Reading ComprehensionDifficulty: Easy

PT150 S1 P2 Q12 Explanation

The Cognitive Interview

A free, expert breakdown of this official LSAT Reading Comprehension question.

TopicsAuthor OpinionLaw

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Passage

When interviewing witnesses to a crime, police interviewers seek to maximize the amount of information that a cooperating eyewitness can give them so that they can generate leads to follow, confirm or disconfirm alibis, and so forth. One method for eliciting witness might otherwise provide is the cognitive interview.

Developed by psychologists and adopted by police forces around the world, the cognitive interview combines cognitive techniques known to improve recall, such as multiple retrieval attempts, with communication strategies developed by social psychologists, such as conversation-management skills and techniques for building rapport between interviewer and interviewee. The general consensus is that this training, and even trained officers often deviate from the procedures specified in the cognitive interview training.

An alternative to the cognitive interview is hypnosis. Indeed, hypnotic investigative interviewing was a precursor to the cognitive interview. However, even though the techniques involved are much less complex, the evidence suggests that overall accuracy, as determined by the proportion of correct to incorrect responses, is not generally improved with hypnosis; in There are other practical difficulties, most notably that not all witnesses are susceptible to hypnosis.

For police interviewers, the ideal method for eliciting additional information from an eyewitness would be one that requires no special training for the interviewer, that can be applied to the entire population of potential witnesses, and that has a positive effect on correct memory reports, with no corresponding increase in false details achieved with no increase in errors, no specialist training, and no greater complexity of interviewing technique.

What this question is testing

Author Opinion

Anticipate

This is an Author Opinion question, so step back and ask: what does the author actually believe, and what specific claims do they make?

The author thinks the cognitive interview works (more recall, no loss of accuracy) but has a real practical problem — its complexity. Even officers who are fully trained on it drift from the procedure in actual interviews. Hypnosis, on the other hand, is simpler but has accuracy problems and a "false confidence" effect. And instructed eye-closure looks ideal. Those are the author's actual views.

Goal

Looking for an answer that matches one of the author's specific claims, with the right technique. Common traps to watch for:

Answers that overgeneralize ("easier methods always yield more accurate information")

Answers that pin a problem on the wrong technique (false confidence is a hypnosis problem, not a general one)

Answers that propose conditional rules — e.g., — that the author doesn't state

Reading along? Open the full official question in LawHub — we show a fragment here and keep the reasoning in our own words.

The question
12.

The author would be most likely to agree with which one of

Answer choices

  1. Contradicted1% picked this

    If all witnesses were susceptible to hypnosis, hypnotic interviewing would be the best procedure for maximizing the amount of accurate

    (A) says that if the susceptibility problem with hypnosis went away, hypnosis would be the best procedure. But the author has two distinct objections to hypnosis in P3 — overall accuracy "is not generally improved" (and sometimes deteriorates), and there's a "false confidence" effect — that have nothing to do with susceptibility. Removing the susceptibility problem doesn't fix the accuracy or false-confidence problems, so hypnosis still wouldn't be the author's pick.

  2. Correct84% picked this

    Even if police forces had the time and resources to train all of their officers in the cognitive interview, the complexity of the procedure

    Why this is right

    This is supported directly by P2. The passage says the cognitive interview is "complex," requiring "substantial training," and adds that "even trained officers often deviate from the procedures specified in the cognitive interview training." That last clause is doing the work here: even when officers have been trained, the procedure's complexity still causes problems. So even in a hypothetical world where every officer was trained, complexity itself would remain an issue — exactly what (B) says.

    Skill tested: Author Opinion · how this choice captures the passage's function is the move to repeat next time.

  3. Wrong View3% picked this

    Instructed eye-closure should be adopted as an investigative interviewing technique only if police forces lack the resources required

    (C) frames eye-closure as a fallback — only adopt it "if police forces lack the resources required to implement the cognitive interview." But the author presents eye-closure as fitting an ideal: no special training, applies to all witnesses, recall benefit equivalent to the cognitive interview, no extra errors. That makes it a first choice on the merits, not a budget compromise.

  4. Unsupported12% picked this

    Interview procedures that are easy to learn are likely to yield a greater amount of accurate information than interview procedures that

    (D) makes a sweeping general claim — easier-to-learn procedures yield more accurate information than harder ones — that the author never endorses. The author's actual claims are technique-specific (cognitive interview = complex but effective; hypnosis = simpler but less accurate; eye-closure = simple and effective). Hypnosis is in fact a counterexample to (D)'s rule.

  5. Unsupported1% picked this

    The more information a cooperative witness provides when interviewed, the more likely it is that the witness is

    The "false confidence" effect appears in P3, attached specifically to hypnosis — it's a problem where hypnotized witnesses become more confident in their reports, including incorrect ones. The author never extends this effect to interviewing in general, and certainly never says that producing more information correlates with experiencing false confidence.

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