Assessing the Diagnosticity of a Persuasion-Based and a Dialogue-Based Interrogation Approach

Abstract

The current study assessed the relative propensity of a persuasion-based and a dialogue-based interrogation approach to generate true and false confessions (i.e., their diagnosticity). Following the Russano cheating paradigm, participants were first either induced or not induced to cheat on an experimental task to create innocent and guilty conditions. An experimenter, blind to the participants’ guilt or innocence, then attempted to generate a confession using a persuasion-based or a dialogue-based interrogation approach. Chi-square analyses showed that both interrogation approaches generated an equally high proportion of true confessions from guilty participants (95% for both approaches; p = 0.942) but that the persuasion-based approach generated substantially more false confessions from innocent participants than the dialogue-based approach (45% vs. 0%, respectively; p = 0.001). The dialogue-based approach’s clear advantage over the persuasion-based approach in this study adds to the call for law enforcement organizations to utilize dialogue-based approaches within real-world interrogations.