Interviewing the Subconscious

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By Wendell Rudacille

Several months before I retired from police work, I was in one of the department’s yearly training sessions. We were watching a videotape of a Texas police officer who had installed a camera in his patrol car to record traffic stops. The tape shows the officer approach a vehicle and question its occupants. The officer is then shown being beaten to death by the car’s occupants, who throw his body down an embankment. The purpose of viewing this tape was to understand what the officer did wrong concerning field confrontational tactics with suspects. The training instructor emphasized how the officer let his killers move in and around him, enabling them to jockey into position and attack him while his attention was directed to the contents of the vehicle’s trunk. Much can be learned from this graphic and sadly sobering account of an officer’s unintentional filming of his own death. At the time I watched this tape, I had just completed my research study on evasive speech and deception, and I noticed that the driver and occupants of this vehicle were using verbal evasion to avoid answering the officer’s direct questions of “Where’s your driver’s license?” “Where are you guys coming from?” “Whose car is this?” etc. When I first heard their “answers,” I knew that these people were lying. We will never know if the officer suspected that they were lying. If he did, why was he not more cautious in dealing with them?

Most of the information police officers and investigators obtain during investigations comes from verbal data supplied by witnesses, victims and suspects of crimes. During the course of taking statements, and doing interviews and interrogations, we are constantly evaluating the accuracy and reliability of what people tell us, then expanding the information for more specific details. For over twenty years I’ve had a deep interest in how persons verbally communicate to describe, explain and talk about things that happen in their lives. When I first became involved in police work in 1969, I noticed that some persons used phrases at the end of their narrations which could indicate they actually had more information than they related.

For example, a suspect in a theft of money stated (condensed from actual statement): “I worked until 11:00 PM that night. I counted out my register and put the money into the bank bag. I then put the bank bag into the drop safe, locked up the store and left. I really can’t think of anything else. That’s about it.” I found that when I asked further questions, nine out of ten times, the person would give me more information, until, at the end of their narratives they said, “that’s it.” I had a suspicion at that time that persons who were intentionally holding back information were unconsciously telling me the complete truth when they said things like “I really can’t think of anything else,” and “that’s about it.” During the next twenty years, while conducting thousands of investigative interviews, I continued to note and document examples of these phrases.

Between 1989 and 1991, I conducted an extensive field research project to collect verbal information from persons during pre-test interview phases of criminal issue polygraph examinations. My theory was that certain forms of verbal evasion were indirect lies and represented direct symptoms of deception. The purpose of the research project was to gather hard evidence of verbally evasive behaviors of liars as opposed to truth-tellers. Common sense tells us that if a person answers a question evasively, he might be withholding information or lying. But, unless he admits that he was lying, we’re left in a gray area in which we only “feel” that deception has occurred. On the other hand, if it could be shown that it was not simply coincidental that liars consistently used certain evasive phrases, a questioner could be more confident of having identified probable deception and could tailor further questioning or investigative work accordingly.

The subjects for this research project were 100 males and females suspected of committing, participating in or having guilty knowledge of a wide range of crimes: murder, rape and sexual offenses, robbery, sexual and physical child abuse, breaking and entering, theft, arson, forgery and false reports of crimes. The subjects were from diverse age ranges and diverse educational and ethnic backgrounds. To document verbal behavior during the pre-test phase of each polygraph examination, a standard procedure was established and adhered to for each subject. Subjects were asked to write out statements about “what happened” and were then orally interviewed concerning the information they had supplied. Depending on the issue of the examination, subjects were then asked direct, relevant questions, such as, “Did you steal the missing money?” “Did you sexually touch Susie’s private parts?” “Did you shoot that man?” etc. Each subject was also asked standard control and non-relevant questions. Subjects’ verbal responses were documented verbatim and then statistically compared to their numerical polygraph test scores.

The results were extremely interesting, but not surprising. Out of the 100 subjects tested, 52 failed and 48 passed. A total of 370 evasive responses to inquiries were documented. The 52 deceptive persons gave a total of 322 evasive responses (an average of 6.19 per person) while the 48 truthful persons accounted for only 48 evasive responses (an average of only 1.00 per person). Correlation of the data revealed a significant positive relationship between the evasiveness of the untruthful persons and their polygraph test scores. Conversely, a significant negative correlation was found between evasive verbal behaviors of the truth-tellers in relation to their numerical scores. Does this mean that the verbal evasion of the deceptive persons caused them to fail the test? No. What it does mean is that the verbally evasive phrases of the liars were direct symptoms of their deception, while those same symptoms were virtually nonexistent in the group of truth-tellers.

