Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

394 A Psychology of Interrogations and Confessions
interviewee, if increasing psychological distance is conceived as commensurate
with a move from a positive, though a neutral, to a negative interviewer attitude
toward the interviewee and a progressive decrease in the social support offered to
the interviewee by the interviewer (p. 760).
Baxter and Boon also point out on the basis of their findings that Yield 2 is undoubtedly
a very important measure of interviewees’ vulnerability to interrogative
pressure ‘and may be a more important measure of witness vulnerability
and reliability in its own right than has been acknowledged hitherto’ (p. 760).
Bain and Baxter (2000) investigated the effects of the manner in which the
GSS 1 was administered. Fifty-five first year undergraduate students were
randomly allocated into one of two groups where the demeanour of the experimenter
was either friendly or abrupt throughout the administration of the
scale. It was hypothesized that the psychological distance between the interviewer
and interviewee would be different in the two conditions, resulting in
greater suggestibility during the abrupt condition. Out of the four suggestibility
measures, one-way ANOVA tests showed that significant differences emerged
with regard to Shift ( p = 0.02) and Total Suggestibility ( p = 0.04). No significant
differences between conditions were found for immediate and delayed recall.
The authors pointed out that their findings support my view that there are at
least two distinct types of interrogative suggestibility, Yield 1 and Shift. The
findings suggest that Yield 1 may be relatively independent of the interviewer’s
manner and demeanour, whereas Shift is clearly not:
This finding may mean that initial responses to leading questions are mediated
by more stable cognitive factors, perhaps involving a capacity for source monitoring
or discrepancy detection, that are relatively unaffected by the manner of the
interrogator, whereas the post-feedback GSS measures may be more sensitive to
social aspects of suggestibility (Bain & Baxter, 2000, p. 131).
The finding that the effect of the abrupt manner was primarily on Shift rather
than Yield 2 suggests that the subjects’ level of uncertainty was increased regarding
their performance and they consequently began to guess more of the
answers after the negative feedback. In order to increase Yield 2 there may need
to be more direct interpersonal pressure, as happened in the stern condition in
the Baxter–Boon (2000) study discussed above.
SUGGESTIBILITY AND SOCIAL DESIRABILITY
Both suggestibility and compliance correlate with social desirability, but the
correlation is small and may not prove to be significant in all studies. Social
desirability is commonly associated with ‘lie scales’, such as those measured by
the EPQ (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1975) and the Marlowe–Crowne scale (Crowne &
Marlowe, 1960). A high ‘lie’ score is generally construed as an attempt by subjects
to present themselves in a socially favourable light (Gudjonsson, 1990d).
In an early study (Gudjonsson, 1983), I found that the GSS 1 Total Suggestibility
score correlated very modestly (r = 0.34, df = 43, p < 0.01) with social