The ease with which children can be induced to make false allegations is an ever present problem in child forensic interviewing. Child interviewing techniques used in the highly publicized McMartin Preschool ritual abuse case were selected for use in a carefully designed study, More than Suggestion: The Effect of Interviewing Techniques From the McMartin Preschool Case, (Journal of Applied Psychology, 1998), to determine the effects a combination of influencing interviewing techniques can have in a matter of minutes. Examiners utilized two interview techniques, each with an innocuous visit by a storyteller and a group of 66 children, ages 3-6. One approach used suggestive ("he had a silly hat on, didn't he?") questions. The other employed reinforcement and social incentives such as, "I already talked to the big kids and they said he did some bad things ... are you smart enough to remember ...good, because I really need your help." Not surprisingly, interviewing techniques based on social influence and reinforcement of children's immediate reports elicited substantially more false allegations (58 percent) from children than did simple suggestive questions (17 percent).

The important next step, which was not addressed in this study, is to draw on what we know about children developmentally and to construct an interview process that will avoid the problem of leading children to make false reports. Saying to a child, "show me what happened," with appropriate non-influencing toys provided avoids the influencing techniques identified in this study: suggestive questions, social influence, reinforcement, and removal from direct experience.

We should be wise to study Plato's observation," You can learn more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation."