewed the same video clip of a car crash. Participants were then assigned at random to one of two groups. Group one was asked, "How fast was the car moving when it passed by the stop sign?" The participants in the other group were asked a similar question that did not refer to a stop sign. The results showed participants from the first group were more likely to remember seeing a stop sign in the video clip, even though there was in fact no such sign. [8] Loftus stated that everyone is affected by suggestive questioning, and it comes from environmental factors instead of innate factors.

William S. Cassel, a professor at the University of New Orleans conducted an experiment that was performed on Kindergarten, Grade 2, Grade 4, and adult subjects. They were required to view a brief video of two children arguing about the use of a bicycle. One week later subjects were asked for their free recall of the events in the video. It was then followed by sets of hierarchically arranged, increasingly suggestive questions that suggested a correct (positive-leading), an incorrect (misleading), or no specific (unbiased-leading) answer. The final level of questioning for each item was a three-alternative multiple-choice question. Correct free recall varied with age, with the kindergarten and Grade 2 children generally following the lead of the first-level questions more so than the older subjects. Older children were as accurate as adults in responding to questions about the central items, but not so for non-central items. Developmental differences were found in responses to repeated suggestive questioning, with kindergarten children following misleading questions and changing answers more often than older subjects. On the final multiple-choice questions, kindergarten children were able to provide the correct answer as often as they had to the initial questions, despite intervening errors. [9]

Loftus and John Palmer developed the Misinformation Effect. It describes participants witnessing an accident whose responses change if questions are worded differently. They found that people tend to exaggerate what they really saw. [10] Twenty-five percent of the participants claimed they saw broken glass because the word "smashed" instead of "hit" was used. [10]

Professionals at risk of using suggestive questions

Interrogators and police

Unethical or unskilled police officers can use suggestive questioning in interrogation rooms; such interrogators use different techniques and types of questions in order to get people to confess: they use response framing when getting people to confess falsely. This is when they purposely limit certain answers and suggest others. For example, they would ask someone if they were at the house at 1, 2, or 3 o'clock, forcing them to think it had to have been one of those choices. It causes people to recall things from the prompt instead of their memories. Also, interrogators use stereotype induction, which is when they tell the witness only negative characteristics of the alleged perpetrator. Part of stereotype induction is the incriminating condition where everything the witness says is labeled as bad. The detective would slightly shake his head or tell the witness to try again. This contrasts with another interrogating option of using a neutral interview technique, which includes both the bad and good aspects of the perpetrator. [5]

The more time interrogators take to ask witnesses about an incident, the more the memory of the event would fade and people would forget what really happened. Then, after the memory is retrieved, some aspects are reconstructed which causes error. Not even confidence in what witnesses think they saw can be correlated with accurate memory. According to the psychologist Philip Zimbardo, "Misinformed individuals can come to believe the misinformation in which they feel confidence". [11]

Therapists

Some therapists are at risk of using suggestive questions on clients while discussing the matter of past traumatic events. Sigmund Freud's definition of repressed memory is "the mind's conscious and unconscious avoidance of unpleasant wishes, thoughts, and memories." [12] However, there has been very little evidence of this type of memory. Some therapists claim that repression causes people to forget frightful events of sexual or physical abuse as a psychological defense. [12] Through improperly phrased interviewing questions, a therapist can convince their client to agree that there is such a thing as repressed memory, and therefore abuse had to have occurred, but the patient just does not remember it. Repetitive questions change clients' answers from a reluctant "perhaps" to a definite "for sure". The use of suggestive questioning by therapists changes perceptions and can cause entire memories to be created. [12]

See also

Related Research Articles

A leading question is a question that suggests a particular answer and contains information the examiner is looking to have confirmed. The use of leading questions in court to elicit testimony is restricted in order to reduce the ability of the examiner to direct or influence the evidence presented. Depending on the circumstances, leading questions can be objectionable or proper.

In law, a witness is someone who, either voluntarily or under compulsion, provides testimonial evidence, either oral or written, of what they know or claim to know.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Interview</span> Structured series of questions and answers

An interview is a structured conversation where one participant asks questions, and the other provides answers. In common parlance, the word "interview" refers to a one-on-one conversation between an interviewer and an interviewee. The interviewer asks questions to which the interviewee responds, usually providing information. That information may be used or provided to other audiences immediately or later. This feature is common to many types of interviews – a job interview or interview with a witness to an event may have no other audience present at the time, but the answers will be later provided to others in the employment or investigative process. An interview may also transfer information in both directions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizabeth Loftus</span> American cognitive psychologist

Elizabeth F. Loftus is an American psychologist who is best known in relation to the misinformation effect, false memory and criticism of recovered memory therapies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Weapon focus</span> Psychological phenomenon

Weapon focus is the concentration on a weapon by a witness of a crime and the subsequent inability to accurately remember other details of the crime. Weapon focus is a factor that heavily affects the reliability of eyewitness testimony. This effect involves a witness to a crime diverting his or her attention to the weapon the perpetrator is holding, thus causing memory impairments and leaving less attention for other details in the scene, such as the attacker’s face, clothing or vehicle.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Response bias</span> Type of bias

Response bias is a general term for a wide range of tendencies for participants to respond inaccurately or falsely to questions. These biases are prevalent in research involving participant self-report, such as structured interviews or surveys. Response biases can have a large impact on the validity of questionnaires or surveys.

The "lost in the mall" technique or experiment is a memory implantation technique used to demonstrate that confabulations about events that never took place – such as having been lost in a shopping mall as a child – can be created through suggestions made to experimental subjects that their older relative was present at the time. It was first developed by Elizabeth Loftus and her undergraduate student Jim Coan, as support for the thesis that it is possible to implant entirely false memories in people. The technique was developed in the context of the debate about the existence of repressed memories and false memory syndrome.

The Gudjonsson suggestibility scale (GSS) is a psychological test that measures suggestibility of a subject. It was created in 1983 in England by psychologist Gísli Hannes Guðjónsson, who had been a detective in Iceland. It involves reading a short story to the subject and testing recall. This test has been used in court cases in several jurisdictions but has been the subject of various criticisms.

In eyewitness identification, in criminal law, evidence is received from a witness "who has actually seen an event and can so testify in court".

In psychology, a false memory is a phenomenon where someone recalls something that did not actually happen or recalls it differently from the way it actually happened. Suggestibility, activation of associated information, the incorporation of misinformation, and source misattribution have been suggested to be several mechanisms underlying a variety of types of false memory.

The cognitive interview (CI) is a method of interviewing eyewitnesses and victims about what they remember from a crime scene. Using four retrievals, the primary focus of the cognitive interview is to make witnesses and victims of a situation aware of all the events that transpired. The interview aids in minimizing both misinterpretation and the uncertainty that is otherwise seen in the questioning process of traditional police interviews. Cognitive interviews reliably enhance the process of memory retrieval and have been found to elicit memories without generating inaccurate accounts or confabulations. Cognitive interviews are increasingly used in police investigations, and training programs and manuals have been created.

Eyewitness testimony is the account a bystander or victim gives in the courtroom, describing what that person observed that occurred during the specific incident under investigation. Ideally this recollection of events is detailed; however, this is not always the case. This recollection is used as evidence to show what happened from a witness' point of view. Memory recall has been considered a credible source in the past, but has recently come under attack as forensics can now support psychologists in their claim that memories and individual perceptions can be unreliable, manipulated, and biased. As a result of this, many countries, and states within the United States, are now attempting to make changes in how eyewitness testimony is presented in court. Eyewitness testimony is a specialized focus within cognitive psychology.

Forensic developmental psychology is a field of psychology that focuses on "children's actions and reactions in a forensic context" and "children's reports that they were victims or witnesses of a crime". Bruck and Poole (2002) first coined the term "forensic developmental psychology". Although forensic developmental psychology specifically focuses on a child's reliability, credibility, and competency in the courtroom setting, it also includes topics such as autobiographical memory, memory distortion, eyewitness identification, narrative construction, personality, and attachment.

Memory conformity, also known as social contagion of memory, is the phenomenon where memories or information reported by others influences an individual and is incorporated into the individual's memory. Memory conformity is a memory error due to both social influences and cognitive mechanisms. Social contamination of false memory can be exemplified in prominent situations involving social interactions, such as eyewitness testimony. Research on memory conformity has revealed that such suggestibility and errors with source monitoring has far reaching consequences, with important legal and social implications. It is one of many social influences on memory.

