Psychology and Policing

Peter Ainsworth

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135997908
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Applied psychology has become increasingly important in the work of policing, police training and the academic study of policing. This book provides a highly accessible account of the way in which psychological principles and practices are applied to policing, reflecting the increasing attention being given to this area in the light of recent concerns about police training and its effectiveness - for example the MacPherson report. The book sets out the main areas of applied psychology which have particular relevance for policing, looking at how these impact in practice on police work - retrieving information, interviewing suspects, understanding crime patterns and profiling offenders, and negotiation and hostage taking. The author concludes with an assessment of the usefulness of psychology in police work, and the pitfalls and problems which arise with its use.

Chapter 1

Person perception and interpersonal skills

In the introduction to this volume it was suggested that a great deal of everyday police work involves simple interactions with others. Social interaction is a subject that has been studied closely by psychologists and a great deal of insight has been offered by the research in this area. At a time when the police service is increasingly concerned about its public image, it seems appropriate that police officers should know something about how humans perceive, and are perceived by, others. Forming an impression of another person and interacting successfully with another individual are core social skills that are essential in our daily life. Understanding such processes enables us to make sense of other people and to interpret their behaviour correctly. However, understanding these processes also enables us to control to some extent the impression that others form of us. One slovenly dressed, gum-chewing, slouching, rude police officer may do a great deal of harm to a police force that is trying to improve its public image. In this chapter we will draw upon a range of research from both social and cognitive psychology and attempt to relate the findings to the context of policing.

Impression formation

Whenever an individual meets someone for the first time they tend to form an immediate impression of that person. They may attend to a number of different factors but will generally be drawn to a few key or salient features. They may initially attend to the person’s face in an effort to form some impression of the sort of person with whom they are dealing.

Facial appearance

The person’s face will tend to give them some clues as to the person’s sex, their race and their age. However, most perceivers will also go beyond this basic information and try to assess aspects of the other person’s personality or character from their facial appearance. Police officers may believe that they have more skill than most in differentiating between an ‘honest’ and a ‘dishonest’ face, although as we will see later in this volume, such presumptions may be ill founded.

The accurate judgement of personality from an individual’s appearance is actually quite difficult. Despite this, people do often form an opinion of another’s traits based on their outward appearance or upon a small sample of their behaviour. Whilst people may be able to detect traits such as extroversion or warmth from a brief exposure, other aspects of personality (e.g. honesty and conscientiousness) appear more difficult to detect accurately (Park and Krauss, 1992). Traits such as honesty are quite difficult to define accurately and this may be one reason why our perception of this trait is difficult. For example a man may be said to be ‘honest’ in the sense that he has never been convicted of a crime yet he regularly uses the office phone to make private calls and often takes home quantities of his company’s office supplies. Even if people are able to assess certain aspects of personality accurately this may not in itself be particularly useful. While many aspects of personality are linked to the way in which people behave, knowledge of a person’s personality rarely allows us to make accurate predictions as to their future behaviour. Thus even if we were able to establish that a person was basically dishonest, this would not allow us to say when or where they are likely to steal next.

Although humans do tend to observe the face closely on first encounter, the impression that is formed may not necessarily be accurate. Whilst clues as to an individual’s race, sex and age are very useful, presumptions as to a person’s likely character and personality may be less easily gleaned from the simple observation of a person’s facial features. Although people can use make-up or cosmetic surgery in order to modify their facial appearance, to a large extent people are stuck with the face with which they are born. Thus, somewhat paradoxically, the aspect of the individual over which they have arguably the least control (i.e. their facial appearance) is the one which is most often used as the basis of a first impression. Expressions such as ‘His face doesn’t fit’ or ‘I didn’t like the look of him’ are used to suggest that there is a certain type of face that fits well and is acceptable in certain environments and another type that does not. Some job application forms may perpetuate such a view by asking that applicants submit a recent photograph of themselves along with their application form. One might presume that those making such requests believe that the photographic information will help them to decide what sort of person the applicant is. Alternatively, one might suspect that the provision of a photograph allows some screening of applicants on the basis of race or some other obvious dimension.

The reason why face perception might be important is that it allows people to make an initial classification of the individual they have just met. Knowing that we are talking to a young white male may produce a different set of behaviours than knowing that we are talking to an elderly black female. To some extent this classification leads people to employ stereotypes, a subject that will be covered more fully in Chapter 2. It would appear that the categorisation of other people is important as it can save a great deal of time and effort when interacting with others. If humans had to ask every individual whom they meet what they are like before they attempted an interaction, the world would become a very difficult place. For this reason the tendency is for a brief observation to be followed by a classification of the individual along a number of dimensions. The face is by no means the only clue to which people attend when making such classifications but it does allow for an initial sifting.

