What Did the Janitor Do? Suggestive Interviewing and the Accuracy of Children's Accounts

Examined the influence of suggestive interviews on 5- to 6-year-old children's reports and recollections of an adult's behavior. Children (29 girls, 27 boys) witnessed a confederate, acting as a janitor, either clean or play with toys. An hour later they were interviewed in succession by the janitor's boss, by an experimenter, and by their own parent. Parents interviewed their child again 1 week later. The boss and experimenter interviewed the child in one of three ways: neutral (nonleading), incriminating (suggesting the janitor was bad and playing on the job), or exculpating (suggesting the janitor was good and doing his job of cleaning). When these interviews were neutral, children consistently gave accurate accounts of the janitor's behavior. When these interviews were suggestive, children's accounts shifted strongly in the direction of suggestion as the interviews progressed. By the end of the suggestive interviews, children's accounts uniformly corresponded to the interviewers' suggestions, even when the suggestions were inconsistent with what actually happened. These effects of suggestion persisted during the two nonleading parent interviews.     

A horse race around a Möbius strip: A review and a test of utility-maximizing and organizational-process models of public expenditure decisions

This article shows how we might choose between utility-maximizing and organizational-process models of public expenditure decisions and concludes we ought not to try. Both contribute to our understanding of public expenditure outcomes. Furthermore, an integrated approach could better explain public expenditure decisions, than could either approach taken alone.The ideas and their presentation in this paper are the responsibility of Fred Thompson. Richard Williams carried out the data collection and editing and the statistical analysis described herein. Indebtedness to Patrick Larkey of Carnegie-Mellon University is very great. He gave many long hours to discussions of the points raised in this paper. Without his contribution it is doubtful that it would have been written. It is not simply egotism, however, which prevents our sharing authorship with him. The fact is, that after many long hours of discussion and exchange of drafts, we continue to find ourselves irreconcilably divided as to the respective merits of the two models. The paper also benefited from extensive comments by Jim Stephenson and Aiden Vining of UBC, Kristen Monroe of NYU and William Zumeta of UCLA.Now Senior Research Consultant, Regulation Reference, Economic Council of Canada, Ottawa, Canada.Now at Behavioral Research Institute, University of Colorado.