Brent Snook

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Memorial University of Newfoundland

False balance arises when opposing viewpoints about a scientific issue are portrayed as more evenly matched than what the empirical evidence demonstrates. We examined the extent to which partition dependence is the psychological mechanism underlying the false balance effect. Participants ( N = 360) read a statement about an interrogation practice (...

Purpose This study aims to test the effect of a falsely balanced message (i.e. exposure to two opposing arguments) on perceived expert consensus about an interrogation practice. Design/methodology/approach Participants ( N = 254) read a statement about minimization tactics and were assigned randomly to one of four conditions, where true expert con...

The perceived acceptability of implicit threats, as a function of messenger type, was examined. Across two experiments, participants (79 undergraduates and 160 community members) read a news article about how a police officer or gang member used an implicit threat to obtain an admission of wrongdoing from a store owner. Participants then provided t...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to contribute to the literature on information elicitation. The authors investigated the impact of social influence strategies on eyewitness recall performance. Specifically, the authors examined the effect of social influence techniques (Cialdini, 2007) on recall performance (Experiment 1) and conducted a follo...

The recall of an episodic narrative, as a function of presentation modality (audio-visual sketch, audio-only), was examined across three cumulative experiments. Experiment 1: participants (N = 84) were asked to recall a narrative delivered via audio, or audio accompanied by a sketch. Experiment 2: participants (N = 116) were asked to recall a narra...

We examined the extent to which presenting youth interrogation rights using different combinations of three multimedia elements (Animation, Audio, and Caption) improved comprehension. A 2 (Animation: Present, Absent) × 2 (Audio: Present, Absent) × 2 (Caption: Present, Absent) between-participants design was employed using samples of adults (Experim...

Judges are the gatekeepers of evidence in the justice system. Granted that witness testimony is pivotal to the truth-seeking function of the criminal justice system, and that judges sometimes intervene and ask questions in the courtroom to help ensure the testimony is accurate, little is known about judges’ questioning practices. In the current stu...

This chapter reviews current research and internationally published guidance for conducting interviews with adult sexual assault victims and identifies key best practices to improve the interview process. Among the issues identified by practitioners, researchers, and victims, two of the overriding themes are victim empowerment and a climate of beli...

Layperson perceptions of explicit and implicit witness interviewing tactics were examined. Canadian residents ( N = 293) read an interview transcript that contained a tactic (i.e., explicit threat or promise, one of four types of minimization, or no tactic) that aimed to persuade the witness to change his account. Participants were then asked to ra...

The current study is the first phase of a larger evaluation of the Vermont State Police (VSP) PEACE Model interview training program. This evaluation measures the impact of the program on trainees’ interviewing knowledge and attitudes, and opinions about the program. VSP Members participating in Tier 1 (N = 72) and Tier 2 (N = 46) PEACE interview t...

The current article presents a series of commentaries on urgent issues and prospects in reforming interrogation practices in Canada and the United States. Researchers and practitioners, who have devoted much of their careers to the field of police and intelligence interrogations, were asked to provide their insights on an area of interrogation rese...

Police victim and witness interviewing in a northern Canadian territory with a predominantly Indigenous population was examined across two studies. In study 1, an Internet survey about interview training, practices and cross-cultural issues was completed by serving police officers ( N = 37). In study 2, transcripts of interviews with Indigenous adu...

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) implemented the Phased Interview Model in Canada and has argued that it is a novel and productive way to interview suspects. We applaud the RCMP for moving away from an accusatorial approach and recognize that the Phased Interview Model contains several science-based practices. In this article, however, we e...

The effect of the suspect-corroborator relationship and number of corroborators on alibi assessments was examined across two experiments. In both experiments, we explored the effect of relationship type and number of corroborators on believability, likelihood of guilt, and decision to retain the suspect as the primary suspect; we increased the soci...

In response to the crisis of confidence in psychology, a plethora of solutions have been proposed to improve the way research is conducted (e.g., increasing statistical power, focusing on confidence intervals, enhancing the disclosure of methods). One area that has received little attention is the reliability of data. We note that while it is well...

The delivery of interrogation rights to youth suspects and associated behaviours (e.g. seeking evidence of comprehension) were examined in a sample of real-world interrogations ( N = 31). Interrogation rights were delivered fully in approximately one-third of interrogations. Verification of comprehension was attempted rarely, and interrogators aske...

