Fair Challenge: Test the Material, Not the Person
When an account and the evidence don’t fit, the easy move is to confront. The fair move is to check first. ASC’s Test tools decide whether a difference is real, whether it’s ready to raise, and how evidence enters the conversation, so the interviewer tests the material, not the person.
The tools of the Test direction.
Clarification and preservation, not forced agreement
The purpose is not to bring the person's account into conformity with what the interviewer believes. It is to determine precisely where the account and the available information agree, where they differ, what may explain the difference, and what must be investigated next.
The person may correct the account, explain the evidence, identify a weakness in the investigative premise, or maintain the original position. Each is a legitimate interview result when it is accurately preserved and capable of further testing.
Only after the difference is genuine, material, and ready
These checks are used only when the interviewer has:
- Obtained and developed the person's account
- Settled the material proposition in the person's own words
- Identified a genuine and consequential difference
- Evaluated the reliability and limits of the information being compared
- Preserved the original account
- Determined that raising the difference is lawful, authorized, fair, and strategically appropriate
- Remained prepared to discover that the evidence, the interviewer's interpretation, or the apparent conflict is wrong
A difference is not ready for challenge merely because something sounds inconsistent. The interviewer must first determine whether the two pieces of information concern the same event, time, vantage point, source, level of certainty, and intended meaning. Only a material difference that survives that review should be put to the person.
Before calling something a contradiction
Before calling something a contradiction, the interviewer conducts a Difference Audit. The interviewer asks:
- Are the two statements about the same event or action?
- Do they concern the same time period?
- Did the person have the same vantage point or access to the information?
- Were the questions phrased in a comparable way?
- Was one statement certain while the other was an estimate?
- Did the information come from personal observation, inference, or another source?
- Are the words being used with the same meaning?
- Is the apparent conflict material to the investigative objective?
The Difference Audit prevents an interviewer from manufacturing a contradiction out of imprecise language, different reference points, uncertain recollection, or an unsupported interpretation.
A difference that does not survive the audit is a clarification task: go back to the Clarify direction.
Seven checks before the difference reaches the person
Before placing the difference in front of the person, the interviewer applies the Fair Challenge Test:
Does the difference matter?
Is the information sufficiently reliable to raise?
Can the information be described without exaggeration?
Has the person's original account been recorded?
Is there a legitimate investigative reason to raise the difference now?
Is the interviewer genuinely prepared to hear any explanation?
Are voluntariness, comprehension, representation, vulnerability, privacy, and applicable legal requirements protected?
If the challenge cannot pass this test, it should not be made in its present form.
If it can’t pass, go back to the work it needs: Clarify, Route, or the evidence plan.
How evidence enters the conversation
Three ways to introduce evidence, real evidence only:
“If I were to review the access logs, would there be any reason your card would be on that list?” Asked only about evidence the investigator actually holds or can lawfully obtain.
The investigator acknowledges, accurately and without revealing the source or the details, that there is a real basis for the concern, for example, “I have reason to believe your access card was used that evening,” and invites the person to explain. The basis must be real; soft confirmation is never a bluff.
“I have reviewed the access logs, and I know your card was used.” Used only after reviewing the record, with its limits stated. ASC’s practice is to attempt direct presentation of remaining material evidence before closing, when questioning can properly continue.
The three are options within the evidence plan, not a required progression.
Established practice, organized for teaching
Once a difference has cleared the Difference Audit and the Fair Challenge Test, it is put to the person in eight moves. These moves are not an ASC invention. They organize established practice from Conversation Management (Shepherd & Griffiths), the challenge stage of the PEACE framework, and the Strategic Use of Evidence research program (Granhag, Hartwig & colleagues). ASC teaches them in this order, and the interviewer can return to any move when the answer calls for it.
Return the material proposition to the person in neutral language and allow correction. The interviewer must understand the person's actual position before testing it.
Tell the person that the interviewer needs to address information that may not fit the account. Signal the transition without announcing a conclusion or attacking credibility: “There are some discrepancies we need to discuss.”
Introduce one material difference accurately and within the limits of the information. When evidence disclosure is appropriate, its timing and presentation must follow the evidence plan, introducing evidence through the Disclosure Ladder: a future-tense question, soft confirmation, or direct presentation. Do not dump multiple conflicts into the same challenge.
