Abstract
Pairs of eyewitnesses with a content-focused interaction style remember significantly more about witnessed incidents. We examined whether content-focused retrieval strategies can be taught. Seventy-five pairs of witnesses were interviewed thrice about an event. The first and third interview were conducted individually for all witnesses. The second interview was individual, collaborative without instruction, or collaborative with instruction. Pairs in the latter condition were instructed to actively listen to and elaborate upon each other's contributions. The strategy instruction had no effect on retrieval strategies used, nor on the amount or accuracy of reported information. However, pairs who spontaneously adopted a content-focused interaction style during the collaborative interview remembered significantly more. Thus, our findings show that effective retrieval strategies cannot be taught, at least not with the current instructions. During the second interview, we observed collaborative inhibition and error pruning. When considering the total amount of information reported across the first two interviews, however, collaboration had no inhibitory effect on correct recall, yet the error pruning benefits remained. These findings suggest that investigative interviewers should interview witnesses separately first, and then interview pairs of witnesses collaboratively.
Highlights
In the past two decades, legal psychologists have recommended that eyewitnesses should be prevented from talking to each other
If there is any indication of nonindependence, pair performance should be used as unit of analysis rather than individual performance (Kenny et al, 2006)
We examined how collaboration with or without strategy instructions affected the amount of correct and incorrect information reported by pairs of witnesses
Summary
In the past two decades, legal psychologists have recommended that eyewitnesses should be prevented from talking to each other This recommendation is based on a series of studies showing that witnesses can contaminate each other’s memory, a phenomenon known as memory conformity (Wright et al, 2000; Gabbert et al, 2003) or social contagion (Roediger et al, 2001; Meade and Roediger, 2002). Recent research on collaborative eyewitness interviews shows that discussion between witnesses does have benefits (Vredeveldt et al, 2016a, 2017). In those studies, collaboration between two witnesses resulted in more accurate testimony. The error pruning effect observed in collaborative eyewitness interviews is in line with findings on collaborative recall of simple stimuli, which
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