Scientific American: Psychology
From the Pages Activity

DRUNK WITNESSES REMEMBER A SURPRISING AMOUNT

Interviewing an inebriated person at the scene may be more accurate than waiting until he or she is sober.

Police officers investigating a crime may hesitate to interview drunk witnesses. But waiting until they sober up may not be the best strategy; people remember more while they are still inebriated than they do a week later, a new study finds.

Malin Hildebrand Karlén, a senior psychology lecturer at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg, and her colleagues recruited 136 people and gave half of them vodka mixed with orange juice. The others drank only juice. In 15 minutes, women in the alcohol group consumed 0.75 grams of alcohol per kilogram of body weight, and men drank 0.8 grams (that is equivalent to 3.75 glasses of wine for a 70-kilogram woman or four glasses for a man of the same weight, Hildebrand Karlén says). All participants then watched a short film depicting a verbal and physical altercation between a man and a woman. The researchers next asked half the people in each group to freely recall what they remembered from the film. The remaining participants were sent home and interviewed a week later.

The investigators found that both the inebriated and sober people who were interviewed immediately demonstrated better recollection of the film events than their drunk or sober counterparts who were questioned later. The effect held even for people with blood alcohol concentrations of 0.08 or higher—the legal limit for driving in most of the United States. (Intoxication levels varied because different people metabolize alcohol at different speeds.) The results suggest that intoxicated witnesses should be interviewed sooner rather than later, according to the study, which was published online . . . in Psychology, Crime & Law.

The findings are in line with previous research, says Jacqueline Evans, an assistant professor of psychology at Florida International University, who was not involved in the new work. Evans coauthored and published a 2017 study in Law and Human Behavior that found similar results for moderately drunk witnesses. “Any effect of intoxication is not as big as the effect of waiting a week to question somebody,” she says.

The new study also found that some aspects of the drunk people’s recollections were not that different from those of the sober participants. For instance, both groups seemed particularly attuned to the details of the physical aggression portrayed in the film. “This research should at least make us more interested in what intoxicated witnesses have to say,” Hildebrand Karlén says, “and perhaps take them a bit more seriously.”

Agata Boxe. Reproduced with permission. Copyright 2019 Scientific American, a division of Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved.

Quiz

1The importance of interviewing an inebriated person at the time of the event rather than waiting until they are sober has to do with the blank memory of the witness.
2The participants of the study, whether drunk or sober while watching the video, were similar in that they were all particularly attuned to the:
3Research by Jacqueline Evans and a follow-up study by Malin Hildebrand Karlén on the topic of drunk witnesses, both found that:
4Karlén’s participants consisted of 136 people divided into two groups of 68 subjects each. Those who drank alcohol and orange juice are the blank group and those who drank orange juice only are the blank.
5A finding of both the Karlén and Evans studies that should be considered by the criminal justice profession is that the testimony of intoxicated witnesses
Activity Type Title

Chapter 1. Chapter 7

From the pages

false
true
 

1.1 Quiz

1.

_max_tries:1 _feedback_correct: Correct. _feedback_incorrect: Incorrect.

The importance of interviewing an inebriated person at the time of the event rather than waiting until they are sober has to do with the ________ memory of the witness.

A.
B.
C.
D.

2.

_max_tries:1 _feedback_correct: Correct. _feedback_incorrect: Incorrect.

The participants of the study, whether drunk or sober while watching the video, were similar in that they were all particularly attuned to the:

A.
B.
C.
D.

3.

_max_tries:1 _feedback_correct: Correct. _feedback_incorrect: Incorrect.

Research by Jacqueline Evans and a follow-up study by Malin Hildebrand Karlén on the topic of drunk witnesses, both found that:

A.
B.
C.
D.

4.

_max_tries:1 _feedback_correct: Correct. _feedback_incorrect: Incorrect.

Karlén’s participants consisted of 136 people divided into two groups of 68 subjects each. Those who drank alcohol and orange juice are the _______ group and those who drank orange juice only are the _________.

A.
B.
C.
D.

5.

_max_tries:1 _feedback_correct: Correct. _feedback_incorrect: Incorrect.

A finding of both the Karlén and Evans studies that should be considered by the criminal justice profession is that the testimony of intoxicated witnesses

A.
B.
C.
D.