The important word in that sentence is virtually. The truthful subjects did exhibit some verbal evasion. Their evasion, however, was directed not toward the relevant issue inquiries, but to outside issues that bore no importance to the reasons for the tests. On the whole, 95% of the evasive responses from untruthful subjects came as a result of inquiries about relevant test issues, while 80% of the evasive responses from the truth-tellers were directed to various outside issues. This data supports the concept that an untruthful person will focus his “deception apprehension” toward an area of the interview to which he must withhold important information and verbally alter or attempt to suppress his knowledge of events, actions and behaviors he knows he committed, participated in or has guilty knowledge of. This is a very important idea for interviewers and interrogators to grasp because it can provide an understanding of why an interviewee uses evasive tactics to some questions but not to others.

In further analyzing the verbal data, I grouped evasive responses into 16 separate “Theme Categories” of similarly repetitive utterances, mirroring psychoverbal tactics of deception. For example, one of the most frequently used evasive responses is titled I CAN’T. This category includes responses such as “I can’t say,” “I can’t think of anything,” “I can’t really tell you anything about that,” etc. In other words, the person admits the complete truth, that he cannot say or tell anything about certain critical events, lest the interviewer might suspect that he is hiding guilty knowledge. Another interesting category is titled UNFINISHED BUSINESS. Here the person is also telling the complete truth when he utters such phrases as “That’s about it,” “That’s about the gist of it,” “That’s about all I know,” “That’s about all that happened,” “That’s about the size of it,” etc.

Another important result of the project was that it was necessary to ask some relevant issue-related questions as many as four times before non-evasive responses were given by deceptive persons. None of the truthful subjects gave evasive responses more than twice to any of the control or non-relevant issue questions. This phenomenon reveals the verbal resistance and defensiveness of the liars in continuing to evade giving specific information to relevant issue inquiries. If an interviewer must repeat a question several times before a person finally answers it, it is highly probable that the person has been or is still being deceptive in his answers. I point this out because there is sometimes a tendency in some interviewers, regardless of skill and experience, to accept a person’s “non answers” to a question as actual answers. If we critically examine the person’s exact words, we may detect that he did not give us information relevant to the question we asked.

An important Theme Category I suspect is often overlooked by questioners is the HYPOTHETICALLY STRUCTURED PHRASE. If it’s hypothetical, it never occurred. If it never occurred, it bears no relationship to reality. If I ask a person “Did you steal that missing five thousand dollars from the office safe?” and the person responds with, “I would deny that allegation,” has the person been evasive? The question asked is a “bipolar” question. That is, it only has two possibly correct answers: YES or NO. If the person answers YES, we have a confession and we have found the thief. If the person answers NO, we have a direct denial and the person could either be telling the truth or lying. In this example the person did not answer YES or NO but replied with the Hypothetically Structured Phrase “I would deny that allegation.” Please notice also that he did not say, “I am denying that allegation.” His use of “I would” in this circumstance means that he is only telling what he “would say,” without actually saying it. In essence, he has said nothing at all. Remember, if it’s hypothetical, it never happened. Some other examples of Hypothetically Structured Phrases are “I would say not,” “I would deny that assertion” and “I should say not.”

In order to validate the results of the polygraph tests in this project as reliable indicators of “ground truth,” independent criteria were investigated to confirm or disconfirm the test results. These criteria consisted of, but were not limited to, (1) a test subject confessing to the test issue; (2) a test subject pleading guilty to a test issue; (3) a test subject being guiltily implicated by means of eyewitness and additional investigative resources.

If a person is verbally evasive, does that automatically mean that he or she is lying? Not necessarily. If an interviewer does not repeat a non-answered question until the person provides the specific information it calls for, then no judgments can be made relevant to probable deception. To obtain a clearer understanding if it is probable or even highly probable that deception is present, certain communicative confounds must be eliminated. The rules of thumb to use are (1) DO NOT ask the question sarcastically, accusatorily, belligerently, demeaningly or with any one word or words emphasized. (“Did you steal any of the missing five thousand dollars?”). (2) DO ask each question in “leveler mode,” with no undue stress or emphasis on any particular words or phrases. (3) DO NOT preface any question with convenient verbal loopholes which immediately notify the untruthful person that he or she should be on guard. (“I know this is probably a difficult question for you to answer, but I’ve got to ask you anyway. Did you steal any of the missing five thousand dollars?”) (4) DO let the question stand alone, with no preamble or introductory excuses about why it must be asked. (5) DO NOT word the question so it is confusing. (“On the night the money was stolen out of the safe, did you come into the office through the back door, and have anything to do with taking the money in any way?”) (6) DO make the question direct, simple, in concise language and pertaining to only one action or behavior. (“Did you steal any of that missing five thousand dollars?”) If you follow these basic rules and the person is sane, has normal hearing and can understand the language you are using, you have eliminated the major communicative confounds. If you receive an evasive response the first time you ask a question, do not let the person get away with not giving you the specific information called for. The same question must be asked again to attempt to get a straight answer. If the person continues to answer evasively, the odds increase that the person is being deceptive to that question. Remember, many deceptive subjects in the field study responded with evasion to as many as four repeats of the same question. For my purposes, if a person does not answer the question after I have asked it four times, he or she is lying. If I have to ask the same question up to three times, then I suspect that it is highly probable that the person is lying. (A word of caution: To avoid domestic difficulties, do not try this on your wives or husbands. Teenagers, however, are fair game.)

