Are you talking to me? Influencing behaviour and culture in police interviews

Abstract

This study examines the relationship between two types of influencing behaviour in police interviews (being kind and rational persuasion) and three types of interview effectiveness, i.e. the suspects’ willingness to give a statement, their estimation of the quality of the relationship with the detective, and suspects’ admission. We expected that being kind and rational persuasion (arguments referring to logic and rationality) would have a different effect on suspects from cultures that tend to be direct and content-oriented (low-context cultures) versus cultures in which communication is more indirect and context orientated (high-context cultures). To examine this, experienced police detectives interviewed mock theft suspects from low-context (n=25) and high-context (n=27) cultures. As predicted, and particularly for high-context suspects, being kind in terms of rewarding and offering was positively related to the perceived quality of the relationship of the suspect, while being kind in terms of active listening behaviour was positively related to admissions. Furthermore, and as expected, there was a positive relationship between rational persuasion of the police detective and admissions for low-context suspects, but also a negative relationship between rational persuasion and admissions for high-context suspects.

Keywords:

• influencing behaviour
• investigative interviewing
• detective strategies
• culture
• low-context/high-context
• communication

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Police Academy of the Netherlands – especially Ingeborg van der Oord, Arend de Vries, Theo Derksen, Jacco van Pijkeren, Willem Brouwer – and Moritz Römer and Elmira Dadres for their help with developing the research material and data collection.