7 Applying the Skills to People
Who Want to Tell the Truth

And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.

—John 8:32, the Bible verse etched into the
wall of the Central Intelligence Agency’s
original building’s main lobby; it’s meant to
characterize the CIA mission in a free society

Even people who want to tell the truth may have problems with the accuracy of their memory. Memory distortions can and do occur, and some of them can be considered run-of-the-mill slips. In other cases, there are either physiological issues at play or circumstantial evidence giving rise to misinterpretation of what occurred or has been said. Interpersonal skills and disciplined information analysis will both help you move toward the truth.

In addition, some people want to tell the truth, but they aren’t sure what it is! This happens in all kinds of personal and professional situations. A simple example occurred when I was applying to graduate school. The head of the department asked me why I wanted to pursue that particular degree. I had no good answer; I just wanted to do it and had not thought through the “why.” His questions helped me discover my motivation. Again, your interpersonal, questioning, and analysis skills can help the person move toward a more complete and truthful story.

Sources of Unintended Untruths

When you have cooperative sources sharing false memories with you, they want to tell you nothing but the truth, but for some reason, they just can’t. What are the possible reasons for this?

Two University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) researchers concluded that our understanding of false memories that don’t stem from neurological disease is an important window to the non-conscious mind.¹ A key piece of their premise is that after the false memory is generated, people are able to accept it because their non-conscious mind suppresses a brain function that signals uncertainty. So unless you have an unusual amount of control over your non-conscious mind, you probably have as many false memories as the rest of humanity.

Four categories of memory distortion are misattribution, cryptomnesia, source amnesia, and confabulation. The first three involve what experts label false memories—so they can be experienced by any of us—whereas the last one is a neurological phenomenon linked to disease or trauma.

Misattribution

Attribution is the process by which people use information to make inferences about the causes of behavior or events. Misattribution is making an incorrect attribution. For example, you see a waitress pour a bowl of soup on a loud, vulgar male customer’s lap. If someone says, “What do you remember?” you state that the waitress was provoked by the man’s rudeness and dumped the soup on his lap. The truth is that the waitress had a muscle spasm and accidentally poured the soup on the customer’s lap. Your “memory” is actually a misattribution, in that you’ve linked an event to something with which it really has no connection or association.

Misattribution theory gives us insights into why and how we sometimes deceive ourselves unintentionally as well as why we accidentally convey false information to others. The basis for this is often a strong emotional response to a person or event. For example, a young woman has just made her first skydive. She was attached, facing outward, to the front of her male instructor by a harness. During the skydive, she screamed with awe and delight and, after landing, kept saying, “That’s the most fun I’ve ever had!” Her tandem instructor gave her a big hug and smile and said, “You’re the best student ever!” Soon after that, she was in the car with her boyfriend, whom she was going to break up with that evening, but she was still on an emotional high from the skydive. The boyfriend pulled over at a scenic location and invited her to look out at the sunset over the ocean. Then he pulled out a ring and asked her to marry him. She said yes. She had overwhelming good feelings about her day and misattributed her positive feelings at the moment of the proposal to the boyfriend. She was lying to herself, but may not ever realize that that was the case.

A famous example of misattribution involved psychologist Donald M. Thomson in 1975. Thomson went on television one evening to talk about the psychology of eyewitness testimony. The day after the broadcast, police picked him up as a rape suspect after a woman named him as the assailant. It was impossible that Thomson could have committed the crime: He was on television at the time of the rape. The explanation was a case of misattribution. The woman had been watching Thomson on television just before she was attacked. She had mentally replaced the face of the rapist with Thomson’s face.

In Thomson’s case, it was easy to identify the inadvertent untruth. It’s generally not that straightforward, however, which is why there are occasional miscarriages of justice linked to eyewitness testimony.

Misattribution is not a rare phenomenon. It’s something that happens to people on a regular basis, perhaps even daily for some people. The PsyBlog Website labels the following three examples of memory distortions “daily misattributions”²:

Misattributing the source of memories. People often say they read something in the newspaper or saw it online, when actually a friend told them or they saw it in on television or heard it on the radio. In a study titled “Retrieval Without Recollection,” participants with normal memories regularly made the mistake of thinking they had acquired a trivial fact from a newspaper, when actually the experimenters had supplied it.³

Misattributing a face to the wrong context. This is what happened in the case of Donald Thomson. Studies have shown that memories can become blended together, so that faces and circumstances are merged.

