Abstract
After witnessing an incident, police officers may write their report collaboratively. We examined how collaboration influences the amount and accuracy of information in police reports. Eighty-six police officers participated, in pairs, in a live training scenario. Officers wrote a report about the incident, either with their partner or individually. Reports by two officers working together (collaborative performance) contained less information than reports by two officers working individually (nominal performance), with no difference in accuracy. After the first report, officers who had worked individually wrote a collaborative report. Police officers who recorded their own memories prior to collaboration included less incorrect information in the collaborative report than police officers who wrote a collaborative report immediately after the incident. Finally, content-focused retrieval strategies (acknowledge, repeat, rephrase, elaborate) during the officers’ discussion positively predicted the amount of information in collaborative reports. Practical recommendations for the police and suggestions for further research are provided.
Highlights
Police officers witness a wide range of events about which they are required to write a report, such as criminal acts observed during stakeouts or patrols; conversations about illegal activity overheard via phone taps; observations of weapons, drugs, and other evidence during house searches; and descriptions of their own and suspects’ behavior during arrests
This error-pruning effect stands in sharp contrast to findings in the eyewitness literature, Vredeveldt et al / WRITING ALONE OR TOGETHER 1073 which show that witnesses often adopt each other’s errors
If there is any indication of nonindependence, as reflected in intraclass correlations significant at the liberal alpha level of .20 (Kenny et al, 2006; Myers, 1979), pair performance should be treated as the unit of analysis rather than individual performance
Summary
Police officers witness a wide range of events about which they are required to write a report, such as criminal acts observed during stakeouts or patrols; conversations about illegal activity overheard via phone taps; observations of weapons, drugs, and other evidence during house searches; and descriptions of their own and suspects’ behavior during arrests. The loss in recall quantity as a result of collaboration is typically offset by an increase in quality: collaborative groups make significantly fewer errors than nominal groups (e.g., Harris, Barnier, & Sutton, 2012; Hyman, Cardwell, & Roy, 2013; Ross, Spencer, Blatz, & Restorick, 2008) This error-pruning effect stands in sharp contrast to findings in the eyewitness literature, Vredeveldt et al / WRITING ALONE OR TOGETHER 1073 which show that witnesses often adopt each other’s errors (known as social contagion, see Roediger, Meade, & Bergman, 2001, or memory conformity, see Wright, Self, & Justice, 2000). This prediction has not been borne out in previous studies, perhaps because the transactive memory system does not improve further once the partners have known each other for a relatively short amount of time (Vredeveldt et al, 2016; Wegner et al, 1991) or because a large amount of time spent together does not guarantee a good quality relationship (Barnier et al, 2014; Johansson, Andersson, & Rönnberg, 2005)
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