Presented by: Sharon Small
HPRCT 2016
Weds, June 15, 2016
Interviewing without Influence
Interviewing is an underdeveloped skill, one that has been taught as a cursory item to many
kinds of analysis - cause evaluation (CE), qualitative interviewing, benchmarking to name a few.
There is new evidence coming from the fields of psychology, cognitive linguistics and neuroscience that are changing the way interviews are being taught and done - in the field and in the
interview room.
This presentation is meant to briefly introduce a different way of interviewing using some of the
latest finding in the above fields, most notably what is coming out one of the newest methodologies, Clean Language.
My primary frame in this presentation is the use of Clean Questions in a CE environment where
gaining accurate information is crucial to the development of action items and future prevention.
Clean Language is a linguistic model that uses the idiosyncratic ways a person speaks, the
words they use and most notably an awareness of the part of the interviewer of the amount of
influence they have over the attention and direction their interviews take.
Clean is a metaphor for keeping as much of your ‘stuff’ as an interviewer out of the equation.
This creates an opportunity to gain better insights and more accurate data from your interview
processes.
This document is a brief designed as a reminder of what we covered during our time together at
2016 HPRCT in the 40 minute presentation - “Interviewing Without Influence”. It is not meant to
be a full treatise on Clean, nor on interviewing in general.
In essence Clean Questions, and what I call a Clean stance, help increase and develop accurate data, utilizes questions that are logical, questions that are easy to answer, develops greater
rapport and trust of your interviewee, and more finely developed sequence or timelines related
to your events. It is specifically designed to minimize unintended influence during all stages of
research, design, interviews, analysis and reporting.
In a recent (May 2016) academic article Natural speech reveals the semantic maps that tile human cerebral cortex, researchers at UC Berkeley found that “most areas within the semantic
system represent information about specific semantic domains, or groups of related concepts,
and our atlas shows which domains are represented in each area.”
Basically, this means our brains have word maps. Words that pertain to selective domains of
thinking activate similar areas of the brain. What is also being shown is that many words live in
two or more areas.
What this means for us as interviewers is that complex questions are not just difficult to extrapolate the meaning of, they often are requiring access to many parts of the brain. In essence, this
assists in slowing down understanding and correlation to the appropriate context.
Words matter. The way and what we ask of an interviewee can prompt certain kinds of information, point their attention, and introject content.
There is something that is being studied in the cognitive sciences, Mark Turner, Institute Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University, calls it ‘conceptual
blending’.
Conceptual blending is where we take one idea or piece of information / experience and blend it
with another idea or piece of information / experience and come up with something completely
new and different.
What sets us apart from other mammals is our ability to blend ideas, experience and even appropriate other peoples memories.
If you followed along with the exercise on slide 7 :
Think of an elephant
Think of a cup of coffee
Think of an elephant with a cup of coffee
This is a simplified example of conceptual blending in action.
You can see the entire construct of an elephant, a cup of coffee and then an elephant with a cup
of coffee were promoted by the words used. Words are powerful little units of energy. We know
this. This is why we spend thousands of dollars learning negotiation and communication techniques.
We have a natural bias that leads us to believe that we have less influence over others than we
actually do. So how do we overcome that natural bias in a way that helps us get the best, most
accurate account of an interviewee? We learn about how to prevent as much influence as is
possible.
In the bias of not having the vital word power we need, we miss the very verbal power we have.
This invisible aspect of language, only now being brought to light in the sciences, is about how
words influence and more importantly, how to prevent that influence when it is not in the best
interest of our business, ourselves or our interviews.
Three areas to pay attention to in your interviews are the context or frame of the interview, the
words you use and your delivery.
In her article Who Gets Heard and Why, Deborah Tannen, professor of linguistics Georgetown
University, brings attention to the fact that we tend to judge others based on our own conversational style, status and how they respond to our questions.
“Linguistic style is a set of culturally learned signals by which we not only communicate what we
mean but also interpret others’ meaning and evaluate one another as people”
We not only judge others by how they speak, but also by how they speak to us, and how they
are spoken to by others.
In the best case scenario, we get the gist of what the other person is saying. In the worst case
scenario we take a persons linguistic style as a personal attack or evasion. There is also the
matter of status, sex, race, ethnic origin, vocabulary.
