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No, Torture Doesn’t Make Terrorists Tell The Truth — But Here’s What Actually Works Over the past five years, psychological research — some involving real terrorist suspects — has shown how to get information from people who don’t want to talk. Now Washington has the chance to put these findings into practice. posted on Aug. 16, 2015, at 9:01 p.m. 
Peter Aldhous BuzzFeed News Reporter... Rather than focusing on stress, the new interrogation research program has concentrated on interviewing techniques that help people remember details about events — and make it harder for liars to keep their story together. Central to this approach is the “cognitive interview,” developed by Ronald Fisher, a psychologist at Florida International University in Miami. Rather than being asked a series of questions, suspects may be told to close their eyes and recall what happened at a key meeting, or draw a sketch of the room in which it took place. They are encouraged to go over events repeatedly and offer details whether or not they seem important. In one test, Fisher’s team asked seasoned instructors at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Georgia, to get their colleagues to recall the details of meetings held to plan field exercises. Those who used a cognitive interview, rather than the standard approach of asking direct questions, extracted 80% more information. This approach can also separate liars from truth-tellers. When recalling their experiences in a cognitive interview, people who are telling the truth give longer and more detailed answers. Their recollections also tend to grow as more details come back into focus. Liars, on the other hand, typically tell a bare-bones story that doesn’t develop with retelling. “Credibility is all in the words people use,” Meissner told BuzzFeed News. “It’s in the way they tell their story.” And crucially, it seems hard to game the system. Telling a lie is more mentally demanding than telling the truth, and hiding this cognitive effort is harder than concealing signs of stress. Make a memory task tougher — by getting suspects to tell their story in reverse order, for example — and the differences become even more obvious. In one study, Morgan simulated the investigation of a bioterrorist plot. He recruited biologists, who all visited a coffee shop in New Haven and were told remember what they saw. Some of them were also shown a picture of a “terrorist” and asked to phone him. They met him at the coffee shop and were given instructions and materials to grow cells in the lab. All of the biologists were given cognitive interviews — including reverse order recall — by interrogators with more than 15 years of experience. Most of the biologists simply had to truthfully remember what they saw, but those who had participated in the plot had to do so while denying any knowledge of the terrorist or involvement in his activities. By analyzing the total length of the biologists’ responses, and the number of unique words they used, Morgan found that he could separate the liars from the truth-tellers with 84% accuracy. This vastly outperformed the experts who conducted the interviews — whose judgments were little better than flipping a coin. Other methods that help detect liars include strategically withholding key evidence until late in an interrogation. Put all your cards on the table to begin with, and it’s too easy for a suspect to adapt their story to fit the facts. But to put these methods into practice, a suspect first has to start talking. The belief that hardened terrorists will open up only if they are mentally broken lay behind Mitchell and Jessen’s abusive tactics. But research has instead confirmed that building rapport with a suspect is what brings results. This finding comes from a unique resource: 181 videos of British law enforcement interviews with 49 suspects later convicted of terrorist offenses — including Irish paramilitaries, right-wing extremists, and al-Qaeda operatives and sympathizers. Britain has its own dark history of abusive interrogations, which, together with flawed forensic science, led to prominent miscarriages of justice after bombings by the Irish Republican Army in the 1970s. In the most notorious case, the “Birmingham Six” were released in 1991 after spending almost 17 years in prison, falsely convicted of planting bombs that killed 21 people. To guard against such abuses, British investigators must now obey strict interviewing rules that prohibit accusatory tactics and restrict them to gathering information. What’s more, all of their interviews must be recorded. Laurence Alison, a psychologist at the University of Liverpool, convinced the British authorities to share videos of their terrorism interviews. His team scrutinized the videos, looking for the extent to which the investigators used methods known to build rapport. Some of these methods, including being nonjudgmental and empathetic, are commonly used by therapists. The methods also include allowing detainees some autonomy — which for suspected Islamic terrorists can mean letting them pray on their usual schedule and speak to an imam. Alison found that interrogators who scored highest on his rapport-building scale got more information and minimized suspects’ use of counter-interrogation tactics like refusing to look at the interviewer, remaining silent, and changing the subject. Even a small amount of bad interpersonal behavior, such as hints of sarcasm, undermined attempts to get suspects to talk. “It really shuts people down,” Alison told BuzzFeed News. Some of Alison’s findings may seem counterintuitive. “The more you reinforce their right to silence, the more likely they are to talk to you,” Alison said. He likens it to the tactics used by successful parents: “If you are good at dealing with your kids, and you have the interpersonal skills, they will be better behaved.” Other important lessons have come from studying the methods of one of history’s most skilled interrogators. During World War II, Hanns-Joachim Scharff was employed by the German Luftwaffe to interview captured American pilots. Scharff rarely asked a question. Instead, he got captured pilots to say whether they already knew the “facts” he presented. Some of these statements were gaps he wanted filled, and Scharff gave no hint that the confirmation of these details was especially important. Pilots he interrogated often thought they’d told him nothing new, and they had few clues about what he was trying to find out. Pär Anders Granhag of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and his colleagues have broken down Scharff’s technique into a teachable framework and shown that it extracts more information than standard, question-based interrogations. In one study, volunteers were asked to read a narrative about an upcoming bomb attack by a left-wing extremist group on a shopping mall, and then faced an interrogation in which they pretended they were a source with this knowledge. To help them play this role, the volunteers were told to imagine that they had strong social ties with the terrorists and could be denied free passage out of the country if they were uncooperative. Given these conflicting pressures, they were told to strike a balance between revealing too little and too much information. Under these circumstances, the volunteers subjected to Scharff’s methods yielded more information, with greater precision, than those questioned in a conventional way. They also underestimated the amount of intelligence that they had provided. ... |