Perceptions of the use of coercive tactics in witness interviews were examined. Canadian community members ( N = 293) were asked to read a transcript of a witness interview that included either (a) threats/overt coercion, (b) minimization/covert coercion, or (c) no coercion, and answer questions about the interview. Participants rated the threat tr...

The questioning practices of Canadian lawyers were examined. Courtroom examinations (N = 91) were coded for the type of utterance, the assumed purpose of the utterance, and the length of utterance. Results showed that approximately one-fifth of all utterances were classified as productive for gathering reliable information (i.e. open-ended, probing...

The perceived credibility of a sexual assault victim’s court testimony was examined. A 2 (Muslim Garment: No, Yes) × 2 (Face Covered: No, Yes) between-participants design was used. Participants (N = 120) were assigned to watch one of four videos of a sexual assault victim providing testimony and asked to rate her credibility. The effect of Muslim G...

The relative effectiveness of three sketching procedures for enhancing the recall of a witnessed event was assessed. Participants (N = 123) viewed a mock crime video and were asked to recall its contents using one of three sketching procedures (i.e., Sketch and Free Recall; Sketch then Free Recall; Sketch and Explain then Free Recall) or two compar...

The effectiveness of a sketch procedure for enhancing the recall of a live interactive event was assessed. Participants (N = 88) engaged in an interaction with a confederate, were administered a sketch, mental reinstatement of context (MRC), or control procedure and then asked to recall the experienced event. Results showed that participants who we...

The relative impact of five alibi components on the assessment of alibi veracity was investigated using a policy-capturing methodology. Participants (N = 115) were instructed to assume the role of a homicide investigator and evaluate 32 alibis that varied on five dichotomous variables: Salaciousness; Legality; Change in Details; Superfluous Details...

Many indices of interrater agreement on binary tasks have been proposed to assess reliability, but none has escaped criticism. In a series of Monte Carlo simulations, five such indices were evaluated using d-prime, an unbiased indicator of raters’ ability to distinguish between the true presence or absence of the characteristic being judged. Phi an...

The effects of warning witnesses about lying (i.e., turncoat warning) and rapport building on perceptions of police interviewers were examined across two experiments. In experiment 1, participants (N = 59) were asked to assume the role of a witness when reading four interview transcript excerpts and rate the police interviewer on an eight-item atti...

Purpose – A recent Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) ruling resulted in stricter rules being placed on how police organizations can obtain confessions through a controversial undercover operation, known as the Mr. Big technique. The SCC placed the onus on prosecutors to demonstrate that the probative value of any Mr. Big derived confession outweighs it...

The effect of a witness interviewing training program on interviewing performance in actual investigations was examined. Eighty interviews, conducted by police officers in one Canadian organization, were coded for the presence of 38 desirable practices. Results showed that, in general, trained interviewers outperformed their untrained counterparts....

Geographic profiling (GP) is an investigative technique that involves predicting a serial offender’s home location (or some other anchor point) based on where he or she committed a crime. Although the use of GP in police investigations appears to be on the rise, little is known about the procedure and how it is used. To examine these issues, a surv...

A policy-capturing analysis of alibi assessments was conducted. University students (N = 65), law enforcement students (N = 21), and police officers (N = 11) were provided with 32 statements from individuals supporting a suspect's alibi (i.e., alibi corroborators) and asked to assess the believability of the alibi, the suspect's guilt, and whether...

Although youth in many Western countries have been afforded enhanced legal protections when facing police interrogations, the effectiveness of these protections may be limited by youth's inability to comprehend them. The ability to increase the comprehension of Canadian interrogation rights among youth through the simplification of waiver forms was...

The ability to predict confessions and cooperation from the elements of an interrogation was examined. Incarcerated men (N = 100) completed a 50-item questionnaire about their most recent police interrogation, and regression analyses were performed on self-reported decisions to confess and cooperate. Results showed that the likelihood of an interro...

Résumé La présente étude porte sur l’évaluation de la complexité de lecture d’un échantillon de formulaires de déclaration et de renonciation aux droits pour adolescents et utilisés par les organisations policières québécoises. La complexité de six formulaires de déclaration et de renonciation aux droits a été mesurée en utilisant quatre mesures d’...

Canadians who are detained by law enforcement officers are afforded the right to silence and the right to legal counsel. The comprehension of these rights is needed in order to protect the rights and freedoms of detainees and to ensure that any statement that provides probative evidence is admissible in court. In this arti-cle, we review the resear...

