When interviewing a witness to an incident, the most reliable question style for eliciting accurate information is:

Question

Accepted Answer

Open-ended questions ('Tell me what you saw') followed by clarifying questions, allowing the witness to narrate freely before drilling into specifics — leading questions can contaminate memory and produce unreliable identifications

Answer

Leading questions that suggest the desired answer, because a witness who is uncertain will settle on the version the questioner offers and the resulting account will then be consistent with the physical evidence already gathered at the scene by the responding officers

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Questions designed to elicit a confession, on the view that the fastest route to the truth is to confront the witness directly with what the guard already believes happened and then watch closely for the reaction that follows the accusation

Answer

Yes-or-no questions only, so that the answers can be tabulated without any ambiguity at all and the finished report reads as a clean list of established points rather than a story

When interviewing a witness to an incident, the most reliable question style for eliciting accurate information is:

Explanation

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