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Teams are ubiquitous in the world of work, in part because they offer the capacity to reduce workload and enhance performance on complex tasks. One task that has taken on heightened importance in today's world is the investigative interview, an information- gathering interview that is conducted in settings as diverse as airport screening, military checkpoints, law enforcement, corporate fraud, and intelligence settings. The goal of this research is to examine how the "power" of teams may be exploited by utilizing pairs of interviewers to conduct the investigative interview. Results indicate that there are benefits and drawbacks to tandem interviews. Specifically, tandem interviewers achieved superior interview outcomes than individual interviewers, including a reduction in cognitive demand, more attention to issue-relevant information (i.e., story cues), and greater use of open-ended questions. On the other hand, the use of tandem interviewers resulted in lower interviewee rapport and tandem interviewers were no more adept at detecting deception than single interviewers. In brief, the results suggest a tangible benefit to the tandem interview. Implications for practice and application are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research constitutes an initial empirical examination of how the introduction of a third party impacts interviewee rapport in an investigative interview setting. Whereas some have argued that employing two interviewers may be beneficial in an investigative interview setting, others have speculated that adding a "third person in the communications loop" (U.S. Department of the Army, 2006) during an investigative interview may negatively impact the establishment of rapport. This research draws on group dynamics research and adopts a content-analytic approach using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC; Pennebaker, Booth, & Francis, 2007) to examine interviewee rapport in real-world investigative interviews. The comparison of dyadic interviews in which one interviewer was present and triadic interviews in which two interviewers were present revealed no significant reduction in interviewee rapport. These findings suggest that the anecdotal concern that "three is a crowd" and that the addition of a third party may result in decreased rapport may be unfounded. Further research on the group dynamics of the investigative interview is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]