Ask the person to explain the difference in open, non-presumptive language. The invitation must allow correction of the account, correction of the interviewer, an alternative explanation, or a maintained position.
Stop talking and allow the person time to answer. Do not interrupt, supply an explanation, diagnose silence, reward agreement, or punish denial.
Develop the response in the person's own words. Separate personal observation from inference, estimate, secondhand information, and information learned later. Identify any new claim that can be independently tested.
Record the original account, the information introduced, the person's response, anything that changed, anything that remained consistent, and anything still unresolved. Do not overwrite the first account with the later version.
Return to the investigative objective. If the explanation creates a testable lead, investigate it. If the conflict remains unresolved, preserve it as unresolved. Do not repeat the same challenge merely to obtain agreement or an admission.
The result of a challenge is not necessarily agreement. The result is a more precise and testable record.
The boundaries are part of the method
These tools do not:
- Determine that a person is lying
- Treat demeanor, hesitation, emotion, or silence as proof of deception
- Assume that evidence is infallible
- Permit bluffing, fabricated evidence, exaggeration, or false claims about what the investigation has established
- Require the person to accept the interviewer's interpretation
- Reward admissions or punish maintained disagreement
- Replace a complete Strategic Use of Evidence plan
- Replace applicable law, policy, representation rights, or procedural safeguards
- Authorize disclosure that would otherwise be unlawful, unfair, privileged, confidential, or strategically inappropriate
- Continue increasing pressure after comprehension, voluntariness, or information quality begins to deteriorate
Practitioner-developed, research-informed
The Difference Audit, the Fair Challenge Test, and the Disclosure Ladder are Joseph R. Auriemma, Jr.’s practitioner-developed, research-informed tools. They have not been independently validated. The challenge process they sit inside is established practice. Obtaining, developing, and clarifying an account before challenge comes from Conversation Management and the PEACE framework developed in England and Wales; the FAIR review within Conversation Management addresses omissions, anomalies, and discrepancies. Strategic and incremental evidence disclosure comes from the Strategic Use of Evidence research program developed by Pär Anders Granhag, Maria Hartwig, and colleagues, including the Evidence Framing Matrix. Non-accusatory work with statement-evidence inconsistencies overlaps with the Shift-of-Strategy approach developed from SUE.
ASC’s contribution is the Difference Audit, the Fair Challenge Test, the Disclosure Ladder with its real-evidence rule, the preservation and stopping rules, the commitment to attempting direct presentation before closing, and the integration of all of it into the Test direction of the Adaptive Strategies Compass™.
ASC’s tools of the Test direction
In the Adaptive Strategies Compass™, the Difference Audit and the Fair Challenge Test are ASC’s tools of the Test direction. Test answers one question: does the account hold up against the evidence? The interviewer turns there only when the account has been given, developed, and clarified, and a material piece of evidence appears to conflict with it, or an earlier answer may have been misleading. These tools do not replace the other Compass directions:
- Teach to Talk® maintains the communication foundation, reciprocal responsibilities, correction rights, and non-accusatory stance. Its opening, TEACH, is the tool of the Teach direction.
- Test only an account you understand. If meaning, source, or certainty is still unclear, Clarify first. Vague words, estimates, and apparent conflicts are sorted (an addition, an omission, a change, or a genuine conflict) before anything is tested. The Difference Audit carries that discipline into Test.
- Strategic Use of Evidence (Granhag, Hartwig & colleagues) is a credited tool in the same direction. It governs the evidence plan: evidence assessment, question tactics, timing, framing, and disclosure, including the Evidence Framing Matrix.
- The eight-move challenge process governs how one ready material difference is communicated, answered, clarified, preserved, and returned to investigation, with evidence introduced through the Disclosure Ladder as the evidence plan allows.
- Barrier Mapping, the core tool of the Re-engage direction, may become appropriate when the problem is a person who can answer but won’t, rather than a developed account-evidence conflict.
- The Route Map, the core tool of the Route direction, identifies the possible conversational branch and its strategic purpose.
