Communicative (inter-)action transcending the police investigative interview room

Abstract

Police officers anticipate the evidential function and the absentaudience while interviewing and recording investigative interviews. Thisaudience consists of judges charged with taking procedural decisions based,among other things, on their reception of these written records. Qualitativestudies have revealed that interviewers use confrontational questions tocommunicate their doubt regarding the interviewee’s credibility to the audience,and that they formulate the questions in the written record more confrontationallythan in the actual interview for the same reason. However, so far, insufficientknowledge exists about the intended effect: Is the audience receptive to thepolice officer’s doubt when reading the written record? Our paper reportsan experiment testing the effects of this confrontational questioning style. Theresults show that there is, indeed, a communicative (inter-)action transcendingthe police investigative interview room: the audience is receptive to the policeofficer’s doubt transmitted via the questioning style reported in the writtenrecord