Misattributing an imagined event to reality. A 1998 experiment by Lyn Goff and Henry Roediger, both researchers at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, demonstrates that memory can easily transform fantasy into reality. Participants were asked either to imagine performing an action or to perform it (for example, breaking a toothpick in two). They later repeated the same process. Later still, the researchers asked participants whether they had performed that action or had just imagined it. Those who imagined the actions more frequently the second time were more much likely to think they had actually performed the actions the first time.⁴

What to do

When a person you trust says or writes something to you that doesn’t quite fit, you can ask questions in the area of concern—people, places, things, or events. Helpful questions will get the person to put the information into context. These would include questions such as “Sorry—where were you again when that happened?” and “Did you access that photo on your phone? I sometimes find there are color issues with photos on my phone.” Focusing on this kind of contextual information can sometimes help shed light from a different angle on the information provided. Or, if the piece of information isn’t that important, it helps you move past the misstatement.

Cryptomnesia

It literally means “hidden memory” and it refers to a phenomenon in which you essentially steal from your own memory to create something new in the present. It’s unintended self-plagiarism. A classic example is former Beatle George Harrison’s song “My Sweet Lord.” This song was at the center of a significant plagiarism suit in the 1970s because of its similarity to the song “He’s So Fine,” made famous by the Chiffons in 1963. Ultimately, a court determined that Harrison subconsciously plagiarised the Chiffons’ song.

Cryptomnesia has occupied a central role in controversies over claims of reincarnation and communication with the deceased. William Stainton Moses was a famous 19th-century spiritualist and medium who was caught in an inadvertent lie—and supposedly the first documented case of cryptomnesia—after a séance in 1874 in which he said he had contacted the spirits of two brothers who had died in India. Records provided verification of the deaths, but a newspaper article that had run just days before the séance provided evidence that Moses had drawn every piece of information on the men from what he had read.

Like misattribution, cryptomnesia is a common memory distortion. In fact, University of Georgia cognitive psychologist Richard L. Marsh, who has done multiple studies on cryptomnesia, has concluded that it’s “a heck of a lot more common than anybody would realize.”⁵

Think back to conversations you’ve had when one person introduced a memorable word or description. Say someone said, “When the layoffs occurred, my faith in the company cratered.” A few sentences later, someone used the word “cratered.” This is a form of cryptomnesia, and Marsh offers a reason for it: “Cryptomnesia stems from a failure to simultaneously engage in creative thinking and monitor where incoming ideas are coming from.”⁶

In his studies of cryptomnesia, Marsh tried to understand how it affects everyday problem-solving. Not only did he find what he considered high rates of cryptomnesia, but he also figured out when it was most likely to occur. This is an insight that’s particularly useful to you in your efforts to get at the truth:

The rate of cryptomnesia was greater under specific conditions. It increased, for example, when there were fewer perceptual and contextual cues—such as the distinctiveness of the voice associated with other-generated information—that participants could use to perform source monitoring during the task, when less time was provided during which participants could monitor the source of incoming information, and when sources of incoming information were more credible. In contrast, plagiarism rates dropped when participants were asked to focus on the origins of their ideas, heightening their awareness of the source of ideas.⁷

Here’s how it might work: Imagine yourself in a long brain-storming session with your colleagues at an advertising agency. People have been tossing ideas around for hours, but you are now within minutes of your boss asking for an outline of the campaign for a big client. The boss looks at the outline and says to the six people around the table, “Good work, team!” Susan, the freshman member of the team, beams and gives a big “Thank you!” because she feels that it’s really her concept that made the whole thing come together. The boss takes note of her response and mentions it later to one of the other people on the team. “Susan can’t take credit for that,” says Bob. “If anyone deserves the bulk of the credit it’s Ellen. Her Stanford MBA and two years of working with this client really pay off every once in a while.” Yet, if anyone were to ask Susan directly about her contribution, she would feel completely honest in saying, “That was my idea.”

There is a potentially positive aspect to Susan’s plagiarism, though. Marsh theorizes that we can absorb important information this way. For example, he thinks cryptomnesia is at work in many counseling environments. The therapist has been working on trying to get the client to recognize something about his behavior or feelings, but the client has resisted. Then one day, he bursts through the door with an insight of “his own.” His insight is nothing more than personalized expression of what the therapist has been saying all along. Of course, if that is the process by which people sometimes gain important insights, then a memory glitch such as cryptomnesia could also explain the adoption of particular political positions and other points of view.

What to do

The first thing to do is remain skeptical if it seems your source is an unlikely supplier of the information you’ve received. This is not to suggest that Susan in the previous scenario could not have been responsible for the good idea, or that everyone should assume that the highly credentialed Ellen is responsible. However, if you want the truth, then test the source.

