Social Behaviour in Police Interviews: Relating Data to Theories - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 333

he also wants to know the officer's surname. The officer then responds in a laconic
way by saying “Oh, you want my surname ?” which leads to the suspect imitating
the officer's response and adding “Wise guy.” What we witness here is an exchange
in which the police officer has an opposed stance towards the (dominant) suspects
and acts disapprovingly of the suspect's behaviour by not granting a full answer.
This, in turn, elicits a similarly disapproving response by the suspect. Thus, over
time, the suspect changes from having a dominant stance towards one that is more
opposed to the officer because of the latter's behaviour.

SUSPECT : [Points at police officer 1.] What was your name again?
POLICE OFFICER 1: **** [Gives his first name.]
S : And...? [Makes a gesture with his hand for the police officer to complete
his name.]
P 1 : **** [Gives his surname.]
S : ****? [Repeats the name.]
P 1 : Yeah.
S : [Chuckles.] And you? [Points at police officer 2.]
POLICE OFFICER 2: **** [Gives his first name.]
S : [Makes the 'completion' gesture again.]
P 2 : What is that? [ Mimics the gesture. ]
S :[ToP 1 :] He doesn't understand? **** [P 1 's surname.] And you? [Points at
P 2 .]
P 2 : Ah, you want to know my last name?
S : [Stares at P 2 .]
P 2 : Yeah, if you could just be clear in your questions. . .
S : He understands [Points at P 1 .] are you a bit stupid or something like that?
P 2 : Yeah, I'm a bit more stupid than him, OK. . .
S : That's clear.
P 2 : [Softly:] All right.
S : No, it's not all right. What is your surname?
P 2 : **** [Gives his surname.]
S :

Ah.... **** [Repeats P 2 's surname.] [Softly:] Wise guy.

16.6 Conclusion and Discussion

In this paper, we presented our methodology for analysing the behaviour of police
officers and suspects in a corpus of enacted police interviews. Taking a holistic
approach, we described fragments of this corpus in short terms that captured the
behaviour of the participants in, and the atmosphere of, the interviews. We used a
factor analysis to cluster related terms based on ratings of observers who annotated
to what extent these terms were applicable to each fragment. Based on the factors
we found, we selected theories from (social) psychology that we intuitively thought
could explain these factors. We included theories about interpersonal stance, face