In Clean we say this is working off of our own map and for general conversations, everyday
business, our map is often close enough.
With all of this happening in simple conversations you can imagine the magnification of these
possibilities in an interview process. There are some things that are out of our control and one
thing that is in our control are the words we use and the questions we ask.
We have words, context / frame, delivery, status, conversational style …
And what about memory?
Elizabeth Loftus, a cognitive psychologist from UC CA and Stanford, has written extensively on
false memory syndrome in the field of psychology. She has also conducted numerous studies
about the influence of the wording in a question.
In a groundbreaking study in 1975 she and her research partner Zanni, G, found the verbs used
in a question could alter the results of the answer dramatically.
In a study where individuals were shown filmed traffic accidents and then asked how fast the
cars were going when they: contacted, bumped, hit, collided, smashed into each other - the rate
of speed was reported by the observer varied by over 10mph, from 32mph to 42mph depending
on the verb that was used.
Another study using the words ‘broken glass’ was also significant. Broken glass was reported
most often by those who reported the cars going faster. It was also influenced by how the question was promoted. “Did you see broken glass?, ‘Was there broken glass?’, ‘How much broken
glass was there?’ (an open, logical and potentially leading question).
Memory used to be thought of as local data in the brain, like a photograph or film clip. We now
know that this is not true. This idea of memory was a great metaphor and one that is very sticky.
The metaphor of a photo or film clip helps us make sense of how the mind works and also be
comfortable that what we know and remember what is ‘true’ or ‘real’.
What science is finding is that memory is a bit more like an Italian dinner that has been put in a
blender, turned on high without the lid and then reconstituted, over and over again as best as
possible.
Coming back to the theory of conceptual blending, when we don’t know, we fill in, with either
something we do know that is similar or we blend to create something new.
This is why how we phrase our questions, their delivery and content is so important. The less
we bring to the table as interviewers, the more chance our interviewee’s have of using their own
resources to give us the information we need. This can often take patience and a reserve of
judgment.
This brings us to the most under attended to part of our natural speech and that is the use of
metaphor or simile. When I use the term metaphor, I mean the use of “one thing (concept, word,
expression) in terms of another”.
In “I Is Another”, James Geary, former European editor of Time and deputy curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, says that we use nearly 6 metaphors a minute in our
everyday speech. Most of these are what linguists call ‘dead’ or in terms of Clean ‘embedded’
metaphors. These are metaphors that are so natural to our everyday expression we simply don’t
track them as not being ‘literal’.
Tabling the agenda, putting it on the back burner, seeing what you mean, being on top of it …
Metaphors and symbolic language are idiosyncratic ways of making meaning.
They can also be ways of expressing when an event is too traumatic for their mind to fully take
in. In those cases, patience and care are needed as metaphors are being used as a way of your
interviewee not re-traumatizing themselves.
A large utility in California had a flagger who was hit. Not only was he hit, he was hit by a drunk
driver going over 80 mph, his right leg was severed at the hip flying one direction and his body
another 120 feet in the other. These kinds of interviews happen and if you are not trained and
skillful in staying in frame (or use of purpose) of the interview, working with their descriptions it
can be detrimental. The words you use matter!
So this brings us to staying in the context, frame or fit for purpose, and a conversation about
curiosity…
Every interview has a purpose, and a direction. How do you know that you are staying in the
frame or use for purpose? How do you gauge where an interview is going, should go, needs to
go?
How do you distinguish when you are asking a question based on the information you are getting the context you are interviewing for and when you are asking a question for your own curiosity? .. because you want to know?
If you do not know that distinction, then I can assure you, you are contaminating and leading
your interviewee.
Questions can be “Clean, clean-ish, dirty or our right grimy” (Phillip Harland, neurolinguistic psychotherapist, UK).
Clean Questions can be open or closed.
In the slide series you will see there are varying scales of information:
• Sensory information: what we see, hear, smell, taste, touch
• Logical inference: what makes sense with what is most likely true. An example of this is when
a police officer at the scene of a car accident asks “Who was driving the car?”
• Personal inference: usually based on our map of what we think happened or our personal assumptions.
• Illegitimate reference: or what could be called fantasy.
An open question does not mean that it is free of inference, influence, assumption or presupposition. It simply means that it is a question designed to remove ‘yes’ or ‘no’ from the interviewee's possible answers.
