警察◆警察專業英文題庫下載題庫

     A psychologist suspected that there were subtle cues that were influencing the police questioning process in interviewing eyewitnesses, which causes misremember. She watched videotape after videotape of witness interviews, looking for these cues but she couldn’t see anything. There were so many activities in each interview—all the facial expressions, the different ways the questions were posed, the fluctuating emotions—that she couldn’t detect any patterns.

    So she came up with an idea: she made a list of a few elements she would focus on—the questioners’ tone, the facial expressions of the witness, and how close the witness and the questioner were sitting to each other. Then she removed any information that would distract her from those elements. She turned down the volume on the television, so instead of hearing words, all she could detect was the tone of the questioner’s voice. She taped a sheet of paper over the questioner’s face, so all she could see was the witnesses’ expressions. She held a tape measure to the screen to measure their distance from each other.

    And once she started studying these specific elements, patterns leapt out. She saw that witnesses who misremembered facts usually were questioned by cops who used a gentle, friendly tone. When witnesses smiled more, or sat closer to the person asking the questions, they were more likely to misremember.