Principal Investigator: dr hab. Romuald Polczyk, prof. UJ

With all the development of sophisticated forensics methods and technical equipment,human testimony remains an important source of information for courts. The quality ofwitnesses’ testimony can have a deep impact on the forensic process, including the decisionsreached by the court - whether a guilty individual is convicted, and an innocent person setfree. The present project is connected with this problem. It is about interrogativesuggestibility, concerning the influence of suggestive questions on the testimony, and thetendency by the witnesses to change their answers as the result of negative feedbackcommunicated by the interrogator, concerning the quality of the testimony.In the present project various kinds of interrogative suggestibility will be researched.For example, it may be that the witness testifies according to suggestions because thesesuggestions changed his/her memory. It also may be that the witness does not rememberinformation relevant to a question but he/she assumes that it “could be” the way the questionsuggests (fills gaps in memory with suggestions). It is even possible that the witness is surewhat he saw yet still gives incorrect answers; this is called conformity.In the planned research it will be verified whether various kinds of interrogativesuggestibility are connected with: general quality of memory, influenceability, anxiety, selfesteem, warning against suggestions, self-confidence, and mindfulness. In the future, resultsof this research may contribute to constructing methods allowing for making witnessesresistant to suggestions, and therefore making them testify more accurately