Evaluating Police Interviews

Police interrogations are one-sided conversations between suspects and the police in which the police accuse a suspect of committing a crime and employ a series of sophisticated psychological tactics to obtain a confession. This study cataloged participants’ perceptions of different police interrogation tactics. One hundred fifty six participants read one of three interrogation transcripts that contained 10 distinct interrogation tactics. The three different interrogation scenarios were murder, hit-andrun, and sexual assault. The results of this study demonstrated that participants believed the police interrogation tactics were more coercive when the suspect confessed. The implications of the results are discussed