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“the police officer is angry and that makes me sad”. The mental state (or mood)
of the virtual suspect helps select the most human-like action that the virtual
suspect has available, for example “I am sad so I will make a sad face”. We do
not present a completely specified mental model for a virtual suspect in this paper,
but provide the groundwork for such a mental model. This work is a continuation
of work by Bruijnes (
2013
) and op den Akker et al. (
2013
) who looked into
interpersonal attitudes in the same domain. This paper has two main contributions;
first, it describes how we analysed interpersonal behaviour by validating ad hoc
interpretations of factors resulting from a factor analysis. Second, we show which
theories from (social) psychology and their underlying concepts are relevant to
capture social interactions during police interviews and how these concepts are
interrelated.
16.1.1
Police Interviews
Police interactions are a special type of social encounter, primarily because of the
role of authority that the police officer has and the often uncooperative stance that
a suspect takes—there may be a conflict between the interaction parties. The police
officer receives training to resolve or reduce the conflict—to make an uncooperative
suspect more cooperative. In this section, we discuss the training that police officers
receive to become skilled at police interviews.
A police interview is often a situation of conflict. Suspects often do not cooperate
with the police officer and the police interview in general, but behave in a
confronting manner. Suspects may be withdrawn, defiant or even aggressive towards
the police officer. The police officer has the difficult task to convince the suspect to
cooperate and tell the truth in an interview: resolve the conflict. At the start of a
police interview course, Dutch police students receive theoretical training on the
use of the theory of interpersonal stance, or as they refer to it “Leary's Rose” (Leary
1957
) (see Sect.
16.3.1
). In addition, “negotiation” strategies are taught with which it
is possible to try and change the behavior of the suspect. The
Table of 10
by Giebels
(
2002
) describes the strategies a police officer can use when, for example, they want
to convince the suspect that cooperation will be of mutual benefit. After learning
about the theory, some students get the opportunity to apply what they learned in a
role-playing exercise with professional suspect-actors.
Training the proper behaviour for interviews is important for the effectiveness
of the interview. For example, Holmberg and Christianson (
2002
) showed that
when suspects perceive the police officer's behaviour during the interview as
dominant they tend to deny criminal accusations. Alternatively, when suspects
perceive the interview as humane and respectful they gain the confidence and
mental space required to admit criminal behaviour (Holmberg and Christianson
2002
). Richardson et al. (
2014
) investigated the relation between the verbal mimicry
(known as Language Style Matching) in police interviews and the confession to
criminal behaviour. They showed that interviews that lead to a confession have a
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