The Snack Aisle Is Evidence-Based. Your Legacy Interviews Aren't: A Science-Based Interviewing Case Study

Part 1 of a series on Science-Based Interviewing and grocery store psychology

Walk into any grocery store in America and you are walking into an evidence-based laboratory that has been grinding away for more than fifty years.

Science-Based Interviewing and grocery stores study their practices as well as their outcomes (from which lessons can be learned). In sharp contrast, legacy interview and interrogation practices still focus on obtaining confessions and refuse to evolve beyond the 1950s.

In your local grocery store, the lighting over the produce is tuned to make the lettuce look like it was picked twenty minutes ago. The bakery vents its smell toward the front door on purpose because ambient scent measurably changes how people evaluate a store and how they behave inside it (Spangenberg et al., 1996). The milk is at the back of the store so you march past four hundred small, impulsive buying decisions to reach it. The expensive cereal sits at your child's eye level and the store brand sits by your ankles, because shelf position and the number of facings measurably change what shoppers notice and buy (Chandon et al., 2009). That candy at the register isn't there by accident. It's there because someone studied its placement to the penny, how a tired person behaves in a checkout line.

Every one of those choices is the result of research — real research, decades of it. Experimental work has confirmed again and again that the environment shapes shopping behavior (Turley & Milliman, 2000), down to something as small as the tempo of the background music slowing you down and lifting sales (Milliman, 1982). The grocery store treats human behavior as something you can study, measure, and, critically, improve. And it re-runs that experiment every quarter, because a two percent improvement here or there is worth millions of dollars.

Now here is the possibly uncomfortable part.

The way many professionals conduct interviews and investigations has not been meaningfully upgraded in well over fifty years. And when practitioners and academics alike suggest that maybe it should be—that maybe there's a better, science-based way to conduct a high-stakes investigative conversation—you get an interesting kind of pushback. You've heard it.

"The experimental research has nothing to do with the real world."

"That's just something people are selling."

"We don't need it. What we do works fine."

"Scientists change their minds all the time so why should I bother?"

"No one would ever confess to a crime they didn't commit."

"I don't need research to tell me how to do my job."

"I've been doing this for twenty years…"

“It was good enough for me; it is good enough for my detectives."

Good enough. Let's take this seriously for a minute. Let's follow this logic all the way to the end.

What You Have to Believe About Interviewing

To make an argument that interviewing can't and even shouldn’t be upgraded, you have to believe some interesting things.

You have to believe that the way we communicate—one of the most complex things human beings do—is the single field of human activity where nothing has been learned since my fellow Kansan Dwight D. Eisenhower was the President. You have to believe that we've refined engines, medicine, aviation, agriculture, computing, and the exact placement of gum by a checkout stand, but that the science of how one person gets another person to open up and talk to them peaked around 1955 and has been frozen solid ever since. Do you agree with this logic?

You have to believe there have been no innovations. None. That an investigator in 1958 and an investigator today are working with an identical “toolkit,” because there is no better tool to be found and because nobody could possibly have studied this and discovered anything useful.

And that's exactly the problem, because many people have studied it.

The Research They're Insisting Doesn't Exist

Since 2010, the U.S. government has funded the first unclassified, sustained research program on the science of interviewing and interrogation, High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG), currently administered by the FBI. Over more than 15 years, that program has produced a large body of published studies identifying what actually works: how to build cooperation and rapport, how to elicit accurate information, and how to challenge a false account without blowing up the conversation (Meissner et al., 2017).

We are not talking about opinion or one instructor's war stories. We are talking about laboratory and field research with measurable results. The scientific method is built to resist the human temptation to test assumptions in a biased (more specifically, confirmatory) way. Further, the entire point of experimentation is to strip away the noise of the "real world" and study the effects of variables in isolation.

There is now a considerable body of research showing the following: When you compare the old legacy confrontational, accusatory style against modern information-gathering approaches, the information-gathering approach increases the number of true confessions while reducing false ones and garners more cooperation during interviews, more confessions, and more case-relevant information. The legacy accusatory styles do the opposite (Meissner et al., 2014, Russano et al., 2024, Russano et al., 2026).