As Marsh suggested, “plagiarism rates dropped when participants were asked to focus on the origins of their ideas, heightening their awareness of the source of ideas.” So you might say to Susan, “We all benefit when someone comes up with a great concept like that. We need to be able to replicate the dynamics that give rise to this good stuff. What happened in the meeting that triggered this line of thinking?”

Psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, who was best known for his investigations of paranormal phenomena, remarked at the end of a 1982 lecture he gave on cryptomnesia and parapsychology: “The main lesson we should learn from a study of cases of cryptomnesia is so obvious that it may seem otiose even to state it, but I shall do so anyway: We should be constantly vigilant for the possibility of cryptomnesia in any case when communications about past events are offered for our appraisal.”⁸

Stevenson’s advice on what to do, therefore, would be to question the veracity of anyone’s version of history—autobiographical or otherwise.

Source Amnesia

This is sometimes called source misattribution. So there is a bit of overlap with the discussion of misattribution. It refers to an inability to remember where your knowledge came from. You know for sure that you can ride a bicycle, but you just don’t remember exactly how or when you learned to do it, for example.

Many experts would call this a memory malfunction because it indicates a disconnect between two types of memory—that is, verbal memory related to meanings and knowledge (semantic), and contextual, or event, knowledge (episodic). Taken to an extreme, you may recall fictional information as real. For example, your mother may have told you countless times that your estranged father was a violent man, and because of her stories, you actually remember him as a violent man—even though he wasn’t.

Some people put the phenomenon to work for them through intense visualization. Because the same brain regions are involved in both visual imagery and visual perception, you are susceptible to perceived visual images as real recollections.⁹

Years ago, Olympic gold medal figure skater Brian Boitano told me the most vivid story of visualization that I’ve ever heard. It was about his win at the 1988 Olympics in Calgary—after his visualization had given him a palpable sense that he had already won. At that moment, his reality fleetingly felt fictional because of that memory phenomenon:

“The Star-Spangled Banner” was playing and I said to myself, This tempo is too fast. My nightly visualizations for about a year had been complete up until that moment—exactly as I’d visualized everything. The jumping, the way the audience responded, the way I responded to the audience. First I did this, then I cried, then I laughed—all that was visualized. When it happened, it was like I was dreaming. It was surreal to me. Then I got up to the podium after winning the gold medal and the National Anthem started playing and I thought, This isn’t the ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ that I imagined. It’s too fast! I imagined “The Star-Spangled Banner” going Daaah, daaah, daaah, daaah, daaah, dah, but it started differently. The drums came in and it was dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, and I thought, This is not real! The tempo’s wrong! That’s what made me realize it was real.¹⁰

What to do

When there is a story involved, try asking questions that break the chronology of it and invite more detail. For example, your source says that his dad was violent and he “remembers” his father coming home from work, going to the refrigerator to get a beer, and then slamming the refrigerator door because there was none. It’s actually a story his mother told him many times rather than something he personally experienced, so all he can possibly “remember” is what he’s been told. So if you question in your mind whether or not the father was violent you could ask, “What did your dad do right after he slammed the refrigerator door?” You might follow that with a question that takes him back in time in the story: “Did he even put his car keys down before he went to the refrigerator?” After that, you might wonder, “How long did it take for him to calm down?”

Confabulation

Unlike other types of false memories, confabulations have their roots in neurological disease such as Alzheimer’s, certain types of strokes, traumatic brain injury, multiple sclerosis, and dementia. People who confabulate are not lying, and have no intention of doing so. They aren’t even aware that they are giving you incorrect information.

I had a conversation with my friend’s elderly father not long ago. He was an outstanding musician who has been suffering from the effects of myasthenia gravis for many years. One of those effects can be cognitive dysfunction. I asked him about a particular, well-publicized outdoor concert that he did 30 years ago, and he related the details of what they performed and the blossoms of the trees at that time of year. The truth was that he had played the concert, but the orchestra did not perform the program he described that night, and it was summer, not spring. Everything he said was true, but it wasn’t true about that particular event.

