First, let us define what’s under the appellation of “interrogative suggestibility”. According to Gudjonsson (2003), children testimonies are often skewed by policemen questions. Indeed, when a child is called to testify as a witness or victim, the situation can soon be stressful and overwhelming for him. The interrogative suggestibility is relied on this particular context in which a child can be influenced by the questions of a policeman during an interrogation. Of course, neither the policeman nor the child are to blame. That’s why researchers focused their studies on the factors that cause children to be more or less suggestible. The capacities of theory of mind are one element that we have focused ourselves on in our thesis.
These capacities refer to the ability of a child to understand other people state of mind. It develops itself during the preschool age going from understanding that “the person in front of me doesn’t have the same desires that I have” to the understanding of people emotions and the implicit in a conversation or in a situation. In the scientific literature, authors disagree on how a child react when confronting himself to a policeman who’s asking the same questions again and again. Some claim that children will not change their answers because they can understand that the policeman has not the information but in fact they do. On the contrary, some authors pretend that children will change their answers because they know that repeating questions means that they gave a false answer and they have to respond differently. But that behaviour often wrongly discredits children testimony which won’t be used or badly used.
Our sample gathers fifty children from 3 to 5 years old who have taken 2 tests evaluating their interrogative suggestibility and their theory of mind level. The result is quite clear children who have the ability to understand that the person in front of them has not the same information as they do, will be less suggestible but will more often change their answers when a question is repeated.
This result goes along the study of Finnilä, Malhberg, Santtila, Sandnabba & Niemi (2003) which found that the increase of suggestibility is due to the child understanding of the conversational rules.
Concretely, this result can help policemen formation’s to interrogation with young children. Learning how to interview children who are witnesses by not repeating the same questions even when they are older because children will believe that they have a false answer and will change them!
MARTIN Maxime & MITACHEVITCH Pauline
Key words : suggestibility, interrogative suggestibility, children, theory of mind,
Vocabulary :
testimony : témoignage
skew : biaiser
focus ourselves on : se concentrer sur
state of mind : états d’esprits
sample : échantillon
gather : rassemble
Bibliography :
Gudjonsson, G. H. (2003). The psychology of interrogations and confessions a handbook. Chichester (UK) Hoboken (N.J.) San Francisco (Calif.) [etc.]: Wiley.
Finnilä, K., Mahlberg, N., Santtila, P., Sandnabba, K., & Niemi, P. (2003). Validity of a test of children’s suggestibility for predicting responses to two interview situations differing in their degree of suggestiveness. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 85(1), 32–49. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-0965(03)00025-0