Those of us who are involved in obtaining verbal information from witnesses, victims and suspects of crimes know that witnesses and victims are sometimes reluctant to tell everything they know for a variety of reasons. Untruthful suspects of crimes rarely tell everything they know happened. In fact, untruthful suspects will try to get by with telling as little as possible with as few words as possible. Research shows that most repetitive violent criminals are incorrigible sociopaths who exhibit little, if any, compunction about telling direct, confrontative “NO” type lies. A trait of many sociopaths, however, is their verbally manipulative agility in seeking a degree of distorted gratification by sort of pulling the linguistic wool over a questioner’s eyes. Sociopaths, although operating from skewed psychological stances, must still unconsciously obey the same genetically inherited rules for language performance that normal humans do. Even though the sociopath will likely prefer to respond with direct “NO” lies to direct “did you do it” questions, his verbal narrations of asserted events, actions and behaviors will contain evidence of evasion in overly qualified actions he is deceptive about. This evidence has been found in a study of sociopaths in the Patuxent Institute of Maryland, by Dr. Myron Eichler. An important finding of Eichler was that sociopaths used significantly more linguistic qualifiers than did normal controls as well as other deviant inmate groups. Qualifiers include (a) expressions of uncertainty (“It’s possible I did, but I’m not really sure.”); (b) modifiers that weaken statements without adding information (“I’m kind of a nonviolent type person.”); and © phrases that contribute a sense of vagueness or looseness to a statement (“Then I proceeded to travel through what you might call a bad neighborhood.”) Dr. Walter Weintraub, at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry, explains that sociopaths Rare individuals who tend to get into compromising situations and are extremely careful about making verbal commitments. They require time to construct plausible stories to account for their behavior. The Patuxent sociopaths displayed great caution in their spontaneous remarks, a phenomenon reflected by a high density of qualifiers.”

The more we discover through research about how language works, and how humans use it, the more we realize that individuals actually change certain grammatical structures when relating truthful versus untruthful information. In my seminars, Identifying Lies in Disguise, I teach that human language is a biologically-based and genetically-transmitted organ system, much like our other, more tangible organ systems of respiratory, cardiovascular, digestive, etc. This theory was originated in 1959 by Harvard linguist Noam Chomsky and has received substantial support from language researchers over the years. Bearing this in mind, if we view language performance in human beings as an organ system, we can then begin to see that it is susceptible to the same responses which cause other physiological changes in our bodies during periods of response to threatening situations. For the untruthful person, getting caught lying to certain questions is a threatening situation and grounds for deception apprehension. The polygraph instrument graphically records involuntary responses of this nature – the direct results of a liar’s fight-or-flight reactions to questions to which he must lie. The only function of the polygraph instrument is to put the physiological data onto chart paper so it can be analyzed by the examiner. In this way, it is compatible to our auditory system which has the function of receiving words, sentences and paragraphs of vocalized verbal data in the form of sound waves. As the sound waves enter our brains, they undergo a process called “sensory transduction” and are given meaning in the context of the language in which we communicate. A crucial component of verbal evasion is the liar’s unintentional use of “pragmatically implied” phrases (“I can’t,” “I would,” etc.) that we fail to identify as literal symbols of exact meaning. This is why most evasive responses are never identified. After all, you can’t find what you’re looking for if you have no idea what to
look for in the first place. The liar’s most attractive avenue of escape is an involuntary and unconscious detour from a narrow one-way street of direct lies onto a broad highway toward evasion. Perhaps if that Texas officer who died in front of his camera had known that some forms of verbal evasion are highly probable indicators of lying, he might be alive today.

Wendell C. Rudacille is a former U.S. Army Criminal Investigator, and retired police investigator from the Howard County, Maryland, Police Department. He is a polygraph examiner and member of the American Polygraph Association. He has a BA in psychology and over twenty-five years’ experience in analysis of verbal behavior during investigative interviews. He is now president of Rudacille & Associates, a Maryland-based verbal behavior analysis and research agency which specializes in polygraph testing and interviewing seminars and publications.

Mr. Rudacille can be reached at 410-531-LIES (5437).

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