Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [71]
“What he described,” says Kassin, “is a person under stress.” Students of the Reid Technique generally do not learn that being nervous, fidgeting, avoiding eye contact, and slouching uncomfortably might be signs of something other than guilt. They might be signs of nervousness, adolescence, cultural norms, deference to authority—or anxiety about being falsely accused.
Promoters of the manual claim that their method trains investigators to determine whether someone is telling the truth or lying with an 80 to 85 percent level of accuracy. There is simply no scientific support for this claim. As with the psychotherapists we discussed in chapter 4, training does not increase accuracy; it increases people’s confidence in their accuracy. In one of numerous studies that have documented the false-confidence phenomenon, Kassin and his colleague Christina Fong trained a group of students in the Reid Technique. They watched the Reid training videos, read the manual, and were tested on what they had learned to make sure they got it. Then they were asked to watch videotapes of people being interviewed by an experienced police officer. The taped suspects were either guilty of a crime but denying it, or were denying it because they were innocent. The training did not improve the students’ accuracy by an iota. They did no better than chance, but it did make them feel more confident of their abilities. Still, they were only college students, not professionals. So Kassin and Fong asked forty-four professional detectives in Florida and Ontario, Canada, to watch the tapes. These professionals averaged nearly fourteen years of experience each, and two-thirds had had special training, many in the Reid Technique. Like the students, they did no better than chance, yet they were convinced that their accuracy rate was close to 100 percent. Their experience and training did not improve their performance. Their experience and training simply increased their belief that it did. 31
Nonetheless, why doesn’t an innocent suspect just keep denying guilt? Why doesn’t the target get angry at the interrogator, as the manual says any innocent person would do? Let’s say you are an innocent person who is called in for questioning, perhaps to “help the police in their investigation.” You have no idea that you are a prime suspect. You trust the police and want to be helpful. Yet here is a detective telling you that your fingerprints are on the murder weapon. That you failed a lie detection test. That your blood was found on the victim, or the victim’s blood was on your clothes. These claims will create considerable cognitive dissonance:
Cognition 1: I was not there. I didn’t commit the crime. I have no memory of it.
Cognition 2: Reliable and trustworthy people in authority tell me that my fingerprints are on the murder weapon, the victim’s blood was on my shirt, and an eyewitness saw me in a place where I am sure I’ve never been.
How will you resolve this dissonance? If you are strong enough, wealthy enough, or have had enough experience with the police to know that you are being set up, you will say the four magic words: “I want a lawyer.” But many people believe they don’t need a lawyer if they are innocent.32 Believing as they do that the police are not allowed to lie to them, they are astonished to hear that there is evidence against them that they cannot explain. And what damning evidence at that—their fingerprints! The manual claims that the “self-preservation instincts of an innocent person during an interrogation” will override anything an interrogator does, but for vulnerable people, the need to make sense of what is happening to them even trumps the need for self-preservation.
Bradley Page: Is it possible that I could have done this terrible thing and blanked it out?
Lieutenant Lacer: Oh, yes. It happens