Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

Suggestibility: Empirical Findings 375
the most serious offence reported was rated on the scale. Factor analysis of the
Motivation Scale revealed five factors. The largest factor, comprised of seven
items and accounting for 16.4% of the total variance, was labelled ‘compliance’.
The items with salient loadings on this factor were the following.
� To please my friend(s) (0.85).
� Giving in to pressure from peer(s) (0.85).
� Wanted to ‘show off’ to friend (s) (0.66).
� Asked by somebody to commit the offence (0.65).
� Was tricked into committing the crime (0.62).
� To show how brave and daring I was (0.61).
� Committed offence because my friends were doing it (0.59).
The GCS score correlated significantly with the compliance offence factor
score among the secondary school (r = 0.25, p < 0.001) and university students
(r = 0.19, p < 0.05), and hardly at all with any of the remaining four factors.
Although the correlations are small, the findings support the view that compliance,
as measured by the GCS, is significantly correlated with the reasons
people give for having committed an offence. Compliance, as a personality trait,
appears relevant in explaining why some people commit offences.
Situational Determinants of Compliance
The GCS, to a certain extent, overcomes problems with compliance being potentially
situation bound, because the subject is rating how he or she generally
reacts to interpersonal pressure rather than referring to any one particular situation.
This does not, however, exclude the possibility that subjects may fill in
the GCS differently according to their situational circumstances. For example,
since many of the GCS items give a fair indication of what the scale is measuring,
some criminal suspects, when this seems favourable to their case, may
endorse items in such a way as to exaggerate their compliance scores. Similarly,
it is possible that suspects who previously gave in to police pressure and
confessed, when they did not really want to, have biased perceptions of their
own compliance, which becomes reflected in their self-report scores. In other
words, because the suspect gave in to the police pressure he thinks he must be
compliant and fills in the scale accordingly.
A number of situational factors have been shown to influence compliance
in a particular experimental setting. The types of factor that can increase
compliance are happy mood state (Milberg & Clark, 1988), touch and gaze
(Hornik, 1988; Kleinke, 1977, 1980), demand for eye contact (Hamlet, Axelrod &
Kuerschner, 1984), the prestige of the communicator (Kelman & Holland, 1953),
the perceived power of the experimenter (Bandura, Ross & Ross 1963), agreement
with a smaller request previously (Freedman & Fraser, 1966), the gender
of the experimenter (Heslin, Nguyen & Nguyen, 1983, Stier & Hall, 1984), the
manipulation of self-esteem (Graf, 1971) and feelings of guilt (Carlsmith &
Gross, 1969; Freedman, Wallington & Bless, 1967; Konoske, Staple & Graf,
1979).