Tactics of interviewing eyewitnesses

In the study of NOF, it is often necessary to rely on eyewitness accounts, especially when there is no material evidence. It is generally accepted that the testimony of witnesses and victims reflect an objective picture of what happened. At the same time, there are many cases when the testimony of witnesses and victims does not reflect the true picture of the events that took place: witnesses give deliberately false testimony or their conscientious delusion takes place. 

Types of false evidence

Among the types of false evidence, delusion and deception are distinguished. Let's look at each of them in detail.

Delusion

Delusion arises as a result of an error.

An error is a discrepancy between an object/phenomenon taken as a standard and an object/phenomenon compared to the first, that is, the result of direct cognition or action.

Delusion is the result of a certain inadequate attitude to an error, born on the basis of an error. This is a follow-up procedure, one of the three possible consequences of an error.

• a person recognizes a mistake and thereby avoids delusion;
• a person does not recognize an error, takes it for a "non-error", for the truth and thereby falls into error;
• a person cannot decide whether it is a mistake or not, and remains in ignorance of the truth or error, i.e. finds himself in a state of uncertainty.

There are two types of misconceptions: conscientious and unscrupulous. 

A conscientious error is an error that is not recognized as an error, i.e. a person takes an error for the truth. At the same time, it is assumed that he sincerely believes that he is expressing a true, and not a false, judgment. Conscientious, i.e. not intentional and unconscious delusions of this kind, can be called latent or hidden delusions. A subspecies of conscientious delusion as an unintentional and unconscious mistake for the truth is self-deception. Sometimes a person is so deeply convinced that his original judgment is true that the real truth seems unacceptable to him. 

An unscrupulous delusion is a delusion that is recognized and recognized by a person in front of himself, but not in front of others. That is, a person knows that this is a lie, but claims that it is true.

Deception

Deception is a false, incorrect message that can mislead the person to whom it is addressed. It is necessary to distinguish deception as an action of a subject pursuing certain interests, and deception as a result, i.e. an action that has achieved its goal, because often this action turns out to be ineffective: deception is recognized, exposed.

Deception as a false message or an action of a deceiver appears in three forms:

• selfdeception;
• obviously untrue, but disinterested judgment;
• a deliberate deception with a selfish purpose to mislead.

Reasons for false testimonies

Before proceeding to the tactics of interviewing eyewitnesses, it is necessary to understand the causes of false evidence.

It should be understood that a person perceives the surrounding reality through his senses, and the criterion of authenticity in this case is his life experience. He is guided by the same experience, passing the perceived information to other people. 

Based on this, let's try to understand the nature of conscious and unconscious deception.

Reasons for unconscious deception or why "Lies like an eyewitness"

Erroneous testimony of witnesses and victims can be caused by:

1. These or other defects of their sensory apparatus, errors in perception, memorization, preservation and reproduction of the perceived. They can also include the shortcomings of the senses, for example, myopia, poor hearing.
2. An unfavorable psychological state at the time of their perception of the event of interest to the investigation. Such states can be excitement, fear, fatigue, confusion, depression, etc.
3. The influence of the "experimenter effect". The term is used to describe a number of subtle signals coming from an experimenter that affect the performance or response of subjects in an experiment. They may be unconscious nonverbal, such as muscle tension or gestures. They can be vocal, for example, the tone of the voice. Research shows that the expectations and biases of the experimenter can be conveyed to the subjects in subtle, unintended ways and these signals can significantly affect the result. In our case, this is a person who conducts an eyewitness survey.
4. The natural structure of human memory.

The last point is worth mentioning in more detail.

The reasons for false or distorted memories have been known to psychologists for a long time. Among them is a special personality type that makes a person notice one thing and lose sight of another, and the power of stereotypes that send perception down the beaten path of familiar associations and vice versa, as well as unbridled fantasy and suggestibility... A false memory can be formed immediately after perception or even in the process of perception itself, or maybe after a while, when consciousness accidentally revives an event in front of the mind's eye or intentionally evokes it from the depths of memory. The more time passes from the event to the moment of remembering it, the greater the risk of distorted reproduction of this event in memory due to the imposition of new impressions and experiences that have left a trace in the personality of the rememberer.

In addition to psychological reasons, false memories also have a purely physiological basis. For example, biologists have come to the hypothesis that in the brain, in the neural circuits through which electrical impulses circulate, carrying encoded information about the perceived, protein synthesis occurs. I.e. memory has a molecular nature, and some chemicals act on memory like an electric shock. They make it difficult to remember what is remembered without them without any difficulty.

