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.

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.

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?

Science-Based Interviewing represents a decisive shift away from confession-driven interrogation toward information-driven investigations. Grounded in psychological science, SBI prioritizes higher-quality information, ethical evidence handling, and reduced investigative risk—without sacrificing confessions. As states move away from outdated accusatorial practices, science-based methods offer a more reliable, defensible, & future-ready approach for public and private sector in