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.

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.

A 1930 patent promised confessions from a talking skeleton. It was never used, but lying to suspects is still legal in most of the country. Here is what the research says.