• No results found

Interpersonal Stance in Conflict Conversation: Police Interviews

N/A
N/A
Protected

Academic year: 2021

Share "Interpersonal Stance in Conflict Conversation: Police Interviews"

Copied!
2
0
0

Bezig met laden.... (Bekijk nu de volledige tekst)

Hele tekst

(1)

Interpersonal Stance in Conflict Conversation:

Police Interviews

Merijn Bruijnes

Abstract

In this work we focus on the dynamics of the conflict that often arises in a police interview between suspects and police officers. Police inter-views are a special type of social encounter, primarily because of the au-thority role of the police interviewer and the often uncooperative stance that the suspect takes: a conflict situation. The skill to resolve or reduce the conflict, to make an uncooperative suspect more cooperative, requires training of the police officer. Leary’s interactional circumplex [2] is used in police interview training as a theoretical framework to understand how suspects take stance during an interview and how this is related to the stance that the interviewer takes. The circumplex consists of two axes, power (dominance-submission) and affiliation (opposed-together) and is divided in stances. Leary predicts the dynamics between the stances of interactants which he calls “interpersonal reflexes”. Acts on the power di-mension are complementary (dominant invokes submissive and vice versa) and acts on the affiliation dimension are symmetric (together invokes to-gether, and opposed invokes opposed). Currently, officers practice apply-ing this theory with expensive actors that are sparsely available. Artificial conversational characters that play the role of a suspect in a police inter-rogation game, a game where policemen can practice applying Leary’s theory, would allow for cheaper training and fewer restriction in time and location of the training. Building artificial suspects requires explicit mod-els of strategies and tactics that policemen apply and explicit modmod-els of the relevant internal psycho-social mechanisms that underlie the behaviors of a suspect in a police interview.

Therefore, we annotated (practice) police interviews on the stance the suspect (professional actors) and police officer take towards each other. Depending on the part, up to nine independent annotators labeled the stance of the speech contributions in three police interviews (using audio and video). In the interviews, one or two officers interviewed one sus-pect. The result was a small corpus of 50 minutes and 1300 contributions annotated on stance.

First, we investigated whether different observers (annotators) agree on the type of stance that suspects and policemen take by having all an-notators annotate a small part of the corpus. Labeling stance on the level of speech segments is difficult. Even when the annotators were allowed to discuss, they were often unable to come to an unanimous agreement of the stance displayed. We found that although inter-annotator agreement on

(2)

stance labeling is low (Krippendorf’s α = 0.24), a majority voting “meta-annotator” was able to reveal the important dynamics and trends in stance taking in a police interview with relative high “inter-meta-annotator” ac-curacy (Cohen’s κ = 0.55) [3].

The results of the meta-annotator showed that police officers gener-ally take a dominant-together stance. This is part of their taught strategy. According to Leary’s theory this stance would make the suspect move to a submissive-together stance, resulting in a cooperative dialogue. Indeed, our meta-annotator showed that a suspect goes from a typical opposed stance at the start of the interview to a more cooperative stance later. This shows the correctness of Leary’s theory in the special type of con-versations, police interviews, where conflict is abundant and interactants are engaged in uncooperative dialogue. It also shows the applicability of the theory in modeling an artificial suspect. Annotations showed that the trend towards cooperation in suspects is not always visible and sometimes destroyed. This occurs when suspects felt disrespected or threatened by the interviewer, showing that Leary’s theory alone is insufficient to model a police interview or a convincing artificial suspect. Other psycho-social theories (e.g. face threats [1]) should be taken into account in future models for artificial suspects and perhaps be made explicit in the police training.

Acknowledgments

This publication was supported by the Dutch national program COMMIT.

References

[1] E Goffman. Interaction ritual. Aldine publishing company, Chicago, 1967. [2] T. Leary. Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality Functional Theory and

Methodology for Personality Evaluation. Ronald Press, New York, 1957. [3] Rieks op den Akker, Merijn Bruijnes, Teun Krikke, and Rifca Peters.

Inter-personal stance in police interviews: content analysis. The Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands Journal (CLIN Journal), 3, 2013, submitted.

Referenties

GERELATEERDE DOCUMENTEN

Mihai Burzo (University of North Texas), Daniel McDuff (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Rada Mihalcea (University of North Texas), Louis-Philippe Morency (University

In the current research we will therefore look into a set of suspect influencing behaviours as developed by Watson, Luther, Jackson, Taylor, and Alison (2018), and how

• De weerstand van de deklaag is vooral bepalend voor de hoeveelheid kwel dicht achter de dijk. De kwelflux is in sommige gebieden zelfs even groot als de neerslag. Behalve neerslag

The ‘Soil-Plant-Atmosphere Radiative Transfer model (SPART) ’ is a combination of three existing, computa- tionally e fficient models for soil reflectance, canopy and

The ISS measures operational skills, a set of basic technical skills for the Internet platform; information navigation skills, required for using technology for information

Taking a dual view of social support, we distinguish between support at work and at home, and we aim to contribute to theory on work and family by identifying when do different

In this review, we will (1) provide relevant knowledge about the skin microbiome in amphibians; (2) proceed with a description of the omics and integrated multi-omics methods that

This makes KPN’s wholesale products more attractive to end-users (it increases their willingness to pay) and provides KPN with more incentives to offer wholesale access (at a