Language style matching and confessions in police interrogations

Studies of police interrogation have often sought to understand how the ebb-and-flow of dialogue relates to a confession. There is now a considerable body of work examining the effect of questioning style (e.g., Granhag, Montecinos, & Oleszkiewicz, in press; Snook, Luther, Quinlan, & Milne, 2012) and interpersonal tactics (e.g., Beune, Giebels, & Taylor, 2010; King & Snook, 2009; Walsh & Bull, 2012) on suspects’ behavior. However, to date, this research has given far less consideration to the impact of language on this interpersonal process. This is surprising, not least because the words that interrogators and suspects use represent the building blocks through which rapport, information gathering, and confessions—true or false—are played out (Kassin & Gudjonsson, 2004). Being able to understand the patterns of language that occur in interrogations will shed light on the interpersonal processes that precede confessions. In this article, we focus on one aspect of language use known as Language Style Matching and consider its relationship with interrogation outcome