Gregory Hartley, my coauthor of seven books on human behavior, told me a story of confabulation that illustrates one of the reasons why this phenomenon occurs, according to the UCLA researchers: “incorrect mixing of unrelated memory traces.”¹¹

I once visited an old friend’s grandmother in a nursing home. She and others in the ward suffered from advanced cases of Alzheimer’s disease. One of the women spoke so brilliantly at times that I kept forgetting her wheels turned differently from mine. She had been a professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and that career defined her. Whenever she drifted into her alternate reality, everything circled back to Vanderbilt. After a while, I forgot she had Alzheimer’s disease because she was so charming and articulate. I realized my friend had gone out of the room and asked her, “Did you see where that tall blonde women went?” “Yes,” she said. “If you go right out that door there and take a left, you’ll be at Vanderbilt. She’s at Vanderbilt.”

What to do

Unless you’re aware of a pre-existing condition with your source, you’ll probably have no idea that the memory glitches you detect are confabulations. All you really can do is proceed on the assumption that your source wants to be cooperative and ask questions accordingly.

If you have a cooperative source—someone you are confident wants to tell you the truth—avoid criticizing the person’s memory, judging the person’s character harshly, or badgering the person. Ask questions that help the individual put information into a context; establish links among persons, places, things, and events in time; and express emotional responses to events and people that help you understand why you may have heard some false memories.

Managing Sources Who Grope for Answers

In many environments, such as medical and legal/law enforcement, people often want to tell the truth, but they are grappling with uncertainty or confusion about how to explain something, and/or they feel intimidated by the professionals asking them questions. Rapport-building skills, good questioning, selecting the best conversation motivators, and reading body language all come into play daily for many people in these environments. From the person who greets people in the reception area to the most senior individual (doctor, lawyer, CEO, detective, and so on), everyone in the environment can impact the ability of the source to tell the truth.

Without the truth, the repercussions can be profound: A person’s health might be at stake, or an investigation could be stymied, or a dangerous product defect could go undetected. But truth-telling isn’t just an action that averts disaster. Depending on the context in which you operate, there are also financial benefits to having your clients, customers, constituents, and coworkers level with you.

Harvey Austin has been a board-certified plastic surgeon since 1970 and he built a thriving cosmetic surgery practice in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. In fact, the Austin-Weston Center continues as the largest non-university cosmetic surgery practice on the east coast of the United States. Over a period of years, I had many opportunities to observe his staff in the office and in the operating room because I was writing a great deal about medicine and surgery at the time, and Austin was generous in granting me access. I also interviewed a number of his colleagues and observed some of their practices, as well. In addition, I had an opportunity to experience Austin’s highly effective client screening process because I first came to the practice as someone seeking a cosmetic procedure.

For clients who were a match for the practice, the screening process almost invariably was the start of a positive experience. At that first consultation, we were guided to a state in which we felt non-defensive telling the truth about why we wanted Harvey Austin to change our face or body. It’s a potentially emotional experience wherein people might readily hedge on what’s motivating them. For example, a woman might say, “I just want to take 10 years off my face,” but what she really means is “I want to look as young as the woman who’s been seducing my husband for the last six months.”

For those who were not a good match for the practice, the relationship was suspended at that initial consultation, regardless of whether or not they thought they wanted to move forward. At that moment, they wanted a cosmetic procedure to fix an emotional problem. With a high degree of certainty, Austin’s staff could determine who would thrive during and after the cosmetic procedure, and who would be disappointed and/or litigious no matter what happened.

Austin monitored the results of this vetting process quantitatively and qualitatively:

We counted all the surgeries and divided it by all of the people we saw. Year after year, it was 43 to 46 percent. Every once in a while, someone would say, “Don’t you think we ought to get that percentage up higher?” And I’d say, “Hell no! It’s where it ought to be. Those people outside that group are the people who, out of our consultation, we help them to decide that this is not the right place or the right time for them.”

We always wanted to operate on the people for whom the operations would make a difference in their life and not operate on those people whose cosmetic surgery, no matter how well handled, would make no difference at all.¹²

In getting to know Austin and his staff, I learned that almost all of them had taken personal development courses. That piqued my curiosity about whether Austin hired people on the basis of their existing interpersonal skills or trained them in aspects of human behavior. He said, “Both.” Then he explained key criteria he had for his staff in these terms:

Cosmetic surgery is highly feminine. The fewer men we had around, the better. We wanted to create a sorority. So I wanted bright, presentable women of no particular age who had been great waitresses. To get a lot of tips, you have to realize that however great you were with one table, the next table doesn’t really care. You have to start from scratch constantly. You have to be able to get along with every person who comes in to order and with the people who work there.

Another aspect of being a great waitress is that it doesn’t matter if she makes mistakes; it’s a matter of how she cleans them up.

