Suspect Suggestibility During Police Interrogations
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The Symposium provides undergraduates from all academic disciplines with an opportunity to share their research with the university community and other guests through conference-style oral presentations. The Symposium represents part of a larger effort of Iowa State University to enhance, support, and celebrate undergraduate research activity.
Though coordinated by the University Honors Program, all undergraduate students are eligible and encouraged to participate in the Symposium. Undergraduates conducting research but not yet ready to present their work are encouraged to attend the Symposium to learn about the presentation process and students not currently involved in research are encouraged to attend the Symposium to learn about the broad range of undergraduate research activities that are taking place at ISU.
The first Symposium was held in April 2007. The 39 students who presented research and their mentors collectively represented all of ISU's Colleges: Agriculture and Life Sciences, Business, Design, Engineering, Human Sciences, Liberal Arts and Sciences, Veterinary Medicine, and the Graduate College. The event has grown to regularly include more than 100 students presenting on topics that span the broad range of disciplines studied at ISU.
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Abstract
Previous research on police interrogations have operated under the premise that as an interrogation persists, a suspect’s resistance to interrogative influence steadily declines. However, addressing the issue from the perspective of a stress and coping framework suggests that the threat of police interrogation may cause a suspect’s resistance to initially spike, similar to the flight or fight response, and only afterwards might a suspect’s resistance begin to decline. This research tested the first half of this prediction by examining whether the threat of police interrogation increases a suspect’s resistance to interrogative influence. Participants (N = 364) were made to be either guilty or innocent of cheating on a laboratory task and either accused or not accused of academic misconduct by the experimenter. The accusation manipulation was intended to vary the threat of the situation. Participants’ resistance to interrogative influence was assessed with a measure of suggestibility. The results supported the hypothesis by showing that participants who were accused of cheating exhibited less suggestibility than participants who were not accused. In other words, participants for whom the situation was more threatening showed greater resistance to interrogative influence than did participants for whom the situation was less threatening.