The extent to which youths understand their interrogation rights was examined. High school students (N = 160) from five different grades were presented with one of two Canadian youth waiver forms—varying widely in reading complexity—and tested on their knowledge of their legal rights. Results showed that comprehension of both waiver forms was equal...

The reading complexity of a sample of Canadian "KGB warnings" was assessed, along with the oral compre-hension of one of those warnings. In Study 1, the complexity of 29 warnings was assessed using five readability measures. Results showed that the warnings are lengthy, are written at a high-grade level, contain complex sentences, and contain words...

This research examined the coordination of interrogator and suspects' verbal behavior in interrogations. Sixty-four police interrogations were examined at the aggregate and utterance level using a measure of verbal mimicry known as Language Style Matching. Analyses revealed an interaction between confession and the direction of language matching. I...

PurposeTo examine the effect of listenability features on the comprehension of interrogation rights.Method In Experiment 1, students (N = 76) underwent a mock interrogation where one of two police cautions (listenable caution vs. standard caution) was administered and students were asked to explain the caution in their own words. Experiment 2 (N =...

Nous avons mesuré le taux de compréhension de deux mises en garde données par les policiers auprès d’un échantillon de contrevenants adultes canadiens et avons prédit leur compréhension à l’aide de trois moyens de mesure d’habiletés intellectuelles (c.-à-d. la mémoire opérationnelle, le vocabulaire et la compréhension auditive). Les participants (N...

A field study of interviews with child witnesses and alleged victims was conducted. The National Institute of Child and Human Development (NICHD) codebook served as the framework to examine a sample of 45 interviews with children ranging in age from three to 16. Results showed that pre-substantive practices were observed rarely. An examination of t...

Attitudes toward four types of decision-making strategies—clinical/fully rational, clinical/heuristic, actuarial/fully rational, and actuarial/heuristic—were examined across three studies. In Study 1, undergraduate students were split randomly between legal and medical decision-making scenarios and asked to rate each strategy in terms of the follow...

The real-life questioning practices of Canadian police officers were examined. Specifically, 80 transcripts of police interviews with suspects and accused persons were coded for the type of questions asked, the length of interviewee response to each question, the proportion of words spoken by interviewer(s) and interviewee, and whether or not a fre...

The reading complexity of a sample of Canadian police youth waiver forms was assessed, and the oral comprehension of a waiver form was examined. In Study 1, the complexity of 31 unique waiver forms was assessed using five readability measures (i.e., waiver length, Flesch–Kincaid grade level, Grammatik sentence complexity, word difficulty, and word...

Résumé Malgré l’importance reconnue de la formation intensive de policiers intervieweurs efficaces et d’une supervision et d’un feedback soutenus afin de maintenir les compétences acquises en techniques d’entrevue, il n’existe aucunes données empiriques sur l’état actuel de telles pratiques dans les services canadiens de police. L...

The interrater reliability of an internationally renowned crime linkage system—the Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System (ViCLAS)—was tested. Police officers (N = 10) were presented with a case file and asked to complete a ViCLAS booklet. The level of occurrence agreement between each officer was calculated. Results showed a 30.77% level of agreeme...

Computerized crime linkage systems are meant to assist the police in determining whether crimes have been committed by the same offender. In this article, the authors assess these systems critically and identify four assumptions that affect the effectiveness of these systems. These assumptions are that (a) data in the systems can be coded reliably,...

Rational choice theories of criminal decision making assume that offenders weight and integrate multiple cues when making decisions (i.e., are compensatory). We tested this assumption by comparing how well a compensatory strategy called Franklin's Rule captured burglars' decision policies regarding residence occupancy compared to a non-compensatory...

The current chapter addresses the ongoing debate about whether individuals can perform as well as actuarial techniques when confronted with real world, consequential decisions. A single experiment tested the ability of participants (N = 215) and an actuarial technique to accurately predict the residential locations of serial offenders based on info...

We examined the extent to which modifying a police caution using three listenability factors (Instructions, Listing, and Explanations) improved comprehension. A 2 (Instructions vs. No Instructions) × 2 (Listing vs. No Listing) × 2 (Explanations vs. No Explanations) between-participants design was used. Participants (N = 160) were presented verbally...

Purpose. The current study examined witness interviewing practices in a Canadian police organization. The effect of interviewer, interviewee, and interview characteristics on those practices was also examined. Method. Ninety witness interviews from a Canadian police organization were coded for the following interviewing practices: types of question...

