Social Behaviour in Police Interviews: Relating Data to Theories - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 325

16.4.1 Concepts in Theories

Psychological and sociological theories use concepts and describe the relations
between these concepts. Theories provide us with a way to describe an interaction
(in our case, a police interview) and they can be used by a virtual tutoring agent
(in our case, a virtual suspect) to predict the effects of its behaviour in an interaction
with a human user. For example, the central concepts in the interpersonal stance
theory are dominant , submissive , together , and opposed and the theory describes
how the combination of these concepts creates the notion of “stance” and predicts
how people are influenced by the stance of others. A virtual tutoring agent can
use this knowledge to create an interesting and useful learning experience. For
example, a user might learn by experiencing that if he displays opposed behaviour
interaction, the conflict escalates. The virtual suspect can display opposed behaviour
in an attempt to get the user to also display opposed behaviour and then let
the conversation escalate (Bruijnes et al. 2013 ). Each of the theories we selected
in the previous section has such concepts, see Table 16.4 . The concepts from
face are positive and negative autonomy , and positive and negative approval .The
concepts for rapport are coordination , attention , and positivity . We added two meta-
concepts— information and strategy to accommodate for the concepts that surfaced
in the factor analysis interpretation but did not fit easily in a theory. The information
concepts we found are questioning , give information , withhold information , lie and
frame or topic . The strategy concepts are confront , surround , evade and annoy .

16.4.2 Factors: Theories and Concepts

The interpretation of the factors, see Sect. 16.2.3 and Tables 16.2 and 16.3 , and the
matching of these factors to theories leads to links between theories and factors.
To validate these links, four observers indicated with which concept(s) from the
theories (Table 16.4 ) a factor could be explained. This method provided us with a
possibility to validate the intuitive (subjective) interpretation of the factors that is
common practice in the field of social science. In other words, we used the initial
interpretations to select theories that “cover” the factors and we used the concepts

Table 16.4 Concepts within the theories stance , face ,and rapport and
the meta-concepts information and strategy
Stance Face Rapport Information Strategy

Dominant Autonomy+ Coordination Questioning Confront

Submissive Approval+ Attention Give info Surround

Together Autonomy- Positivity Lie Evade

Opposed Approval- Withhold info Annoy

Frame/topic