Before closing an interview that can properly continue, the interviewer attempts direct presentation of the remaining material evidence, and returns to any earlier answer that proved misleading. Test is most often used with suspects and respondents, but a witness’s or victim’s account can conflict with evidence too. The fairness is the same; the safeguards and sensitivity follow the role. Several directions may support the interview, but the eight-move challenge process leads only the challenge-and-clarify task.
Test the material, not the person.
A verified access record that conflicts with an account
An internal investigation involves a badge-access log showing that an employee's credential opened a restricted server room at 2:14 a.m. The employee's settled account is that they left the building around 6:00 p.m. and did not return that night. The two do not fit. Here is how the eight-move challenge process handles the difference, once it has cleared the Difference Audit and the Fair Challenge Test.
- 01Settle. "I want to make sure I have your account right. You left around six that evening and were not back in the building overnight. Have I got that correct?" The employee confirms it.
- 02Signal. "There are some records I need to go over with you, and one of them doesn't seem to fit what you've told me." No accusation: the interviewer never calls the employee dishonest and never states as fact that the employee was in the room.
- 03Place one difference, within its limits. "The badge system shows your access credential was used at the server room door at 2:14 that morning. I want to understand how that fits with your account." The record is described as a credential read, which is what it is, not as proof of the employee's presence.
- 04Invite. "Help me understand what might explain that."
- 05Protect. The interviewer stops talking and lets the pause sit. No suggested explanation, no reaction to the hesitation. The employee then explains that the badge was reported lost two days earlier and that a replacement was issued, so someone else may have used the old credential.
- 06Clarify. The interviewer develops the explanation in the employee's own words: when and to whom the loss was reported, and how the employee knows a replacement was issued. The explanation is not agreement and it is not a confession. It is a testable possibility, a claim that can be checked: a lost-badge report, the deactivation timestamp, and whether the old credential should have worked at all.
- 07Preserve both. The record holds the original account, the access log as introduced, the lost-badge explanation, and the fact that the conflict is now unresolved pending verification.
- 08Reset and investigate. The interviewer ends the challenge rather than pressing for agreement, and pulls the lost-badge report and the access-system audit trail. If the report predates the 2:14 a.m. entry and the credential was never properly deactivated, the investigative premise, not the employee, was wrong.
A properly handled difference does not prove the interviewer correct. It produces a more precise record and, in this case, a lead that can protect an innocent person and expose a weakness in the investigation's own systems.
What the research does and does not support
The sources below support the individual principles these tools and the challenge process draw on. They do not validate ASC’s tools, which have not been independently tested. Each note states only what the source supports.
- 1
Shepherd, Eric, and Andy Griffiths. Investigative Interviewing: The Conversation Management Approach, third edition. Oxford University Press, 2021. doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192843692.001.0001
Supports account development before challenge and the FAIR review of omissions, anomalies, and discrepancies within Conversation Management.
- 2
Granhag, Pär Anders, and Maria Hartwig. "The Strategic Use of Evidence Technique." In Detecting Deception, 2014. doi.org/10.1002/9781118510001.ch10
Supports strategic and incremental disclosure of evidence as an interview technique.
- 3
Granhag, Pär Anders, Leif A. Strömwall, Rebecca M. Willén, and Maria Hartwig. "Eliciting Cues to Deception by Tactical Disclosure of Evidence: The First Test of the Evidence Framing Matrix." Legal and Criminological Psychology 18, no. 2, 2013. doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8333.2012.02047.x
Supports the framing and timing of how a single piece of evidence is presented, via the Evidence Framing Matrix.
- 4
Luke, Timothy J., and Pär Anders Granhag. "The Shift-of-Strategy Approach: Using Evidence Strategically to Influence Suspects' Counter-Interrogation Strategies." Psychology, Crime & Law 29, no. 7, 2023. doi.org/10.1080/1068316X.2022.2030738
Supports non-accusatory work with statement-evidence inconsistencies, which overlaps with the challenge process taught here.
Strategic Use of Evidence (SUE) · Barrier Mapping · The Route Map · Adaptive Strategies Compass™ · Training: The Academy
Train your team to challenge the difference, not the person
The Difference Audit, the Fair Challenge Test, and the Disclosure Ladder are taught in The Academy and From Information to Evidence.