Intelligence Interviewing: Synthetic Environments, Cognition and Cognitive Styles

For the foreseeable future, gathering information from others is likely to remain a fundamental goal for those concerned with protecting national and international security. A central challenge facing all information gatherers is to identify howa sender (the information collector) might ‘manage’ a receiver (the information holder) to best effect, that is how to encourage the receiver to move from a position of witholding to imparting information. Additional challenges arise from recent moves away from coercive, interrogative methods towards intelligence interviewing, and the increasing use of synthetic environments as communication channels, and so how senders might persuade receivers when interacting in synthetic environments. Here we disciss how the information gathering literature, with reference to intelligence interviewing, might advance in the face of such change, suggesting that those tasked with developing bespoke plans, or operational accords might wish to consider social cognition and cognitive styles theory to support positive outcomes in synthetic environments, without commanding them