Advancing the Shift-of-Strategy approach: Shifting suspects' strategies in extended interviews.

OBJECTIVE: Interviewers often face the challenge of obtaining information from suspects who are willing to speak but are motivated to conceal incriminating information. The Shift-of-Strategy (SoS) approach is an interviewing technique designed to obtain new information from such suspects. This study provides a robust empirical test of the SoS approach using more complex crime events and longer interviews than previously tested as well as testing a new variation of the approach (SoS-Reinforcement) that included a strategic summary of the suspect's statement. We compared this new variation with a standard version of the approach (SoS-Standard) and an interviewing approach that involved no confrontation of discrepancies in the suspects' statements (Direct). HYPOTHESES: We predicted that the two SoS versions would outperform the Direct condition in terms of participants' disclosure of previously unknown information. We also predicted that SoS-Reinforcement would outperform SoS-Standard. Finally, we expected that participants in the SoS conditions would not assess the interview or the interviewer more poorly than participants in Direct. METHOD: A total of 300 participants completed an online mock crime procedure, and they were subsequently interviewed with one of the three interviewing techniques. Following the interview, participants provided assessments of their experiences being interviewed. RESULTS: Participants in both SoS-Standard (d = 0.49, 95% confidence interval [CI: 0.21, 0.78]) and SoS-Reinforcement (d = 0.59, 95% CI [0.30, 0.87]) disclosed more previously unknown information than participants in the Direct condition, but SoS-Reinforcement did not outperform SoS-Standard (d = 0.08, 95% CI [-0.20, 0.36]). Participants in SoS-Reinforcement assessed their experience more negatively than those in Direct. No such differences were observed in the remaining two-way comparisons. CONCLUSIONS: The study provides support for the effectiveness of eliciting new information through the SoS approach and illuminates possible experiential downsides with being subjected to the SoS-Reinforcement approach. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Hotels re-explored: Experience and influence of reciprocity and social normative appeals.

In this paper we report two high-powered and pre-registered experiments, testing the robustness and conceptual development of reciprocity and social norm appeals. Both experiments assessed both psychological processes for complying with these appeals and pro-environmental behavioral intention in tourism settings. In Experiment 1 (N = 2004), participants reported lower psychological reactance levels after learning that the hotel engaged in resource conservation (i.e., indirect homeomorphic reciprocity). No statistically significant effect was obtained for either obligatory motivation, prosocial motivation, skepticism, or behavioral intentions to reuse hotel towels. Importantly, high baseline intention of reusing hotel towels might have limited the effect of appeals. Therefore, we targeted meat consumption in Experiment 2 (n = 2540). Results first showed stronger obligatory and prosocial motivation for all three reciprocity appeals, compared to the standard appeal. No statistically significant results were found for either reactance or skepticism. Finally, after learning that the hotel had made a financial contribution to an environmental organization (i.e., indirect heteromorphic reciprocity) participants showed reduced meat consumption intentions compared to the standard appeal. Overall, the results provide initial evidence for conceptually refining the norm of reciprocity to encourage pro-environmental behaviors and for understanding the underlying psychological processes.

Does Expertise Reduce Rates of Inattentional Blindness? A Meta-Analysis.

Inattentional blindness occurs when one fails to notice a fully visible stimulus because one's attention is on another task. Researchers have suggested that expertise at this other task should reduce rates of inattentional blindness. However, research on the topic has produced mixed findings. To gain clarity on the issue, we meta-analyzed the extant studies (K = 14; N = 1153). On average, experts showed only a slight reduction in rates of inattentional blindness: 62% of novices experienced inattentional blindness compared to 56% of experts, weighted odds ratio = 1.33, 95% CI [0.78, 2.28]. The relevance of the stimuli to the experts' domain of expertise showed no notable moderating effects. The low number of the included studies, and the small sample sizes of the original studies, weaken our conclusions. Nonetheless, when taken together, the available evidence provides little support for any reliable influence of expertise on rates of inattentional blindness.