The third aspect is good service—and part of that is opening possibilities by asking helpful questions. A waitress just doing her job would say, “Hey, what do you want for dinner?” A waitress who cares about her customers and loves doing her job says, “Hi, it’s really good to see you! Would you like a before-dinner drink? I can bring you some nuts and cheese with that.” And before they can even wonder where she is, she shows up and says, “And as for the main course, let me tell you what I’m getting the good feedback on.” Later on, at just the right time she asks, “And would you like dessert? Or maybe a cheese platter?” In other words, she knows all about service.

Service is about opening up a possibility for others that gives them the opportunity to step in and take action.¹³

Austin didn’t literally just hire waitresses, but the metaphor is useful because the type of person he described is someone who knows how to build rapport by making others feel special and cared for—someone who helps clients feel energized and focused about taking action. His staff knew how to make a potential client, who may be reticent about why she was there for plastic surgery, trust them enough to admit the truth. The woman who ultimately admitted that she wanted to look 10 years younger to compete with her husband’s mistress would not make the cut—at least not at that first consultation. Once people in Austin’s practice realized that someone had a vengeful, supercilious, or other misguided motivation for wanting cosmetic surgery, that person would be respectfully encouraged to seek help elsewhere. In short, those women needed therapy either instead of, or prior to, cosmetic surgery.

The practice’s effective screening—which averted costly malpractice suits—not only relied on the interpersonal skills of the staff, but also on a system of client evaluation that included good questioning and stress detection. My first interaction, which happened many years ago so the dialogue is my best guess (see prior sections on memory distortions), had highlights such as these:

After being greeted and escorted to an office by Carol, we sat down with no barrier, such as desk, between us.

Carol:	How did you hear about us?
Me:	I was referred by (name of a close friend).
Carol:	How is she doing? I remember she was going to audition for a movie being shot in Baltimore.
Me:	She’s great! She just did a bit in that movie that should grab some attention.

I was impressed with the fact that she remembered my friend because it was such a busy practice. We probably chatted for a while before she asked her next question about having my nose reshaped.

Carol:	Why do you want to do this?
Me:	I sometimes look in the mirror and see a stranger. For some reason, this face just doesn’t seem to be me.
Carol:	How do you see yourself inside?

This was a pivotal question and it is one that I remember distinctly from the consultation. Carol got me to open up about a personal vision of myself. It was the truth about who I thought I was.

Having addressed the “why” question, we went on to the other critical interrogatives: what the surgery entailed, when we could schedule it, who would take care of me. Questions also addressed my expectations of what I would look like, as managing those expectations is an important job of staff in this environment. Carol also asked me questions to determine how healthy and health-conscious I was. And probably most importantly, we laughed about quite a few things. As Austin said when I spoke with him, “We wanted to see smiles on our staff and smiles on the people coming through and going out the doors.”¹⁴

The challenges of a questioner in a medical environment like Austin’s and in a legal or law enforcement environment are analogous. There is a high likelihood that the individual has some degree of stress; the ability of the questioner to build trust before questioning is critical in getting the truth from that person.

In many cases involving violence, medical professionals and law enforcement have to come together and build that trust in a coordinated way prior to questioning and subsequent legal proceedings. The good news for these professionals is that research suggests that memories of traumatic events tend to be accurate because emotional experience heightens memory. There may be short-term memory issues, but once the person has had at least a few days to rest and recover, the rapport-building and questioning of skilled professionals can often arrive at the truth.

Sue Rotolo holds a PhD in nursing and has served as a sexual assault nurse examiner (SANE) for 22 years. These nurses are certified forensic nurses with a specialty in working with patients who have reported sexual assault and collecting evidence related to the assault. They sometimes are called on to testify in court as expert witnesses. Rotolo has a rare breadth of experience because of holding certifications in adult, adolescent, and pediatric practices.

Trust-building begins before a SANE nurse ever meets the patient, and the law enforcement professionals who first attend to the patient engender this. When a patient reports a sexual assault, she learns she is going to be seeing a healthcare provider specially trained to help patients who have been assaulted. That knowledge predisposes the patient toward positive feelings about the interaction. She has some reasonable assurance that she will be in the company of a compassionate and skilled person who is there for her in an exclusive and private way.

In many cases, alcohol or drugs might be involved, so the patient might try to alter some of the facts to make them look a little better. She doesn’t want to be judged as someone who invited the rape because of where she was or what she was doing. Some assault victims have already judged themselves; they come to the exam with guilt that they “let it happen” because they were drinking or hanging out with a bad crowd. Another reason to minimize the involvement of drugs or alcohol is that the victim does not want to be perceived as lying about the assault because she was under the influence of some substance at the time.

