Police interviewing styles and confessions in Japan

Abstract

Psychological studies of suspects' confessions have been conducted mostly in English-speaking and European countries, and the results may not generalise to countries whose cultures and policing practices differ. In particular, the difference between Japanese and Western laws may affect the roles that police interviewers play in suspects' confessions. This study examined the interviewing techniques used by Japanese police officers and associated features of the suspects' confessions. An extensive questionnaire was completed by 276 police officers across Japan. Detailed ratings of their interview techniques were factor analysed, yielding five factors: Presentation of Evidence, Confrontation, Rapport Building, Active Listening, and Discussion of the Crime. Based on these five factors, we identified four interviewing styles: Evidence-focused, Confrontational, Relationship-focused, and Undifferentiated. When interrogators employed the Relationship-focused interviewing style, suspects were more likely to make full confessions and to provide new information. By contrast, suspects were more likely to make partial confessions and were less cooperative when the police officers employed an Evidence-focused style.

Keywords:

• interrogation
• police interviewing techniques
• interviewing style
• relationship-focused
• confession

Acknowledgements

This study was conducted as part of the first author's doctoral dissertation at the University of Cambridge. The authors are grateful to the National Police Agency for assistance in conducting the study.

Notes

1. Descriptive statistics, cluster analysis and ANOVAs were conducted by SPSS (version 17). When conducting Exploratory Factor Analysis, Mplus (version 6) was employed since it could handle the missing values using a direct ML method.

2. Robust Tests of Equality Means was conducted because Levene's tests revealed that homogeneity of variance was not met (Field, 2005).

3. Tests of the homogeneity of variance on these variables using Levene's test revealed significant effects for items 5 and 6. Thus, Robust Tests of Equality Means were conducted for these items.