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Comment by openasocket | Hacker News Reader

I honestly think police shouldn't be allowed to interview children at all (at least those under 13), it should be left to forensic psychologists. Not just interrogations, interviews of witnesses or potential victims too. Children are simply so easy to lead in questions, there's an entire field of study in psychology devoted to figuring out how to ask questions of children without leading them. Here's some examples: if you ask a child a yes-no question that they don't understand, they default to saying yes. If you ask them a multi-choice question ("Would you rather X, Y, or Z?") they default to whichever option was given last.

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I had an experience with this (on a much smaller scale. No police were involved).

When I was about 13 or so, I was walking home with a kid from school and he threw a rock at a passing car. He ran off and left me to deal with the driver. I explained that it was this other kid.

I called the kid later to let him know that I ratted him out and apologized, but I didn't want to be on the hook for it.

The driver, my parents, and the parents of the kid who threw the rock all met with us. Talked through the details, and somewhere in there they mentioned that I had called this kid to apologize, and I said that yeah, I had called him.

It wasn't until after everyone left with the agreement that I was guilty and would pay the damage that my dad told me that I had agreed that I called this kid and apologized for lying about him throwing the rock.

I was totally blindsided by that interpretation. I didn't understand that anyone had even suggested that I might have lied in that situation. It never crossed my mind, I thought I was just saying that I called him. There's nuance and implications in adult conversation that never crosses the mind of a kid.

Something similar can happen to adult too. Less likely to a child, but still, adults are not perfect rational players with great social skills. And not all adults are smart.

Plus, this right there sound to me like very wishful thinking on the side of dad who don't want his kid to be guilty. It does not sound like honest evaluation of what was said. He was likely eager to interpret and twist anything just to get that result and succeeded.

I couldn’t agree more. To share a little bit of my experience in this area:

I’m a social robotics researcher and our group has spent several years working in this area, looking at the effectiveness, ethics, and protections (or harms) involved in using different emerging technologies for conducting forensic interviews with children. As a result I’ve become very familiar with the different forensic interviewing techniques used with kids.

One thing I can say is historically some horrible approaches have been common, but there’s tremendous effort today to reform this. However, even with these well designed techniques the research shows forensic interviewers fall back to using problematic methods if they aren’t regularly refreshed on proper techniques. Our research is focused on eliminating the biases and leading interviewers are vulnerable to by using software and even using tightly controlled social robotic interviewers to totally control expressions, body language, etc. during these interviews.

The general progression is ask an open ended question, then if that’s unsuccessful offer multiple choice, then yes-no. Our protocols strictly forbid adding information apart from repeating what a child says in open ended responses for clarification. But even that can be tricky, even through a robot. In summary it’s not an easy thing and it seems most police/social services in the US have relatively few resources dedicated to improving it. Here’s hoping we can improve this soon!

tbh, I think adults suffer from the same thing, maybe to a lesser extent.

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