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Types of Suggestive Questions

Direct questions

Direct questions lead to one word answers when explanations are sometimes needed. This could include questions like “Do you get it?” and “Where did it happen?” According to Dr. Kathy Kellermann, an expert in persuasion and communication, direct questions force exact responses through carefully worded questions ^[1].

Repeated questions

Repeated questions elicit certain types of answers. Repeated questions make people think their first answer was wrong, lead them to change their answer, or cause people to keep answering until the interrogator gets the exact response that they desire. Elizabeth Loftus states that errors in answers are dramatically reduced if a question is only asked once ^[2]

Forced questions

Yes/no or forced choice questions like “is this yellow or green?” force people to choose between two choices when the answer could be neither of the choices or needs more explanation. This generates more “interviewer-talks” moments, where the interviewer is talking and controlling most of the interview. ^[3]

Presumptuous questions

Presumptuous questions can either be balanced or unbalanced. Unbalanced questions ask questions only from the point of view of one side of an argument. For example, an interrogator might ask “’Do you favor the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?”’ This question assumes that the person’s only point of view in the situation is that a person who is convicted must either get the death penalty or not. The second type of presumptuous question is balanced question. This is when the interrogator uses opposite questions to make the witness believe that the question is balanced when the reality is that it is not. For example, the interrogator would ask, “’Do you favor life in prison, without the possibility of parole?”’ This type of question may seem balanced when in reality it is still influencing the person to discuss life in prison and no other choice. ^[4]

Confirmatory questions

Confirmatory questioning leads to answers that can only support a certain point. Here, the interviewer forces the person to make sure his or her answers make them out to be extroverted or introverted. If they want them to look extroverted they would ask questions like “How do you make a party more fun?” and “When are you talkative?” If they want the person to look introverted they ask questions like “Have you ever been left out of a group?” or “Can you be more hyper sometimes?” ^[5].

Research

Considerable attention has been devoted to suggestive questions and its effects. Experimental research by Elizabeth F. Loftus, an american psychologist and an expert on human memory, has established that trying to answer such questions can create confabulation in eyewitnesses ^[6]. Loftus conducted and experiment where participants all viewed the same video clip of a car crash. Participants were then assigned at random in one of two groups. Group one was asked, "How fast was the car moving when it passed by the stop sign?" The participants in the other group are asked a similar question that does not refer to a stop sign. The results showed participants from the first group are more likely to remember seeing a stop sign in the video clip, even though there was in fact no such sign^[7]. Elizabeth Loftus stated that everyone is affected by suggestive questioning, and it comes from environmental factors instead of innate factors, meaning that everyone is affected by suggestive questioning.

William S. Cassel, a professor at the university of New Orleans conducted an experiment that was performed on Kindergarten, Grade 2, Grade 4, and adult subjects. They were required to view a brief video of two children arguing about the use of a bicycle. One week later subjects were asked for their free recall of the events in the video. It was then followed by sets of hierarchically arranged, increasingly suggestive questions that suggested a correct (positive-leading), an incorrect (misleading), or no specific (unbiased-leading) answer. The final level of questioning for each item was a three-alternative multiple-choice question. Correct free recall varied with age, with the kindergarten and Grade 2 children generally following the lead of the first-level questions more so than the older subjects. Older children were as accurate as adults in responding to questions about the central items, but not so for non-central items. Developmental differences were found in responses to repeated suggestive questioning, with kindergarten children following misleading questions and changing answers more often than older subjects. On the final multiple-choice questions, kindergarten children were able to provide the correct answer as often as they had to the initial questions, despite intervening errors. Findings are discussed in terms of the type of questions presented, the repetition factors, and the opportunities for subjects changing their answers in response to subsequent questions about the same item ^[8].

Detectives and the police use suggestive questioning in interrogation rooms. Interrogators use different kinds of techniques and questions in order to get people to confess. They use response framing when getting people to falsely confess. This is when they purposely limit certain answers and suggest others. For example, they would ask someone if they were at the house at 1, 2, or 3 o’clock, forcing them to think it had to have been one of those choices. It causes people to recall things from the prompt instead of their memories [12]. Also, interrogators use stereotype induction, which is when they tell the witness only negative characteristics of the alleged perpetrator. Part of stereotype induction is the incriminating condition where everything the witness says is labeled as bad. The detective would slightly shake his head or tell the witness to try again. This contrasts with another interrogating option of using a neutral interview technique, which includes both the bad and good aspects of the perpetrator ^[13].

Police use suggestive questions that lead to false confessions. There have been 125 proven false confessions from 2006-2011. The time spent in the interrogation room for these 125 cases have all been more than 16 hours, where the normal amounts of hours are around 2^[14]. According to Richard Leo, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, “confessions are such powerful evidence that police, prosecutors, and juries will often overlook irrefutable evidence of innocence,” like a footprint or DNA sample, “rather than disregard the confession.” ^[15]This explains why 60% of the people who falsely confessed to a crime they didn’t do, were sent to prison before even going to trial, and 81% of those that did go to trial, were convicted, “with 9 receiving death sentences.” ^[16] The more time interrogators take to ask witnesses about an incident, the more the memory of the event would fade and people would forget what really happened. Then, after the memory is retrieved, some aspects are reconstructed which causes error. Not even confidence in what witnesses think they saw can be correlated with accurate memory. According to the psychologist Philip Zimbardo, “Misinformed individuals can come to believe the misinformation in which they feel confidence”^[17]

Therapists

Therapists use suggestive questions on clients while using recovered-memory therapy. Sigmund Freud’s definition of repressed memory is “the mind’s conscious and unconscious avoidance of unpleasant wishes, thoughts, and memories.”^[18] However, there has been very little evidence of this type of memory. Therapists claim that repression causes people to forget frightful events of sexual or physical abuse as a psychological defence. They try to retrieve these memories and tell their clients to “accuse, confront, and perhaps sue” the perpetrators. ^[19] The first step to recovered-memory therapy is through continuous suggestive questions. Therapists convince their clients to agree that there is such a thing as repressed memory, and therefore abuse had to have occurred, but the patients just do not remember it. Repetitive questions change clients’ answers from a reluctant “perhaps” to a definite “for sure.” The use of suggestive questioning by therapists changes perceptions and can cause entire memories to be created ^[20]. Critics of the repressed memory therapy believe that any event recalled by clients is iatrogenic, or therapist-induced. This kind of therapy makes clients believe traumatic events occurred when they really did not. ^[21]

Case studies

In the 1998 murder case of Stephanie Crowe, detectives used suggestive questioning techniques that forced a confession from her brother, Michael. Without any evidence, the police suspected that the brother stabbed her to death in her sleep. They convinced him that he had a

The McMartin preschool trial of the 1980s was a sexual abuse case entailing seven teachers, who were accused of sexually abusing hundreds of children for the period of a decade. Investigation started in 1983 and lasted until the 1990s. In reality none of the accused were convicted since the accusations against them were confirmed through subjective questions. Interviews of the case included various examples, or scenarios where interviewers used suggestive questioning techniques to pressure children into affirming the claims against the teachers. Some suggestive questioning techniques applied by interviewers of the case involved suggesting information that the interviewee never brought up in the interview. ^[23]

References