Outdated legacy interviewing methods ignore research findings on interview and interrogation, lie detection, and human communication.

Read that again, because it's the reason you are here reading this. The methods many investigators defend as "what works" have been measured against the alternative—and they produce more false confessions, less cooperation, and less reliable information. That's not a marketing claim. Those are the real-world findings.

So, the position "we don't need an upgrade" isn't a neutral one; it is bald-faced mediocrity. It requires believing that hundreds of published studies simply don't count, while the shelf-placement research that decides where your ketchup goes apparently does.

One Last Science-Based Interviewing Distinction

We just spent this whole article admiring the grocery store—and the grocery store is in the business of persuasion. It studies you in order to sell you. So let me be clear about what we are borrowing and what we are not. We are borrowing their respect for research and constant improvement: the willingness to study human behavior, measure it, and improve. We are not borrowing their singular goals.

Because here is the part that is important for anyone who investigates for a living. Persuasion has no place in the interview room (even if you dub it "ethical persuasion"). Trying to persuade a person toward a single conclusion — nudging, pressuring, steering them toward the answer you already want — is not science-based interviewing. It is the legacy accusatory approach, and the accusatory approach has a single goal: confession. That is the whole design and a near-perfect definition of confirmation bias (Kassin, Goldstein, & Savitsky, 2003). Not the truth, not the full account—the admission followed by a full confession. And an interview built to produce a confession will produce them from the innocent and the guilty alike. That is how you end up with a false one that is proceeded by forced investigative errors and a checklist approach to interviewing.

Science-based interviewing does not have that single goal. It is indifferent to the answer. Its entire purpose is to create the conditions — through upgraded, research-based methods — for an accurate, complete account that is uncontaminated and corroborated. It counts as a success even when that account clears the person, contradicts your theory, sends you down other rabbit holes, or hands you something you did know you had. The accusatory interview optimizes for one outcome, sometimes led there with junk lie detection practices. SBI's interviewing components optimize for the truth, whatever it turns out to be.

That is the upgrade: better practices grounded in research. After all, better interviews, better investigations.

Evidence-Based Interviewing References

Chandon, P., Hutchinson, J. W., Bradlow, E. T., & Young, S. H. (2009). Does in-store marketing work? Effects of the number and position of shelf facings on brand attention and evaluation at the point of purchase. Journal of Marketing, 73(6), 1–17.

Kassin, S. M., Goldstein, C. C., & Savitsky, K. (2003). Behavioral confirmation in the interrogation room: On the dangers of presuming guilt. Law and Human Behavior, 27(2), 187–203.

Meissner, C. A., Redlich, A. D., Michael, S. W., Evans, J. R., Camilletti, C. R., Bhatt, S., & Brandon, S. (2014). Accusatorial and information-gathering interrogation methods and their effects on true and false confessions: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Experimental Criminology, 10(4), 459–486.

Meissner, C. A., Surmon-Böhr, F., Oleszkiewicz, S., & Alison, L. J. (2017). Developing an evidence-based perspective on interrogation: A review of the U.S. government's High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group research program. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 23(4), 438–457.

Milliman, R. E. (1982). Using background music to affect the behavior of supermarket shoppers. Journal of Marketing, 46(3), 86–91.

Russano, M. B., Meissner, C. A., Atkinson, D. J., Brandon, S. E., Wells, S., Kleinman, S. M., Ray, D. G., & Jones, M. S. (2024). Evaluating the effectiveness of a 5-day training on science-based methods of interrogation with U.S. federal, state, and local law enforcement investigators. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law: An Official Law Review of the University of Arizona College of Law and the University of Miami School of Law, 30(2), 105–120.:

Russano, M. B., Meissner, C. A., Jones, M. S., Rothweiler, J. N., Taylor, P. J., Cory, C., & Brandon, S. E. (2026). Evaluating the effectiveness of a practitioner-designed science-based interviewing and interrogation course: A collaborative training and research effort. Legal and Criminological Psychology.

Spangenberg, E. R., Crowley, A. E., & Henderson, P. W. (1996). Improving the store environment: Do olfactory cues affect evaluations and behaviors? Journal of Marketing, 60(2), 67–80.