The cultural dimension of uncertainty avoidance impacts police-civilian interaction

This research examines how the cultural dimension of uncertainty avoidance—a person’s (in)tolerance for uncertain or unknown situations—impacts communication alignment in crisis negotiations. We hypothesized that perpetrators high on uncertainty avoidance would respond better to negotiators who use formal language and legitimize their position with reference to law, procedures, and moral codes. Data were transcriptions of 53 negotiations from a Dutch–German police training initiative, where police negotiators interacted with a high (German) and low (Dutch) uncertainty-avoidant mock perpetrator. Consistent with accounts of cross-cultural interaction, negotiators tended to achieve more alignment in within-culture interactions compared to cross-cultural interactions. Moreover, German negotiators, who scored higher on uncertainty avoidance than the Dutch negotiators, were found to use more legitimizing messages and more formal language than their Dutch counterparts. Critically, irrespective of the negotiators cultural background, the use of these behaviors was a significant moderator of the degree to which negotiator and perpetrator aligned their communicative frames: Using legitimizing and formal language helped with German perpetrators but had no effect on Dutch perpetrators. Our findings show the effects of cultural background on communication alignment and demonstrate the benefits of using more formal language and messages that emphasize law and regulations when interacting with perpetrators high on uncertainty avoidanc

Deceptive Intentions: Can Cues to Deception Be Measured before a Lie Is Even Stated?

Can deceitful intentions be discriminated from truthful ones? Previous work consistently demonstrated that deceiving others is accompanied by nervousness/stress and cognitive load. Both are related to increased sympathetic nervous system (SNS) activity. We hypothesized that SNS activity already rises during intentions to lie and, consequently, cues to deception can be detected before stating an actual lie. In two experiments, controlling for prospective memory, we monitored SNS activity during lying, truth telling, and truth telling with the aim of lying at a later instance. Electrodermal activity (EDA) was used as an indicator of SNS. EDA was highest during lying, and compared to the truth condition, EDA was also raised during the intention to deceive. Moreover, the switch from truth telling toward lying in the intention condition evoked higher EDA than switching toward non-deception related tasks in the lie or truth condition. These results provide first empirical evidence that increased SNS activity related to deception can be monitored before a lie is stated. This implies that cues to deception are already present during the mere intention to lie. © 2015 Ströfer et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

Interaction patterns in crisis negotiations:Persuasive arguments and cultural differences

This research examines cultural differences in negotiators' responses to rational persuasion in crisis negotiations over time. Using a new method of examining cue-response patterns, we examined 25 crisis negotiations in which police negotiators interacted with perpetrators from low- or high-context cultures. As predicted, low-context more than high-context perpetrators were found to use persuasive arguments, to reciprocate persuasive arguments, and to respond to persuasive arguments in a compromising way. These effects were partly mediated by time period, with the more normative, later period of interaction associated with larger cultural effects than the early crisis-dominated period of interaction. Further analyses found that low-context perpetrators were more likely to communicate threats, but that high-context negotiators were more likely to reciprocate them. The implications of these findings for our understanding of inter-cultural interaction are discussed

Don’t Know, Don’t Care, Don’t Want, Don’t Dare:An Explorative Study into Predictors of Police Officers’ Support for Reform to Prevent Ethnic Profiling

This study examines how participation in learning activities on controversial topics can be increased. Specifically, we focus on police officers’ willingness to participate in activities to prevent ethnic profiling, a highly charged topic within the police organization and society alike. As with other controversial topics, not all police officers embrace such initiatives. In this paper, we explore individual (e.g. gender, service years) and work-related antecedents (e.g. psychological safety) of police officers’ support for reform training in two different studies. In the first explorative study, we interviewed 13 police professionals who volunteered to lead an ethnic-profiling reform in their units. The interview data confirmed the importance of the variables extracted from the literature and identified two additional factors: job satisfaction and political orientation. In total, we identified four sociopsychological constructs and five individual variables that we deemed relevant for further analysis. A second, quantitative survey study with 281 police officers tested the relationship between the identified constructs and police officers’ support for reform. The results showed that being male, warrior-minded, orientated towards the political right, and being dissatisfied with one’s job all corresponded with less support. Open text analysis revealed that police officers typically avoid reform activities for four key reasons: lack of awareness of potential bias (don’t know), indifference towards the topic (don’t care), opposition to the reform (don’t want), or fear of negative evaluation from colleagues (don’t dare). These findings highlight the importance of psychologically safe, informative, and appealing learning environments in reform strategies to prevent ethnic profiling.</p

Creating controversy:developing a virtual reality training tool with 360° film to engage in ethnic profiling reform

Ethnic profiling is a topic that is challenging to address in policing communities. Many police officers doubt its existence or find it too trivial and irrelevant to worry about. Others may find it important, but do not feel psychologically safe to discuss it with their colleagues. Many police officers, therefore, ignore training and conversations on ethnic profiling, which hinders combating it. We describe the foundations of a Virtual Reality based training prototype that seeks to encourage active participation in ethnic profiling dialogue. We describe the iterative process between the various steps in the design process of the Virtual Reality tool and the design features including experiential learning and perspective-taking on the individual level, and constructive controversy dialogue on the group level. Our observations during its testing phase indicate that the current prototype contributes to officers’ awareness of ineffective and biased police practices. While this testifies to the potential of the prototype design to shape meaningful police reform activities on a larger scale, we also speculate that our immersive design may offer solutions for other urgent socio-political controversies.</p