The nurse makes it clear that being truthful has huge value to her as well as to other women she might help later. “We let them know that nothing is going to surprise us and that they are not alone.”¹⁵

But even after expressing compassion, understanding, and competence, a SANE nurse is dealing with a woman who probably can’t tell her the whole story; she just isn’t mentally capable of it. New research indicates that a patient who has gone through an assault is probably better able to remember details of what happened after she’s gone through two sleep cycles.¹⁶ That might not be two days, because it could be several days before she completes two sleep cycles.

The reason may be the person has been in shock, with the body experiencing extreme fight-freeze-or-flight responses. The process of normalizing would involve a series of steps, perhaps beginning with a 911 call, then going through the initial medical and law enforcement procedures—all the while with the victim saying to herself, If I can just get through this…. After a couple of days, she has gone through it, and the body and mind start to calm down a bit. At that point, she can remember more details.

Knowing this research exists, healthcare providers and law enforcement personnel would not assume that a story that differs from the one they heard immediately after the assault means that the victim was lying, or is now lying.

The rapport-building of a SANE nurse would be geared toward establishing a sense of safety and trust, so “easing fears” would be valuable conversation motivator in conjunction with direct questioning, whereas something like quid pro quo would not. “It’s not about us. It’s about them,” says Rotolo,¹⁷ and a quid pro quo that implies “I’ve been there, so I understand” is completely inappropriate. The SANE nurse understands because of her professional experience, and it’s that combination of competence and compassion that helps the victim feel connected to her. Rotolo says: “We focus on how powerful it is for them to tell us what happened. There is a lot of empowerment for them in sharing the truth of what happened with us. They come to understand that they help us care for them when they tell us everything and they help us care for others.”¹⁸

At the beginning of the exam, the nurse makes it as routine as possible and does things the patient would normally have done in any checkup—blood pressure, temperature, and so on. These are “little touches” that help the nurse move toward the examination of areas of the body that have been assaulted. While this is going on, the nurse tries to get the patient to begin the narrative of what happened to her and, of course, asks for her consent to touch her. It’s important that the patient feels she has control over whether or not someone touches her. As the exam progress, questions arise based on what the nurse sees and hears. So the process of questioning and conversation is continual throughout the exam. According to Rotolo:

Sometimes there is a victim advocate in the room who are skilled in giving emotional support while the genital part of the exam is occurring. Even photographs of the assaulted area may need to be taken, but by the time they are taken, most women feel enough trust for the nurse that they realize they are necessary and consent to it. They feel protected.

You can’t put any judgment on the way they are acting at the time of the examination. Everyone is little different emotionally and cognitively. On one end of the spectrum, some women have had such horrific things happen to them in life, that this is just one more horrific incident. I had a young girl come in after a sexual assault and she was fabulous during the examination. We were talking comfortably and she said matter-of-factly, “You know, my mom’s been raped. My aunt’s been raped. It was just a matter of time before I was.” She was aware of what happened.

You can’t say if someone is laughing during an examination that she’s lying. You can’t say because she’s crying that she’s lying. There is no typical reaction.

In the past, we used to put a lot of weight on their reactions. That’s gone by the wayside. Thank goodness.¹⁹

Rotolo’s comment prompted a story I had long forgotten: A college friend of mine had been raped. Before the incident, she asked the assailant if she could put in her diaphragm. He agreed, and then proceeded to rape her. Back when that happened, as Rotolo notes, a common perspective was that a woman who thought enough to protect herself by asking for the assailant to use a condom or other form of protection perhaps wasn’t really raped. Fortunately, as a society, we’ve moved past that stupidity. The truth is, just because a woman tries to protect herself when she’s being assaulted in no way diminishes the violence of the attack.

Relative to the specific challenge of crime investigators, research published in Applied Cognitive Psychology shows that “the additional time spent on building rapport (in particular using verbal techniques) may prevent inaccuracies in witness accounts and decrease the witness’s susceptibility to post-event misinformation.”²⁰ The lead author, Jonathan P. Vallano, explains:

When police interviewers build rapport by creating a comfortable environment with a witness, that witness is less likely to report false information than a witness that has not benefited from a comfortable environment. Our study, based on accounts from over 100 college-aged adults who viewed a videotaped mock theft crime, shows that building rapport before these adults were asked to recall the mock crime decreased the percentage of inaccurate information reported by these witnesses.²¹

Vallano also pointed directly to the value of quid pro quo in this trust-building process—but this would assume that the circumstances of the interaction were very different from those described by Rotolo and her interactions with a victim immediately after an assault: “We found that when the investigator shares something about him- or herself with the witness, the person being interviewed is more likely to trust the interviewer and disclose a higher percentage of accurate information in return.”²²

Insights like Vallano’s are valuable, but the problem is they may not always make it into the hands of professionals on the front line. According to an article in the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, “Police officers receive little or no training to conduct interviews with cooperative witnesses.”²³ They noted that the same could be said for most accident investigators, attorneys, physicians, fire marshals, safety inspectors, and many others. The big difference among them in terms of going after the truth is that they deal with different content.

