You grab a Red Bull at checkout. Behind that can is a race team that wins by testing everything. Here is what F1's small gains and rule changes teach investigators about upgrading the interview.

“Let’s work together to find a solution” sounds helpful, but it often skips the listening. Crisis negotiators do the opposite: secure safety, slow down, verify, and listen, then ask as if they don’t already know. Here is what managers, HR, and security teams can borrow from them.

There is a heat map for the cereal aisle, the ad, the landing page, and your résumé. Entire professions test, measure, and upgrade to move a number two percent. The interview room—where we decide what is true—still runs on a method whose first famous case produced a false confession.

You've been taught to watch for crossed arms and averted eyes. The research says that skill doesn't exist—not even for professionals. Here's what to do instead.

Plato's prisoners mistook shadows for the world. Most interview and interrogation training does the same thing — 1950s confrontation repackaged as "non-accusatory" and "research-based." Here's how to tell the difference and why the upgrade to science-based interviewing is worth your training dollars.

A practical bank of HR investigation interview questions — what to ask complainants, witnesses, and subjects, and the leading questions that quietly wreck a case.

Investigative interviewing is moving away from confession-driven legacy methods and toward information-gathering approaches grounded in research. Science-Based Interviewing prioritizes accurate information, rapport, open-ended questioning, strategic evidence use, and hypothesis testing while reducing the risks created by guilt presumptions, psychological manipulation, pseudoscience, and false confessions.

Grocery stores have spent fifty years using behavioral research to change how you shop — down to the scent of the bread and the height of the cereal. Meanwhile, the way we interview and investigate hasn't meaningfully changed since 1955. If a soda bottle can be upgraded with science, why not the interview?

Handed your first internal interview with no training? Follow eight steps, from a one-page plan to a word-for-word opening script, and run it fairly and defensibly.

I get this question in almost every class: what's with all the goats? It started as a way to say thank you — cartoon GOAT stickers and a handwritten note for detectives who did great work. It ended up teaching me something about science-based interviewing. One good opening question once got 14 minutes of lies from a man now serving 30 years for murder. Every one of those lies was information. Statements are evidence. Here's why that changes how you interview — and how you lea

You can't learn from your mistakes—because anxiety-based lie detection training never lets you count them. No batting average, no save rate, and no field goal percentage: it records only the hits. I trusted NLP, microexpressions, and baselining once, and they pointed me at an innocent man while the real evidence sat on a phone I'd turned off. Human deception detection runs about 54%—barely better than a coin flip. Here's why the science-based fundamentals beat the pseudoscien

Science-Based Interviewing (SBI) replaces outdated interrogation myths with research-backed methods for gathering reliable information. Learn how rapport, better questions, active listening, planning, bias reduction, and strategic evidence disclosure help investigators, HR professionals, compliance teams, and leaders improve interviews and decisions.

Spies gather intelligence, but someone still has to decide—usually without certainty. From the Prussian war game to the Catholic Church's Devil's Advocate, Israel's "Tenth Man," and the red teams that stress-tested the bin Laden raid, history shows that the most dangerous moment in any investigation isn't when the file is thin and everyone's arguing. It's when the file feels complete and everyone agrees. Are you red teaming your case—or one unchallenged assumption from disast

You can learn open-ended questions, rapport, and de-escalation on a slide. Using them under pressure is a different skill. Here's how IXI builds that skill with real-time AI simulations — and what the evidence does and does not yet show.

Most suspects walk into an interview braced for an accusation. The Strategic Use of Evidence flips the script: instead of confronting a suspect with what you know, you ask first and reveal later. Guilty suspects, unaware of the evidence against them, talk themselves into contradictions the innocent never produce. It's not about reading twitches or chasing nerves—it's about letting the gap between a story and the facts speak for itself. Here's how SUE works and why the science

Most active listening training teaches performance, not the real skill. After years in hostage negotiation and homicide investigations, I can tell you — nobody in those rooms cared whether I was nodding. What actually determines whether someone talks or shuts down has nothing to do with what any listening module ever taught. Here's what real active listening costs, why dismissing it as a soft skill is a dangerous mistake, and what it actually looks like when the stakes are hi

Science-Based Interviewing gives companies a better way to conduct internal investigations, workplace investigation interviews, and corporate security interviews. Instead of relying on accusatory tactics, pseudoscientific lie detection, or premature evidence disclosure, investigators can gather reliable information, protect statements from contamination, test accounts against evidence, and make better decisions.

Workplace violence prevention starts with better communication, such as active listening and rapport building, skills used by police hostage negotiators during crisis negotiations.

Peer review can keep homicide investigations from going stale by bringing fresh eyes, diverse disciplines, and red-team thinking into major case reviews. This article explains how multidisciplinary case reviews help challenge assumptions, identify missed leads, strengthen evidence, improve interview planning, and keep investigative momentum alive before time, workload, and competing priorities weaken a case.

Workplace investigations depend on more than policy and paperwork. They depend on communication, sound interviewing, and the ability to gather reliable information when tensions are high. This article explains how science-based interviewing helps HR, corporate security, compliance, and internal investigators conduct fairer, more thorough, and more defensible investigations through better questions, active listening, rapport, and evidence-based methods.