Witnesses’ Verbal Evaluation of Certainty and Uncertainty During Investigative Interviews: Relationship with Report Accuracy

• DOI: 10.1007/s11896-019-09333-6
• Publication Date: 2019-06-07T06:02:54Z
• Authors: Rui M. Paulo; Pedro B. Albuquerque; Ray Bull
• Keywords: Certainties; 05 social sciences; recall; Social Sciences; Confidence; witness; 16. Peace & justice; Uncertainties; Cognitive interview; Ciências Sociais::Psicologia; 0509 other social sciences; Accuracy; cognitive interview

The Enhanced Cognitive Interview (CI) is a widely studied method to gather\ud informative and accurate testimonies. Nevertheless, witnesses still commit errors and\ud it can be very valuable to determine which statements are more likely to be accurate\ud or inaccurate. This study examined whether qualitative confidence judgments could\ud be used to evaluate report accuracy in a timesaving manner. Forty-four participants\ud watched a mock robbery video and were interviewed 48hours later with a revised CI.\ud Participants’ recall was categorized as: (1) evaluated with very high confidence\ud (certainties); (2) recalled with low confidence utterances (uncertainties); or (3)\ud recalled with no confidence markers (regular recall). Certainties were more accurate\ud than uncertainties and regular recall. Uncertainties were less accurate than regular\ud recall, thus its exclusion raised participants’ report accuracy. Witnesses were\ud capable of qualitatively distinguish between highly reliable information, fairly\ud reliable information and less reliable information in a timesaving way. Such a\ud distinction can be important for investigative professionals who do not know what\ud happened during the crime and may want to estimate which information is more\ud likely to be correct.