While some faces may evoke a fairly neutral response, others may trigger a much more acute reaction. For example a particularly attractive face may arouse much more interest than would one that is deemed to be only moderately attractive. Similarly a particularly ugly or disfigured face will tend to command a great deal more attention than one that is simply ‘average’. Bull and McAlpine (1998) suggest that people often have a view as to what facial features certain types of criminal may typically possess. Such a belief may have an effect on jurors when they are trying to decide upon the guilt or innocence of an accused person. We will return to this issue in the next chapter.

Hairstyles and clothing

Perhaps next on the list of features to which people attend would come hair and clothes. Hair is much more easily altered than are facial features, and so to some extent hair style and even hair colour can be manipulated in such a way that the individual has some control over the sort of signals that are given off. Perhaps surprisingly there has been relatively little psychological research into the effects of hairstyle, length and colour on person perception and impression formation. One possible reason is that the perception of hairstyle is to some extent culture, or even sub-culture dependent. Very long or very short hair may give off different signals in different cultures or at different points in time. In the 1980s, ‘Skinheads’ were invariably perceived in Britain as troublemakers, yet in 2001 such short hairstyles were perceived as fashionable and worn by many professional footballers. In most Western police forces, long hair and beards are frowned upon, presumably because it is felt that they will give off the ‘wrong’ message.

Physique

Physique is another cue to which people attend when meeting someone for the first time. There is a something of a stereotype with regard to physique. Many believe that thin people are nervous, fat people are jolly and muscular people are aggressive. Whether such stereotypes are valid is a moot point, but the very fact that people may respond to body shape in such a way is in itself interesting. Some early research (Glueck and Glueck, 1956) suggested that there might be a link between criminality and body shape, in that those with strong muscular physiques were thought more likely to be found amongst the criminal fraternity. Although such theories have now been questioned they do raise an interesting point in relation to cause and effect. For example, it may be the case that those with a strong physique and an intimidating presence are sought out by other criminals and persuaded to join their gangs. On the other hand any young male who wishes to indulge in a life of violent crime may decide to spend hours working out in the gym and even take anabolic steroids in order to enhance his physique.

Voice and speech style

Although many of these visual clues are important, humans also tend to pay close attention to what a person says and to how they say it. Impressions can be formed on the basis of the softness or hardness of a person’s voice, the accent that they have acquired and the speed with which they speak. Certain speech impediments such as lisps will tend to have a significant effect on the way in which a speaker is perceived. Language is said to be one of the main factors that separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom and this may be one reason why person perception can be affected by differences in voice or speech. A person who speaks very slowly or in a very high pitched voice will be perceived somewhat differently than one who speaks with a more normal speed and pitch.

Forming an instant impression

We can see that many static features will affect both how we perceive and are perceived by others. Many of these signals may be obvious ones yet people rarely stop to think how they have formed a particular impression of a certain individual. It is not uncommon for someone to take an ‘instant dislike’ to a person they have just met, or, at the other extreme, to talk of love at first sight’. Police officers on patrol may decide that they do not ‘like the look of an individual whom they encounter and choose to stop and question him whilst allowing other people to go on their way unchallenged. Police officers may even brag about the fact that they can spot someone who appears to be in some way suspicious and, as a result, make an arrest. If police officers possess such skills and are invariably right in their hunches, then we should perhaps admire and applaud them. However, if such hunches come about as a result of prejudice and stereotyping then it is a cause for concern. We will return to this notion in Chapter 2; however, it is perhaps appropriate at this point to draw attention to the dangers of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If police officers believe that they are able to identify the sort of individual who is likely to be carrying a weapon or who is likely to be in possession of illegal drugs they will tend to stop only those individuals who match this template or ‘schema’ (see Chapter 5). The gun-carrying drug dealer whose physical appearance and demographic characteristics do not match the template will of course go unchallenged, and as result the officer may never feel a need to revise the template in the future. The officer may even feel vindicated by the fact that the person who was stopped was in possession of a weapon or drugs and was subsequently convicted of a criminal offence. But such a ‘result’ may do little to encourage the officer to look for other dangerous individuals whose physical appearance is different from that of the majority of people who are stopped and searched.