Although Clean Questions can be open or closed they are specifically designed to be:
• Non-Directive - We issue no instructions at the level of content
• Non-Suggestive - We make no recommendations, offers or advice
• Non-Intrusive - We do not dispute or challenge what is said
This helps prevent cherry picking interviewee information, confirmation bias and undue influence by the interviewer.
Clean Language, clean language questions and a clean stance come from the fields of
Neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics, self-organizing systems theory and psychology.
The primary questions I have introduced today were honed over 14 years to be as free from inference and presupposition as possible and have been used in various fields across the globe.
To date Clean Questions are being used in all types of interviewing, therapy, coaching, management, auditing, benchmarking, athletic performance and more.
If you would like to know more about Clean Interviewing and methodologies I encourage you to
attend our 2-Day training in California, January 2017 with myself and James Lawley, author of
Metaphors in Mind and one of the primary developers of the use of clean questions in qualitative
interviewing methods.
CLEAN INTERVIEWING: Interviewing without leading questions and unintended bias
2-Day certificate program - January 17 - 18, 2017
www.cleanlanguagetraining.com/cleanconvergence2017
www.regonline.com/cleaninterviewing2017
Born in Den Haag in 1962, Sharon is an internationally recognized Clean Language trainer and assessor.
With over 13 years of experience working in the nuclear industry, a degree in psychology and background in NLP, Sharon brings a broad set of skills and
experiences to her training rooms. She also provides
individual consultancy work and supervision
for coaches and therapists.
For ten years, Sharon has traveled the world to bring
some of the most innovative change and investigative
work to the coaching and management fields. She has
trained coaches, auditors, cause analysts, operations &
CEO level managers from Pacific Gas & Electric (USA), Siemens (Germany), Ennovation (Japan), and Boeing (UK).
Sharon is a vibrant and engaging trainer with an amazing amount of energy. She has a unique gift
for conveying the “how to” of Clean Language in an accessible and friendly way, bringing humor, insightfulness and new skills into the field of coaching, management communication and investigative interviewing.
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References:
Grove, D. J. & Panzer, B. I. (1989). Resolving Traumatic Memories: Metaphors and symbols in psychotherapy. New York: Irvington Publishers Inc.
Loftus, E. F. & Zanni, G. (1975). Eyewitness testimony: The influence of the wording of a question. Bulletin of the Psychonomic
Society, 5, 86-88.
Loftus, E TED TALK: How reliable is your memory?
https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_loftus_the_fiction_of_memory?language=en
Lawley, J & Tompkins, P (2005) Clean Conversations: Remaining Clean-ish in everyday settings. www.cleanlanguage.co.uk
Lawley, J & Tompkins, P (2011) Clean Evaluative Interviewing www.cleanlanguage.co.uk
Lawley, J & Tompkins, P (2009) Modeling: Top-down and Bottom-up. www.cleanlanguage.co.uk
Lawley, J & Tompkins, P (2005) Clean Conversations: Remaining Clean-ish in everyday settings. www.cleanlanguage.co.uk
Lawley, J & Tompkins, P (2006) Using Symbolic Modeling as a Research and Interview Tool. www.cleanlanguage.co.uk
Lawley, J & van Helsdingen, A (2005) Modeling Shared Reality: avoiding unintended influence in qualitative research. www.cleanlanguage.co.uk
Oswald, M. E. & Grosjean, S (2004). "Confirmation Bias", in Pohl, Rüdiger F., Cognitive Illusions: A Handbook on Fallacies and
Biases in Thinking, Judgement and Memory, Hove, UK: Psychology Press, pp. 79–96,
Podsakoff, P. M., MacKenzie, S. B., Lee , J. Y., & Podsakoff, N. P. (2003). Common method biases in behavioral research: a
critical review of the literature and recommended remedies. Journal of Applied Psychology Oct; 88(5):879-903.
Rice, S. A. (1929) Contagious Bias in the Interview: A Methodological Note. American Journal of Sociology Nov; 35 (3):420-423
Thibodeau, P. H. & Boroditsky, L. (2011). Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning. PLoS ONE, 6(2),
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Tannen, D (1995) “The Power of Talk: Who gets heard and why.” Harvard Business Review 73 (1995):5