Why Ask Someone to Tell a Story Backwards?

Asking someone to tell a story backwards is an interview technique designed to increase the mental effort of recall. The idea, developed by Aldert Vrij and colleagues at the University of Portsmouth,

By Murder Book Editorial TeamPublished by Gungrounds, the studio making Murder BookPublished 3 October 2026Updated 3 October 2026

Asking someone to tell a story backwards is an interview technique designed to increase the mental effort of recall. The idea, developed by Aldert Vrij and colleagues at the University of Portsmouth, is that lying is already cognitively demanding. When an interviewer asks a person to recount events in reverse chronological order, the additional load should affect a liar more than a truth teller, because a truth teller can lean on genuine memory while a liar must mentally navigate a fabricated account without the anchor of real experience. Early research found that reverse order interviews produced more cues to deception and improved observers' accuracy. Later studies have been more cautious, showing that the technique has real limits and does not work reliably in every context.

Key takeaways

Reverse order recall adds cognitive load by requiring an interviewee to recount events against their natural timeline.
A 2008 study found that reverse order interviews produced more verbal cues to deception and improved police observers' accuracy.
The technique rests on the cognitive load theory of deception: lying taxes mental resources, and extra demands widen the gap between liars and truth tellers.
Later research found that the technique can also burden truth tellers, especially when applied to future intentions rather than past events.
Meta-analytic accuracy rates for cognitive load approaches are modest, around 58% overall.

How does reverse order recall work?

In a standard interview, a person recounts events from beginning to end. People who are telling the truth tend to recall events in roughly the order they happened, sometimes jumping between moments as memory serves. People who are lying typically rehearse a cover story in chronological order, practising it until the sequence feels natural.

Reverse order recall disrupts that rehearsal. The interviewer asks the person to start at the end of their account and work backwards. For a truth teller, this is harder than normal recall but still possible, because genuine memories have multiple retrieval paths. For a liar, the task forces them to navigate a script in an unfamiliar direction while simultaneously constructing plausible details, monitoring what they have already said and suppressing the real version of events.

This is part of the broader cognitive load approach to deception detection, which proposes that interviewers can make lying harder by increasing the mental demands of the interview.

What did the original research find?

The most influential study was published by Vrij, Mann, Fisher, Leal, Milne and Bull in 2008 in Law and Human Behavior. In the first experiment, 80 mock suspects either told the truth or lied about a staged event, and half were asked to give their account in reverse order. The reverse order interviews contained significantly more cues to deception than the chronological control interviews.

In a second experiment, 55 police officers watched a selection of the videotaped interviews and made veracity judgements. Officers who watched the reverse order interviews were better at detecting deception than those who watched the standard interviews. The technique did not produce a response bias, meaning officers did not simply become more suspicious overall.

The findings were promising. They suggested that a simple instruction could make deception easier to spot, without requiring any special equipment or training beyond the interview protocol itself.

What are the limits of the technique?

Later research has identified several important caveats.

It can burden truth tellers too

A 2015 study by Vrij, Leal, Mann and Fisher examined what happens when reverse order recall is applied to statements about future intentions rather than past events. The results were less encouraging: the technique increased the appearance of cognitive load in truth tellers and raised the rate of misidentifying truthful people as liars. When people have not yet experienced an event, they lack the rich sensory memory that helps truth tellers navigate reverse recall.

Accuracy remains modest

Meta-analyses of cognitive load approaches to deception detection, including reverse order recall, report overall accuracy rates of approximately 58%. Vrij, Fisher and Blank's 2017 meta-analysis found that cognitive credibility assessment methods improved on baseline accuracy but still fell well short of reliable individual classification. Can You Actually Tell When Someone Is Lying? discusses the broader accuracy picture.

Liars can adapt

If a liar knows that reverse order recall may be used, they can practise their story backwards. The technique works best when it catches the interviewee off guard, which means it loses some of its power as awareness of it spreads. This is one reason researchers now recommend combining multiple approaches, such as unexpected questions and requests for verifiable details, rather than relying on any single method.

How does reverse order recall compare with other techniques?

Reverse order recall is one of several cognitive interview techniques that researchers have proposed for improving deception detection. Others include asking unanticipated questions, requesting drawings or sketches of a scene, and the strategic use of evidence. Each adds a different kind of mental demand.

Technique	What it adds	Key strength	Key limit
Reverse order recall	Disrupts rehearsed chronology	Produced more cues in early studies	Can burden truthful people too
Unanticipated questions	Forces answers outside the prepared script	Larger detail gaps between truth and lies	Less effective when liars know the setting
Sketch drawing	Requires spatial and visual recall	Liars often omit people from drawings	Needs a spatial context to work
Verifiable details	Asks for checkable information	Truth tellers provide more verifiable content	Relies on the interviewer following up

The common thread is that these techniques make the interview harder for everyone but disproportionately harder for someone who is fabricating. None of them can identify a liar with certainty. Why There Is No Single Reliable Sign of Deception explains why that certainty remains out of reach.

Is reverse order recall used in real investigations?

The technique has appeared in police training programmes and investigative interviewing protocols in several countries. The UK's PEACE model, for example, encourages interviewers to vary their questioning approach, and reverse order recall is sometimes included as one option. In practice, its use depends on the interviewer's training and the context of the interview.

It is worth noting that the technique was developed for investigative interviews, not for everyday conversation. Asking someone in a casual setting to tell a story backwards would be unusual and potentially confusing. Its value lies in structured professional settings where the interviewer has a reason to test the consistency and depth of an account.

How does this relate to Murder Book?

Murder Book is an upcoming narrative interrogation game from Gungrounds, an independent studio in Zagreb, Croatia. The game's development screenshots show a technique menu that includes options like Baiting, Bluffing and Confrontation. Players examine unreliable stories, behavioural changes and narrative gaps across focused 5-10-minute cases.

The reverse order recall technique connects to the game's emphasis on spotting inconsistencies. In research, asking for a backwards account can reveal where a story's structure depends on rehearsal rather than memory. In Murder Book, players look for similar seams: places where a suspect's account breaks down under different angles of questioning. The game treats behavioural cues as prompts for further investigation, not as definitive proof, which aligns with the research finding that no interview technique reliably identifies deception on its own.

Murder Book is in development for PC (Steam) and mobile, with release currently planned for the end of Q2 2027.