Wait! I forgot one of the Reid Technique’s big clues: watch the hands!
During a response, a subject’s hands can do one of three things. They can remain uninvolved and unmoving, which can be a sign that the subject lacks confidence in his verbal response or is simply not talking about something perceived as very significant. The hands can move away from the body and gesture, which is called illustrating. Finally, the hands can come in contact with some part of the body, which is referred to as adaptor behavior. (Reid et al., p. 96).
What follows is an explanation of how hand movements do and don’t contribute to our understanding of truthfulness. The Reid Technique assumes there is a pattern to hand movement. Really? Here are Johnson’s hand-movement data. This time I’ve included the range of responses—the shortest recorded response in the second column and the longest in the third column. Take a look:
Hand gestures per minute
Average time (in seconds)
Shortest time (in seconds)
Longest time (in seconds)
African
American/innocent
28.39
00.00
58.46
African American/suspect
23.98
00.00
56.00
Caucasian/innocent
07.89
00.00
58.00
Caucasian/suspect
17.43
31.00
56.00
Hispanic/innocent
22.14
23.00
57.00
Hispanic/suspect
31.41
13.43
53.33
Entire sample
23.68
00.00
58.46
If you can make sense of those numbers, you’re smarter than I am.
By the way, the weirdest of all Reid obsessions is this: “Changes in [foot] bouncing behavior—whether it be a sudden start or stop—that occur in conjunction with a verbal response can be a significant indication of deception.…The feet are also involved in significant posture changes called ‘shifts in the chair.’ With this behavior, the subject plants his feet and literally pushes his body up, slightly off the chair to assume a new posture. Gross shifts in the chair of this nature are good indications of deception when they immediately precede or occur in conjunction with a subject’s verbal response” (Reid et al., Essentials of the Reid Technique, p. 98).
What? I happen to be someone who is constantly, nervously jiggling his foot. I do it when I’m excited, or when I’m on a roll, or when I’m a little jumpy after too much coffee. What on earth does this have to do with whether or not I’m telling the truth?
One more shot at the Reid Technique. Let me just quote from Brian Gallini’s devastating law-review article, “Police ‘Science’ in the Interrogation Room: Seventy Years of Pseudo-Psychological Interrogation Methods to Obtain Inadmissible Confessions,” Hastings Law Journal 61 (2010): 529. The passage is a description of a study done by Saul Kassin and Christina Fong: “‘I’m Innocent!’: Effects of Training on Judgments of Truth and Deception in the Interrogation Room,” Law and Human Behavior 23, no. 5 (October 1999): 499–516.
More substantively, Professors Kassin and Fong videotaped one group of participants interrogated pursuant to the Reid method to determine whether they committed a mock crime. A second group of participants, some of whom were trained in the Reid method, watched the videos and opined on (1) the guilt or innocence of each subject, and (2) their confidence in their assessment of guilt or innocence. The results were as predictable as they were disturbing: First, judgment accuracy rates were comparable to chance. Second, “training in the use of verbal and nonverbal cues did not improve judgment accuracy.” In an effort to explain why training did nothing to improve judgment accuracy, the authors stated pointedly, “There is no solid empirical basis for the proposition that these same cues reliably discriminate between criminals and innocent persons accused of crimes they did not commit.”
Finally, the authors reported, participants were overconfident in their assessment of guilt or innocence. In the authors’ words:
[W]e found among both trained and naive participants that judgment accuracy and confidence were not significantly correlated, regardless of whether the measure of confidence was taken before, after, or during the task. Further demonstrating the meta-cognitive problems in this domain is that confidence ratings were positively correlated with the number of reasons (including Reid-based reasons) articulated as a basis for judgments, another dependent measure not predictive of accuracy. Training had a particularly adverse effect in this regard. Specifically, those who were trained compared to those in the naive condition were less accurate in their judgments of truth and deception. Yet they were more self-confident and more articulate about the reasons for their often erroneous judgments.
“I apologize…these last couple of weeks…”: “Sandy Speaks—March 1, 2015,” YouTube, posted July 24, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJw3_cvrcwE, accessed March 22, 2019.
DOJ report on Ferguson, Missouri: United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, “Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department,” March 4, 2015, https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/ferguson_police_department_report.pdf.
African Americans are considerably more likely to be subjected to traffic stops (in footnote): Charles R. Epp, Steven Maynard-Moody, and Donald Haider-Markel, How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
North Carolina State Highway Patrol statistics: “Open Data Policing: North Carolina,” accessed March 2019, https://opendatapolicing.com/nc/, accessed March 2019.
FM 1098 is not “a high-crime, high-drug area”: This crime map reflects Waller County data from 2013 to 2017 collected by Baltimore-based crime data aggregator SpotCrime, which sources data from local police departments.
More on the dilemmas caused by haystack searches: Middle-aged women, in most countries, are encouraged to get regular mammograms. But breast cancer is really rare. Just under 0.5 percent of women who get a mammogram actually have the disease. Looking for breast cancer is therefore a haystack search.
Epidemiologist Joann Elmore recently calculated just what this means. Imagine, she said, that a group of radiologists gave a mammogram to 100,000 women. Statistically, there should be 480 cancers in that 100,000. How many will the radiologists find? 398. Believe me, for a task as difficult as reading a mammogram, that’s pretty good.
But in the course of making those correct diagnoses, the radiologists will also run up 8,957 false positives. That’s how haystack searches work: if you want to find that rare gun in someone’s luggage, you’re going to end up flagging lots of hair dryers.
Now suppose you want to do a better job of spotting cancers. Maybe getting 398 out of 480 cases isn’t good enough. Elmore did a second calculation, this time using a group of radiologists with an extra level of elite training. These physicians were very alert, and very suspicious—the medical equivalent of Brian Encinia. They correctly identified 422 of the 480 cases—much better! But how many false positives did that extra suspicion yield? 10,947. An extra two thousand perfectly healthy women were flagged for a disease they didn’t have, and potentially exposed to treatment they didn’t need. The highly trained radiologists were better at finding tumors not because they were more accurate. They were better because they were more suspicious. They saw cancer everywhere.