Using the Scharff-technique to elicit information: how to effectively establish the “illusion of knowing it all”?

The Scharff-technique is used for eliciting information from human sources. At the very core of the technique is the “illusion of knowing it all” tactic, which aims to inflate a source's perception of how much knowledge an interviewer holds about the event to be discussed. For the current study, we mapped the effects following two different ways of introducing this particular tactic; a traditional way of implementation where the interviewer explicitly states that s/he already knows most of the important information (the traditional condition), and a new way of implementation where the interviewer just starts to present the information that s/he holds (the just start condition). The two versions were compared in two separate experiments. In Experiment 1 (N = 60), we measured the participants’ perceptions of the interviewer's knowledge, and in Experiment 2 (N = 60), the participants’ perceptions of the interviewer's knowledge gaps. We found that participants in the just start condition (a) believed the interviewer had more knowledge (Experiment 1), and (b) searched less actively for gaps in the interviewer's knowledge (Experiment 2), compared to the traditional condition. We will discuss the current findings and how sources test and perceive the knowledge his or her interviewer possesses within a framework of social hypothesis testing.

Empathy in the field: towards a taxonomy of empathic communication in information gathering interviews with suspected sex offenders

Research suggests that those suspected of sexual offending might be more willing to reveal information about their crimes if interviewers display empathic behaviour. However, the literature concerning investigative empathy is in its infancy, and so as yet is not well understood. This study explores empathy in a sample of real-life interviews conducted by police officers in England with suspected sex offenders. Using qualitative methodology, the presence and type of empathic verbal behaviours displayed was examined. Resulting categories were quantitatively analysed to investigate their occurrence overall, and across interviewer gender. We identified four distinct types of empathy, some of which were used significantly more often than others. Female interviewers displayed more empathic behaviour per se by a considerable margin.