In psychology, the misattribution of memory or source misattribution is the misidentification of the origin of a memory by the person making the memory recall. Misattribution is likely to occur when individuals are unable to monitor and control the influence of their attitudes, toward their judgments, at the time of retrieval. Misattribution is divided into three components: cryptomnesia, false memories, and source confusion. It was originally noted as one of Daniel Schacter's seven sins of memory.

Eyewitness memory is a person's episodic memory for a crime or other witnessed dramatic event. Eyewitness testimony is often relied upon in the judicial system. It can also refer to an individual's memory for a face, where they are required to remember the face of their perpetrator, for example. However, the accuracy of eyewitness memories is sometimes questioned because there are many factors that can act during encoding and retrieval of the witnessed event which may adversely affect the creation and maintenance of the memory for the event. Experts have found evidence to suggest that eyewitness memory is fallible.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Misinformation effect</span> Effect of later events on a previous memory

The misinformation effect occurs when a person's recall of episodic memories becomes less accurate because of post-event information. The misinformation effect has been studied since the mid-1970s. Elizabeth Loftus is one of the most influential researchers in the field. One theory is that original information and the misleading information that was presented after the fact become blended together. Another theory is that the misleading information overwrites the original information. Scientists suggest that because the misleading information is the most recent, it is more easily retrieved.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reconstructive memory</span> A theory of memory recall

Reconstructive memory is a theory of memory recall, in which the act of remembering is influenced by various other cognitive processes including perception, imagination, motivation, semantic memory and beliefs, amongst others. People view their memories as being a coherent and truthful account of episodic memory and believe that their perspective is free from an error during recall. However, the reconstructive process of memory recall is subject to distortion by other intervening cognitive functions and operations such as individual perceptions, social influences, and world knowledge, all of which can lead to errors during reconstruction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eyewitness memory (child testimony)</span>

An eyewitness testimony is a statement given under oath by a person present at an event who can describe what happened. During circumstances in which a child is a witness to the event, the child can be used to deliver a testimony on the stand. The credibility of a child, however, is often questioned due to their underdeveloped memory capacity and overall brain physiology. Researchers found that eyewitness memory requires high-order memory capacity even for well-developed adult brain. Because a child's brain is not yet fully developed, each child witness must be assessed by the proper authorities to determine their reliability as a witness and whether they are mature enough to accurately recall the event, provide important details and withstand leading questions.

Memory implantation is a technique used in cognitive psychology to investigate human memory. In memory implantation studies researchers make people believe that they remember an event that actually never happened. The false memories that have been successfully implanted in people's memories include remembering being lost in a mall as a child, taking a hot air balloon ride, and putting slime in a teacher's desk in primary school.

References

  1. 1 2 Crisp, Richard D. (1957). Marketing research. Tata McGraw-Hill. p. 100. ISBN   978-0-07-463535-3.
  2. ↑ Copeland, James M. "Cross Examination in Extemp" (PDF). National Forensic League. Retrieved 6 April 2010.
  3. 1 2 Loftus, Elizabeth F. (1996). Eyewitness testimony. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ISBN   978-0-674-28777-8.
  4. 1 2 "AS Psychology holah.co.uk" . Retrieved 19 April 2010.
  5. 1 2 3 Lyon, Thomas. "Questioning Children: The Effects Of Suggestive And Repeated Questioning". Electronic Publishing, Inc. SSRN   199353.{{cite web}}: Missing or empty |url= (help)
  6. ↑ Peterson, Carole. "Forced-choice: Are forensic interviewers asking the right questions?".
  7. ↑ AS Psychology holah.co.uk
  8. ↑ Loftus, Elizabeth F. (1996). Eyewitness testimony. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ISBN   0-674-28777-0.
  9. ↑ Cassel, Roebers, Bjorklund, William S., Claudia E.M., David F. (1996). "Developmental Patterns of Eyewitness Responses to Repeated and Increasingly Suggestive Questions". Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. 61 (2): 116–133. doi:10.1006/jecp.1996.0008.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  10. 1 2 Zimbardo, Philip. "Suggestibility: External Cues Distort or Create Memories." Psychology AP Edition with Discovering Psychology. Ed'. Suzan Hartman. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2010. Print
  11. ↑ Zimbardo, Philip (2010). Psychology AP Edition with Discovering Psychology. Ed. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. p. 262.
  12. 1 2 3 Ofshe, Richard; Ethan Watters (March–April 1993). "Making Monsters". Society. 30 (3): 4–16. doi:10.1007/bf02695218. S2CID   189886146.
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