Reasons for conscious deception

There are many kinds of lies. There is a lie consisting entirely of fiction. It is rare, because it is easily exposed. Incomplete lies are more common when a liar processes the truth, distorting it in his own way. At the same time, trying to inspire confidence in his words, he most often starts from genuine events, distorting them only to the extent necessary. False testimony in the absolute majority of cases belong to this type, are fictitious only in that part, the truthful coverage of which is undesirable for the interviewee.

Paul Ekman in the book "Psychology of Lies" notes two main forms of lies: silence and distortion. And an unobtainable picture is achieved using the following techniques:

• omission, concealment, exclusion from the message of individual elements of the described event, their own actions and actions of other actors;
• adding fictional details or elements to the description, with the help of which the desired character and coloring are given to the event;
• rearrangement and displacement in the description of individual fragments of an event by their place, time, sequence, relationship, etc.
• replacing individual elements of the event with other, fictional circumstances and details.

A person can resort to lying not in the name of the process of lying itself, but for the sake of satisfying any selfish and other personal interests. Therefore, one of the main elements of the psychological mechanism of false testimony are the motives and goals of lying, which directly underlie the choice of a behavior model, and therefore are the foundation of false testimony. 

Among the reasons that give rise to false testimony of witnesses and victims may be:

• the impact that they experienced from the interested parties (requests of the latter, persuasion, bribery, blackmail, etc.);
• a painful state of mind;
• selfish motives.

The diagnosis of lies is based on knowledge of the peculiarities of the psychology of thinking. In the consciousness of a lying person, two images, two events coexist in parallel: the fictional one, which he wants to pass off as real, and the real one. In front of the liar's mind's eye, there is always a true picture of what happened, it is bright, stable and detailed. And he has to suppress it all the time, replace it with fictional images, incomparably weaker and blurred. He has to, as it were, banish from memory what happened (and therefore remembered well), and remember what is only invented (and therefore remembered more difficult); he has to maneuver between the truth that cannot be told, the truth that can be told, and the lie that must be replaced by the concealed truth.

At the same time, the liar must never lose his way, do not forget what he said earlier, repeat exactly, in all the details of his inventions in a week and a month. A liar always runs the risk of speaking out, i.e. giving out some bit of truthful information, which immediately contradicts what was said earlier and reveals guilty awareness. 

The version that your interlocutor (eyewitness, victim, suspect, accused), despite his assurances of the truthfulness of his testimony, reports false information, can be based on the establishment and analysis of the following circumstances:

• messages by this person of various information on the same occasion;
• uncertainty, incorrectness of the information contained in the testimony;
• the presence of coincidences in the smallest details of the testimony of different persons about the same thing;
• "sayings" in statements indicating that the person denies knowledge of the circumstances of the event about which he is being interrogated;
• poverty of the emotional background of the testimony (schematicity, facelessness, pallor of the testimony);
• persistent emphasis by the interlocutor of his integrity and disinterest in the outcome of the case;
• his evasion of answering a direct question;
• concealment of obvious facts that could not but be known to this person.

Each of these circumstances can be considered as a sign of your interlocutor's lies. 

Of course, it is impossible to draw such conclusions on any one basis. It has been established that lie recognition is possible at the following levels: 

• verbal (signs of a lie can be considered the absence of minor details that make the story "alive", the desire for generalization and uncertainty. Stiffness. Fear of "going beyond" your text.);
• non-verbal (facial expressions, posture, gestures);
• psychophysiological (change in pulse rate; change in blood pressure; changes in the rhythm of breathing; pronounced changes in the galvanic skin reaction, the appearance of profuse sweating; changes in the electrocardiogram; changes in the picture of the electroencephalogram, etc.). [4]

Tactics of interviewing NOF eyewitnesses

Based on all of the above, it is possible to make a tactic of interviewing eyewitnesses (victims) of the NOF.

First of all, it is always necessary to assume that the eyewitness is telling the truth until proven otherwise.

If there are several witnesses, it is best to interview one at a time. To improve the quality of the data obtained as a result of the survey, the first stage can be asked to record and sketch the observation in detail in free form without contact with the researcher.

Stages of conducting the survey:

After receiving a message about the NOF, but before the direct interview of witnesses, it is necessary (if possible):

1. Collect information about a phenomenon similar to the one described in the message (history, signs, geography, etc.).
2. Find out if there is information about this NOF in available sources.
3. Make a plan for interviewing witnesses and an approximate list of possible questions.

At the time of interviewing witnesses:

1. Determine the condition of the interviewee and establish psychological contact;
2. Ask an eyewitness in a free form to tell about what happened without interrupting him.
3. Ask additional (but not leading) questions.
4. You can familiarize an eyewitness with the recording of his survey and ask him to clarify whether the information provided was recorded correctly.
5. To clarify the data, you can repeat the survey after a while.

To improve the quality of the investigation, it is possible to record testimony by audio and/or video recording.