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CHAPTER

7 Conducting Tough Interviews

Introduction

This chapter sets out the potential strategies, tactics and questions for conducting tough in-
terviews in the seven phases discussed in Chapter 6 and provides indicators of truthful and
untruthful responses.

Types of questions

THE MENU

There are many ways in which we can deliver questions:

• some are general and set the scene;
• some will test whether the subject is being truthful or not;
• some will produce detail or fine-tune an answer;
• some will increase anxiety;
• others are empathetic and emotionally sensitive and can be used at the pivotal point to help

the suspect conclude that it would be in his best interests to tell the truth.

The relevance of questions to the seven interview phases is usually as in Table 7.1.

Most questions will be directed and answered at a conscious level although, as we will see
later, we can use embedded commands, NLP, non-verbal communications and other tech-
niques to excite the monkeys on the liar’s back.

CONTROL AND RELEVANT QUESTIONS

Control questions are non-threatening and are used, among other things, to monitor a sub-
ject’s baseline reactions when he is telling the truth. For example, under most circumstances,
the question ‘When did you start working here?’ could be regarded as a control question, as
could ‘Do you prefer rice pudding to treacle tart?’ The problem is that what you think may be a
control, and unthreatening, question may hold a dreadful significance for the subject, espe-
cially if he has just stolen Granny Smith’s rice pudding. Honest people take the same level of
care with control as they do with relevant questions: liars relax but don’t know how to deal
with them.