The Cognitive Interview

Ronald P. Fisher and R. Edward Geiselman are researchers who have written extensively about investigative interviewing and developed something they call the cognitive interview (CI).²⁴ They introduced it in a book called Memory-Enhancing Techniques for Investigative Interviewing, and then focused the application of CI on police work in follow-up work. CI was designed primarily as a tool to help investigators improve their interviews with cooperative witnesses and victims, although many elements can be applied, or adapted to apply, to people in other professions where the source is stressed out. Fisher and Geiselman organized their method around three psychological processes: cognition, social dynamics, and communication.

Much of what they describe in their method integrates techniques and insights discussed earlier in this book. The following are highlights of CI.

Cognition

This facet of the method focuses on memory retrieval and the interviewer’s concurrent challenges of connecting with the source, following source leads, and good record-keeping.

» It’s important to encourage the person to re-create what happened mentally. That would include every aspect of it (physical, mental, and emotional) because all are part of the truth. Fisher and Geiselman encourage an empathetic response, but they discourage either termination of the interview (if the source gets emotional) or instructing the source to draw back from emotions. Interrupting or stopping the interview may make the source feel patronized or as though he or she is being denied an opportunity to be honest about everything.

» We all have a limited ability to process information, but people who are feeling a great deal of stress have a diminished ability. Your source might have trouble following your questions, interpreting them, or processing his or her answers to them. Don’t overload the person by asking a succession of questions without allowing the person to take his or her time and answer each one fully. Be really mindful of avoiding any of the so-called bad questions—compound, vague, negative, or leading. Use the conversation motivator of silence rather than interject another question or a comment while the person is thinking.

» Each person’s mental record of an event is unique. Some of this has to do with access senses, meaning that some people are highly visual, whereas others are auditory, and others might lead with their kinesthetic sense. Still others might have their primary memory be the smell of flowers or gunpowder. It is vital that you customize questions for the source rather than just ask standardized questions. Listen to the person’s narrative to help you decide what his access sense(s) might be.

» Fisher and Geiselman call this aspect of CI “witness-compatible questioning,” and there is more guidance on how to do that in the next section on tips to help you structure questions. Fisher and Geiselman assert that witness-compatible questioning is probably the most difficult aspect of CI to learn, and that’s because it requires the questioner to pay attention to the source—her character, her nature, and how her emotions and level of cooperation might change during the interview. So much of the success of CI reflects what has been covered in many ways in this book: rapport-building.

» The next piece of CI is something that I tell my coauthors and contributors all the time: You can tell me a story again, even if you know you told it to me before, because something new will come out of it in the retelling. Never say “You already told me that” to a source. If you want the truth, listen to the story again. And again.

» Recall accuracy is important, so if your source starts to wander off—think back to the eye movement clues that may indicate imagination rather than recall—then just say, “It’s okay to say that you don’t remember.”

» The final guidance in the cognitive section relates the source of false memories described earlier as either misattribution or cryptomnesia. In this case, the source may construct a more complete story than the one he actually remembers by incorporating details he’s picked up from other sources—including you, if you ask leading questions. Or, he may have seen something on television that crept into his subconscious mind. Refer to the “what to do” suggestions earlier in this chapter if you suspect either of these memory glitches.

Social Dynamics

Questioner and source are part of a dynamic social unit; each influences the other in the way the two interact. To have an ideal outcome, the roles should be coordinated. The recommendations that Fisher and Geiselman make relative to this topic dovetail precisely with has been recommended earlier in this book—namely:

Build rapport.

Engage the person’s natural curiosity through both open-ended questions and listening. Hopefully, get the source to ask questions, as well.

Use conversation motivators such as “boosting ego” and “easing fears” to keep the source feeling positive about himself.