The administration of the right-to-silence and right-to-legal-counsel cautions in 126 investigative interviews (37 videotapes, 89 transcripts) was evaluated with a 78-item coding manual. We found that the right-to-silence and right-to-legal-counsel cautions were administered in 87% and 83% of the interviews, respectively. Average speech rates for b...

University students, police professionals, and a logistic regression model were provided with information on 38 pairs of burglaries, 20% of which were committed by the same offender, in order to examine their ability to accurately identify linked serial burglaries. For each offense pair, the information included: (1) the offense locations as points...

In a recent narrative review and meta-analysis of the criminal profiling (CP) literature, Snook, Eastwood, Gendreau, Goggin, and Cullen (2007) found that self-labeled profilers and/or self-labeled profilers/experienced detectives did not decisively outperform lay individuals in their ability to produce accurate profiles. Combined with their finding...

Les pratiques d'entrevues d'enquête au Canada devraient faire l'objet d'une réforme importante. La formation sur les entrevues avec des témoins et des victimes adultes, qui est offerte aux agents de police canadiens, est souvent superficielle et celle sur l'interrogation de suspects se limite à la controversée technique Reid. Cela pose problème par...

Résumé: Nous avons examiné jusqu'à quel point le jumelage heuristique peut représenter le processus décisionnel des agents de police lors de l'évaluation de la véracité d'une note de suicide. Pour ce faire, on a demandé à trente-six agents de police de lire chacun 30 notes de suicide sélectionnées au hasard et de distinguer les vrais des fausses. L...

A judgement analysis of people's social inferences of attitudes and ability was conducted. University students were asked to infer the liberalness (N = 60; Study 1) or intelligence (N = 40; Study 2) of targets seen in pictures. Multiple regression analyses revealed that attractiveness was the most important cue for predicting inferences of liberaln...

Comprehension of a Canadian police right to silence caution and a right to legal counsel caution was examined. Each caution was first presented verbally in its entirety, followed by its sentence-by-sentence presentation in written format. Participants (N = 56) were asked to indicate, after each presentation, their understanding of the caution. When...

In “The Criminal Profiling Illusion: What’s Behind the Smoke and Mirrors?” (Snook, Cullen, Bennell, Taylor, & Gendreau, 2008), we questioned the evidence base for criminal profiling (CP) and offered an explanation regarding how people have been misled into thinking that it is more effective than what research suggests. In their reply, Dern, Dern, H...

The precision, accuracy, and efficiency of geographic profiling (GP) predictions made by students, some of whom were taught a geographic profiling heuristic, were compared to those made by seven mathematical algorithms, including several based on a Bayesian prediction model. The stimuli consisted of 40 maps, each depicting a different offence serie...

This study sought to shed light on the interrogation process through analysis of 44 video-recorded police interrogations of suspects in criminal cases. Results showed that, on average, interrogators used 34% of the components composing the nine-step Reid model of interrogation. Approximately 27% of the interrogations met Leo's criteria for a coerci...

Human performance on the geographic profiling task—where the goal is to predict an offender's home location from their crime locations—has been shown to equal that of complex actuarial methods when it is based on appropriate heuristics. However, this evidence is derived from comparisons of ‘X-marks-the-spot’ predictions, which ignore the fact that...

Police psychology (PP) articles in five forensic psychology journals (Behavioral Sciences and the Law; Criminal Justice and Behavior; Law and Human Behavior; Legal and Criminological Psychology; Psychology, Crime, and Law) were identified in order to examine PP publication and research trends within the field of forensic psychology. A level of inte...

This study compared the precision, accuracy, and efficiency of geographic profiles made by students to those made by mathematical algorithms. After making predictions on 20 maps, each depicting a different offence series, nearly half of the sampled students were instructed that ―the majority of offenders commit offences close to home‖. All of the s...

A fundamental assumption in criminal profiling is that criminals who exhibit similar crime scene actions have similar background characteristics. We tested this so-called homology assumption by first classifying, with pre-existing typologies, a sample of arsons (N = 87) and robberies (N = 177) into different crime types and then comparing the backg...

There is a belief that criminal profilers can predict a criminal's characteristics from crime scene evidence. In this article, the authors argue that this belief may be an illusion and explain how people may have been misled into believing that criminal profiling (CP) works despite no sound theoretical grounding and no strong empirical support for...

Geographic profiling predictions can be produced using a variety of strategies. Some predictions are made using an equation or mechanical aid (actuarial strategy) while others are made by human judges drawing on experience or heuristic principles (clinical strategy). We review research that bears directly on the issue of whether clinical strategies...

