Garven, S., Wood, J.M. & Malpass, R.S. (2000). Allegations of wrongdoing: The effects of reinforcement on children's mundane and fantastic claims. Journal of Applied Psychology, 85, 38-49.
Purpose
- To see if the interviewing techniques reinforcement and cowitness information can induce children’s claims of false allegations. More specifically, can interviewing techniques have a lasting effect and will a second neutral interview "be tainted"Overview
: In the 80’s teachers at the McMartin preschool were accused of abusing the children in their care including some bizzare allegations such as kidnapping kids from the preschool, "flying them in a helicopter to a farm where animals were tortured and the children were forced to engage in group sex."The interviews given to the kids contained positive reinforcement for making allegations and also the kids were told about claims other kids had made already (co-witness information). The interviews were identified (by Wood et. al. 1998) as being more suggestive than regular Child Protective Services interviews for child abuse.
Hypotheses
-Reinforcement and cowitness information will cause kids to make false allegations
-Kids interviewed with Reinforcement (R) and /or Cowitness information (C) will continue to make false allegations in a second interview without R or C
-Reinforcement and cowitness information will cause kids to make fantastic allegations but these will be less frequent than mundane allegations.
Related studies
In prior reseach (
Garven, et. al, 1998) the authors have shown that reinforcement and co-witness information together can have a profound impact on the accuracy of children's testimony. In the present study, the authors attempt to tease apart the influence of these two factors.Zigler and Lanzer (1962) found that reinforcement can influence a child’s behavior change.
Things to memorize to make you sound smarter.
Reinforcement +/- consequences… (+) consequences are things such as giving, or promising something during the interview. (–) consequences are things such as criticizing or disagreeing with the child in the interview.
Cowitness information… telling the child what the other kids have already said.
Types of allegations kids were persuaded to claim
Mundane allegations
- plain allegations, like did Odie pay for the chips and salsa today??Fantastic Allegations
- more outrageous allegations, like did Odie fly us to a farm where a horse was beaten with a baseball bat and a gal was pushed down on some poop.Method
A young man called Paco Perez went to 5 grade schools, read stories and gave out treats. A week later kids were re-interviewed. One to two weeks later kids from four of the schools were interviewed once more.
Kindergarten and 1st grade kids were interviewed ( ages 5-7). N=120 51 boys 69 girls. Interviews were taped.
Paco led story time. He wore a big hat and goofy glasses with a fake nose and a moustache. He then told the story and gave a sticker to each child (on the left hand), gave out candy, and left.
Interviews were given individually and the first and second interviewers were different.
Children were randomly assigned to one of four types of interviews
16 questions were asked
8 were misleading mundane (. Did Paco tear a book?)
4 were misleading fantastic ( Did Paco take you in a helicopter ride?)
4 were leading questions ( Did Paco take off his hat?)
In the second interview, half of the kids were interviewed in the same format as their first interview and the other half had a new interview format (They told the kids that what the first interviewer might have said untrue things and they also challenged each yes answer with follow up questions)
RESULTS
Interview 1
False assents to misleading mundane questions
34.68% with R
12.50% without R
29.44% with C
18.75% with out C
False assents to misleading fantastic questions
51.61 % with R
4.91% without R
no effect of cowitness information on false assents
Notice that the children were more likely to go along with the fantastic questions than the mundane questions (although this could be because order of presentation was confounded with question type).
Correct assents to correctly leading questions
93.14% with R
86.66% without R
no cowitness effects were found but the kids were accurate.
Interview 2
In interview 2 some children were reinterviewed with the same type of interview they originally had and some were reinterviewed with only suggestive questions
Misleading Mundane
52.71 with R
6.11 without R
no other effects were found
Misleading Fantastic
61.95% with R
6.91 % without R
Leading correct items
96.19% with R
88.29% without R
Repeated interviews
96.19% yes answers given
No Repeat interviews
88.19% yes answers given
Reinforcement effects
2(Cowitness info in 1st interview)X2(Reinforcement in 1st interview)X2 (Repeat or New interview) ANOVA was conducted
25% yes answers given to mundane question with R.
3.72% yes answers given to mundane questions without R.
30.43% yes answers given to fantastic questions with R
4.25% yes answers given to fantastic questions without R.
False information was elaborated on 82.6% of the time in the 2nd interview.
DISCUSSION
Reinforcement dramatically increases rate of making false allegations in 5-7 year old children
Cowitness information has weak effects on making false allegations in 5-7 year old children
Even absurd (fantastic allegations) were claimed to be true with Reinforcement involved in the interview and the effect is stronger for fantastic claims than for mundane claims
Even when false claims were challenged children still claimed they happened.
Possible Problem: The misleading fantastic questions always followed the mundane questions, and frequency of yes answers increasingly went up in the reinforcement interviews. Therefore, this could account for why children answered yes to more fantastic questions than mundane ones.
HYMAN AND PENTLAND FOUND COLLEGE STUDENTS WERE MORE LIKELY TO "REMEMBER" FALSE EVENTS IF THEY WERE TOLD A FAMILY MEMBER SAID IT WAS TRUE!
Stuff to memorize that won’t make you sound smarter
One girl claimed a "Gal" was pushed down on some "Poop"
What does the study suggest???