Educing Information: Interrogation - National Intelligence University

younger and more limited in life experience than the populations of interest in the
national security context. While criminal populations may make generalization of
findings more reasonable for law enforcement personnel, they present limitations
for the intelligence collector. The population of criminals in the United States
consists disproportionately of individuals in the low average range of intelligence
or worse. In addition, criminals as a group are likely to have substantially more
experience in interrogation/questioning situations than the rest of the population.
Law enforcement may be at the point of developing real capabilities to work with
below-average intelligence criminals and academic researchers may have a good
understanding of above-average intelligence college students, but these results
may have only limited relevance to intelligence collection.
Most studies also used a relatively small sample size, with an average of 40
subjects per study. 41 Such small samples may allow validation of only the most
powerful cues and may discount many moderately effective ones.
Behavior Sampling
Most studies typically use very short snippets of data — commonly less
than 1 minute — whereas in a real-world situation an interviewer may observe
a subject over a much longer time frame, with the option of repeated contacts.
Therefore, results to date may only reflect those variables that have efficacy in
that short time frame.
Most studies involve people in an observer role who watch a tape of someone
being questioned. In real-world applications, the people responsible for detecting
deception are likely to be participating in the exchange and to be working by
themselves. Research suggests that in the participant mode detection success is
likely to be below 50%, or at the level of chance. 72,73
Finally, much of the research uses a 50/50 paradigm, wherein the base rate of
true vs. false reports is equal. The likelihood that this reflects reality seems small.
Our results to date may thus represent a skewed construction of the real-world
problem.
Cross-Cultural Representation
We know almost nothing about how our current methods work with various
Asian, Middle Eastern, Central and South American, or African populations.
Research to date has focused primarily on samples drawn from modern, Western
countries (primarily the United States and Europe), with a few studies involving
Jordanian, 74, 75 Saudi, 58 Chinese, 76,77 and Japanese 78,79 subjects. Of all the limitations
in the existing body of research literature, this is the most troubling. In the DePaulo
review of studies involving 120 samples, 101 were drawn from the United States
or the United Kingdom and only 4 came from non-Western cultural groups. 41 Thus,
from the standpoint of intelligence gathering, they do not address the populations
of interest and utility. Although Ekman and his associates hold that microfacial
expression changes represent a fairly universal phenomenon. 80,81,82 there is little
evidence to suggest the existence of universals in nonverbal and paralinguistic
behaviors across cultures. This absence of universals may also hold true even for
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