If a white Metropolitan Police officer working in Brixton believes that Afro-Caribbean youths are responsible for the majority of crime in the local area, the officer will be more likely to stop and question such people when out on patrol. Indeed it may be found that in an average tour of duty, the officer stops and questions five black youths and one white. Even if only 5% of those stopped are found to have committed an offence, the figures at the end of the year might appear to justify the officer’s actions. But it may be that 5% of white youths who are stopped might also have committed an offence. Yet the fact that the officer stops five times as many black youths as white will go some way towards explaining the apparently racial difference that might appear in the official figures published at the end of the year. As we will see in Chapter 2, stereotypes can have a powerful effect on the way in which people perceive and interact with the world.

Non-verbal communication (NVC)

So far in this chapter we have looked at a number of static variables that affect how people perceive others. Whilst factors such as physical appearance can be very important in the early stages of interpersonal perception, it is often by interacting with the individual that a better image of what the person is really like may begin to emerge. Although people tend to listen closely to what someone is saying, they will also be taking in information that is provided non-verbally. A police officer may for example pay close attention to the non-verbal signals that a person gives off as the officer approaches them on the street. When questioned, the suspect may well deny any wrongdoing but the officer may be justified in examining other signals that are being given off whilst the denial is being made. Although as we noted above the officer may use age and race as early filtering devices when deciding who to stop on the street, non-verbal cues may also alert the officer that the person appears to have something to hide. Even an individual’s posture when standing on the street corner may lead the officer to believe that they have little respect for authority and are worth speaking to.

Psychologists have carried out a great deal of research on non-verbal communication and its role in interaction. We will now consider some of this and assess its relevance for police officers.

Gestures

Gestures are often used as a way of illustrating certain aspects of speech or, in some cases, as alternatives to speech. An officer may for example point directly at the individual who he/she wishes to question and such a gesture may reinforce an instruction to the person that they should come over and speak to the officer. Rude gestures such as giving someone the finger can also be used as effective forms of communication when speech is perhaps difficult. Gestures can thus be used both as speech illustrators and also as speech substitutes. Some individuals use gestures a great deal whilst others may use them less frequently. It would also appear that some cultures use gestures much more frequently than do others. For example British communicators tend to use their hands much less often than say Italians. For some cultures touching the other person whilst talking is seen as quite normal whilst in other cultures such gestures would be frowned upon. It is important that police officers are aware that there are such cultural differences. Variations in these norms can mean that an officer might inadvertently offend a member of the public by the inappropriate use of a certain gesture. And similarly the officer may misinterpret a gesture used by someone from a different culture and, as a result, form an inappropriate impression of the person.

Gestures might also be examined closely to see whether they may be a clue as to how an individual is feeling. For example, an individual who wrings his hands or tugs his earlobe when denying involvement in a crime may be perceived as experiencing stress. In some cases this stress may be presumed by the police officer to emanate from the person’s guilt and fear of being found out. However, as we shall see in Chapter 7, assumptions about the truthfulness or otherwise of a suspect’s statements may not always be accurate. Having said that, a change in the use of gestures may signal that some change has occurred within the individual. For example an individual who suddenly stops using hand gestures or even sits on their hands may be doing so because of some change in the way that they are feeling. Where clues are picked up by an interviewer, it is often because a person’s use of gestures changes at some point. It is much more difficult to interpret gestures accurately when there is no such baseline from which to work.

Posture

We made reference to posture earlier in the chapter. Observation of a person’s posture can be used in order to try to understand how the person may be feeling or, in some cases what sort of person the other appears to be. If someone has just completed a very tiring or difficult task they may collapse into a chair and sprawl themselves out with their head lolling. Anyone who sees the person positioned this way may have little problem in interpreting what the other person is feeling. But posture can also be used in more subtle ways. For example a person who leans forward intently when another is speaking may be suggesting that they really are interested in what the other has to say. By contrast the person who slouches in the chair and rarely makes eye contact may be suggesting to the other that they are totally uninterested.

In some cases, posture can be manipulated deliberately so as to give off a certain image or signal, but in other cases the change in posture may be inadvertent. For example, a police officer who is interviewing a suspect may suddenly become much more interested in something that is being said and may pay closer attention to the speaker. In doing so the interviewer’s posture may change completely. We use expressions such as ‘my ear’s pricked up when he said …’. Such statemen...