Communication

The questioner has a need for information, and the source theoretically has the ability to meet that need. The techniques recommended by Fisher and Geiselman, once again, dovetail closely with what intelligence experts advised in Part I of the book:

Ask questions that help the source focus on all aspects of the circumstances—people, places, things, and events. If one of these areas of investigation seems lacking, then head there with your questions. This doesn’t mean that the source should feel constrained, though. If she wanders off topic, just return to the topic later and listen for what’s revealed in the meantime.

Non-verbal output counts as information, as well. Body language can reveal the emotions that perhaps words cannot. In addition, in dealing with crime or other circumstances in which visual detail is an essential part of the story, moving around or drawing can help the source tell you everything you need to know.

Fisher and Geiselman didn’t merely use the CI method in the laboratory to validate its effectiveness. They tested it with officers handling real crimes. Those field studies showed the same pattern of effectiveness as did the laboratory studies.

Tips for Structuring Questions for a Cooperative Source

In the example of the cosmetic surgery practice, the first victory in eliciting the truth from clients is building rapport so that the people seeking a procedure do not feel defensive about their motives for wanting cosmetic surgery. The hope is that even those who are not a fit for the practice are well-served by the consultation. Similarly, in the law enforcement example, the first task of investigators is to build trust, not to go directly down the path of mundane demographic or case-related questions.

A questioning style that reflects an understanding of what the source is likely to respond to—ego boosting, incentive, and so on—supports that initial rapport-building. Ideally, the questioner would also have a sense of the person’s information sorting style.

Dean Hohl is a former U.S. Army ranger and leadership consultant with whom I wrote Rangers Lead the Way. He developed a succinct way of describing information sorting styles. Following are three styles that can guide a questioner in knowing how to get additional salient information from a source:²⁵

» Large chunk vs. small chunk: A large-chunk thinker looks at the big picture; he thinks in conceptual wholes. The opposite type is someone who focuses on details and thinks in small pieces.

A lawyer questioning a friendly witness might begin by asking him to tell everything he knows about the case. If the witness is a large-chunk thinker, that narrative might be a “high-altitude” view of what happened and who was involved. Diametrically opposed to that would be the narrative of a witness who is nose-in-the dirt with his information. It’s a narrative stuffed with details.

Someone questioning large-chunk thinker keeps moving forward with good follow-up questions, the most basic of which is “What else?” or “Who else?”

People who are extremely focused on the bits and pieces instead of the whole have a tendency to add peripheral information that has no direct link to anything else in the narrative. A questioner with the small-chunk thinker, therefore, needs to ask questions that clarify links between pieces of information. The categories of information are people, places, things, and events, so follow-up questions would help sort the details into those categories to make it easier to see how they tie together.

» Sequential vs. random: The sequential thinker wants her facts well-organized, and she’s very process oriented, preferring to finish one thing before starting another. A random thinker feels comfortable jumping from topic to topic.

In terms of storytelling, the sequential person will have some underlying organization that should be apparent. It might be a moment-by-moment chronology, or, if the person is a large-chunk thinker as well, the story might be presented in terms of a sequence of major events. A random person may go in and out of chronology, possibly hitting on highlights first and filling in missing parts of the story later. Asking questions of a random person that channel her into more sequential thinking can help fill in gaps or correct misperceptions. Conversely, asking a sequential thinker to jump around a story can also help you check the soundness of her story by taking a close look at different pieces of it.

The earlier sections in this chapter on false memories include some “what to do” tips that can be enhanced by understanding sorting styles, such as sequential and random, and how you might shift your questioning based on that knowledge.

» Approach vs. avoidance: The person characterized by an approach orientation tends to move toward opportunity and situations that satisfy curiosity. In a situation involving some risk, for example, he’d automatically consider what the rewards might be. The avoidant person tends to move away from a perceived danger or the unknown, telling himself, Don’t do this because of what could happen to you.

Leading with the “childlike curiosity” conversation motivator should be very effective with someone who has an “approach” view.

In questioning an avoidant source, the conversation motivators of easing fears and engendering a sense of certainty should support your rapport-building. HR professionals, physicians, police, counselors, or anyone else facing people who might be asking questions of a cooperative avoidant source need to offer emotional, psychological, and, if necessary, physical protection. You will help foster the person’s feelings of security and trust in you.

The sequence of working with a cooperative source is the same as it is with anyone who wants to hide something or is blatantly hostile. Start by cultivating trust—that is, build rapport with the person. Ironically, in trying to get the information you want from someone who is accommodating, there is a tendency to downplay the importance of this. If you have an information need for a negotiation, investigation, personal relationship, or any other circumstance, make sure the trust is there before you ever unleash your questioning skills.