Geographic profiling (GP) predictions (about where an unknown serial offender lives) can be produced using a variety of strategies. Some predictions are made using an equation or mechanical aid (actuarial approach) while others are made by human judges drawing on experience or heuristic principles (clinical approach). To assess the overall body of...

The use of criminal profiling (CP) in criminal investigations has continued to increase despite scant empirical evidence that it is effective. To take stock of the CP field, a narrative review and a 2-part meta-analysis of the published CP literature were conducted. Narrative review results suggest that the CP literature rests largely on commonsens...

This study examines the effect of the number of crimes and topographical detail on police officer predictions of serial burglars’ home locations. Officers are given 36 maps depicting three, five, or seven crime sites and topographical or no topographical details. They are asked to predict, by marking an X on the map, where they thought each burglar...

Fifty-one Canadian police offi cers', working in major crime divisions, were interviewed about their experiences with criminal profi ling (CP), and their beliefs about its utility and validity. The majority of offi cers agreed that CP helps solve cases, is a valuable investigative tool, and advances investigator understanding of a case. Few of- fi...

This paper considers a suspect prioritization technique and tests its validity using a sample of commercial armed robbery offences from St John's, Newfoundland, Canada. The proposed technique is empirically grounded in criminal careers and journey‐to‐crime research. Suspects with a previous criminal history are selected and ranked in ascending orde...

In a recent issue of this journal, Kocsis reviewed the criminal profiling research that he and his colleagues have conducted during the past 4 years. Their research examines the correlates of profile accuracy with respect to the skills of the individual constructing the profile, and it has led Kocsis to draw conclusions that are important to the pr...

This study examined whether people adhered to the recognition heuristic (i.e., inferred that a recognized hockey player had more total career points than an unrecognized player) and whether using this heuristic could yield accurate decisions. On paired comparisons, having participants report whether they recognized each player plus any knowledge th...

This study assessed the effectiveness of the DNA Identification Act by examining whether 106 predatory sexual murderers and 85 predatory sexual assaulters had earlier convictions for offences that require offenders to provide a DNA profile to the National DNA Data Bank (NDDB). Offenders' criminal records were checked for convictions of primary and...

An examination of the home-to-crime distances (measured as the straight-line distance from the robbery site to the robber's home location) for 177 solved commercial robberies in St. John's, newfoundland, indicated that half of the robberies were committed within 1 km of the robber's home and the frequency of target selection followed a distance-dec...

The outcome of German serial murderer spatial decision making was measured as the straight-line distance (km) between murderer home locations and each crime location (i.e. body recovery location). Geographic and series development data, as well as information on age, intelligence, motive, marital status, employment status, and mode of transportatio...

In ‘Geographic profiling: The fast, frugal, and accurate way’ (Applied Cognitive Psychology, 2004, vol. 18, pp. 105–121), we demonstrated that most people are able to predict the home location of a serial offender by using a simple prediction strategy that exploits patterns found in the offender's spatial behaviour. In this issue of Applied Cogniti...

Geographic profilers have access to a repertoire of strategies for predicting a serial offenders home location. These strategies range in complexity—some involve more calculations to implement than others—and the assumption often made is that more complex strategies will outperform simpler strategies. In the present study, we tested the relationshi...

This paper uses police data on a sample of 41 serial burglars committed in the city of St John's, Canada and surrounding areas, to examine individual differences in distances travelled. In accord with findings from studies in other locations, results show that serial burglary is a localised activity. Differences between serial burglars in distances...

The current article addresses the ongoing debate about whether individuals can perform as well as actuarial techniques when confronted with real world, consequential decisions. A single experiment tested the ability of participants (N = 215) and an actuarial technique to accurately predict the residential locations of serial offenders based on info...

The accuracy with which human judges, before and after 'training', could predict the likely home location of serial offenders was compared with predictions produced by a geographic profiling system known as Dragnet. All predictions were derived from ten spatial displays, one for each of ten different U.S. serial murderers, indicating five crime loc...

Problems of classification in the field of Investigative Psychology are defined and examples of each problem class are introduced. The problems addressed are behavioural differentiation, discrimination among alternatives, and prioritisation of investigative options. Contemporary solutions to these problems are presented that use smallest space anal...

This article explores how unobtrusive research methods popularized by Webb et al. (1966) can be utilized in forensic research. In particular, the value of the approach is considered with special reference to examining investigative processes and criminal behaviour. Webb et al.’s three non-reactive types of unobtrusive measures (physical traces, arc...